skellytz

Ive just re-read the entire VOGONS thread and they do insist occlusion is only available on Win98 all the way through. They mention something about the game being hardcoded to use VxD drivers for those effects.

The guy who reported it also said this later:

I just tried it on my Sound Blaster Live! 5.1 (SB0100). That's the oldest EAX 2.0 capable sound card that I have. The results were interesting. When using the original installation CD from 2001 both VxD and WDM drivers properly provided occlusion in Baldur's Gate 2.

 

I even tried a newer SBLive installation CD from 2004 and those WDM drivers still properly provided occlusion. At a guess, Creative changed something within the Audigy (and X-Fi) code branch of the WDM drivers. After that change was made, BG2 occlusion became broken on those cards when using WDM drivers, while still remaining functional with VxD drivers. Either that, or there's a hardware difference between SBLive and Audigy cards that WDM drivers don't account for.

I think I'd gotten mine to work with a Hercules Gamesurround Muse DVD 5.1 using drivers from 2003. Since these were the last drivers ever released for that card, I had to keep using them even some years later when I played BG2. I believe I remember this because I didn't like the effect at first; in other games, EAX occlusion was typically used for muffling sounds coming through walls or underwater, not from sources simply being farther away from you, so I thought it was a bit weird. I could be wrong, of course; this was a long time ago. I kind of like the effect now because it softens sounds off-screen, which complements the positional audio.

Let me know when you get a chance to test all this on a retro PC. I'd be grateful if you could confirm whether this issue is related to Creative drivers or Windows.

it looks like the occlusion effects from EAX were only available with VxD drivers (basically, the drivers for Windows 98). WDM drivers (for Windows XP) did away with occlusion.

If you mean that VOGONS thread, I think it's clarified further on occlusion worked even with WDM drivers back when the game was more popular after its release. I'm pretty sure it worked for me even years later on my sound card; but then again, it wasn't an Audigy. Apparently, Creative changed something in their drivers at some point. To be fair, sound card drivers randomly caused me quite a few issues in other games too; it wasn't all sunshine and rainbows 

In any case, I'll try to restore these effects when possible!

Infinity Sounds updated to v2.2!

Download  |  Readme  |  GitHub


Changes in this release

• Restore NPC Voiceovers: French subtitles translation (thanks to Selphira)
• More Existence Sounds: added existence sounds to gibberlings
• Tweak Existence Sound Delay: adjusted the custom delay values
• Updated DSOAL to r661 and OpenAL Soft to r9950

Congratulations on this update, skellytz!

As always, thanks for a cheer!  
 

I do miss the occlusion effect in my game and I'm hoping one day it'll be back.

Just to give the others a bit of context, I'd posted this on our Discord server:

The original BG2 supported EAX 2.0 and made use of its occlusion effects. Back when we used compatible sound cards, many sounds farther away from the center of the screen were muffled like this:

 bg2-occlusion.ogg   167.37K   8 downloads

DSOAL, the DirectSound wrapper Infinity Sounds uses to restore EAX, currently doesn't support the occlusion effects in BG2. This was already reported to the DSOAL creator a few months ago, so maybe one day this will get fixed and we'll be able to bring these effects back. Right now, some sounds won't be processed as intended and may seem to blare at a distance.

I'll keep you posted on any progress on this issue.

Infinity Sounds updated to v2.1!

Download  |  Readme  |  GitHub
 
 
The highlight of this version is a new component for the EEs: Enhance Positional Audio.

While the EEs do not support EAX, positional audio still works through OpenAL, the default API. Unfortunately, due to the lack of configurability, many find the listening experience inadequate, especially with headphones. This is mostly because of the exaggerated panning that splits sounds into either the left or right channel.
 
This component adds the configurable software implementation of the API, OpenAL Soft, with crossfeed filters enabled to mitigate the channel separation.

Changes in this release

• New component: Enhance Positional Audio
• Restore NPC Voiceovers:
  • German voiceover transcription (thanks to Ychap)
  • Russian subtitles translation (thanks to yota13)
  • Polish voiceover transcription
  • Restored Aerie's minor unused voiceover (thanks to Ychap)
• Tweak Sound Channel Volume Levels:
  • Disabled the hardcoded volume variation of armor movement sounds
  • Attenuated footsteps and armor movement sounds
• Restore BG1 Spellcasting Sounds: restricted the BG1 variant of eff_m10.wav to Dispel Magic and Remove Magic
• Tweak Existence Sound Delay: increased the existence sound delay of several creature types
• Restore & Tweak Soundsets: amplified the walking sounds of ghouls, wolves, and dogs
• Support for translations with UTF-8 character encoding
• Compatibility with BG2 Fixpack component EE-Style GTU
• Updated DSOAL to r659 and OpenAL Soft to r9933
• Repackaged with Windows, macOS, and Linux installers in a single ZIP archive (thanks to Argent77)