[openal] a bit of clarification needed about openal-info32

[Chris Robinson]

On 01/04/2015 04:51 PM, Damon Curry wrote:
> I ran openal-info32, which printed quite a bit of text (shown in the
> attached screenshot image), but the text printout causes me to wonder
> about a few things:
>
> 1. The readme.txt file said, /"... openal-info32 ... can be used to
>     tell if the OpenAL Soft DLL is being detected."/ The output text of
>     openal-info32 does not specifically say, "OpenAL Soft DLL detected",
>     so I am not certain if the OpenAL Soft DLL is installed and working
>     properly.

Yeah, sorry. That's intended to say 'if OpenAL Soft devices are being 
detected/provided' (by looking at the available device list). Though 
there's the additional issue that OpenAL Soft doesn't prepend
"OpenAL Soft on ..."
to the device identifiers like it should. I'll probably have that sorted 
out for the next release.

For the screenshot provided, it appears OpenAL Soft (the 32-bit version) 
is not being detected, and you're getting the Generic Software driver 
instead.

> 2. The printout includes "Supported filters: !!! none !!!" and
>     "Supported effects: !!! none !!!".  Is that a problem?  Does it
>     indicate that I have a faulty installation?

This seems to be an issue with Creative's drivers. openal-info calls 
alGetEnumValue("AL_EFFECT_(effect type)")
and
alGetEnumValue("AL_FILTER_(filter type)")
to determine if the given effect or filter type is supported. But 
Creative's drivers always return 0 for them even if they're 
supported/recognized enums, which causes the app to think there are no 
supported effects and filters.

Unfortunately, the only other way to test for support is to try to set 
the effect or filter type and check for an error, but that's bad 
practice (an app should avoid generating errors on purpose since they're 
supposed to indicate a problem, not act as a query response). I would've 
preferred if EFX also added alIsEffectType and alIsFilterType query 
functions for that, but there's nothing we can really do about it until 
it's promoted to core (or another extension is made that adds those 
functions).