[openal] Alure updates
Chris Robinson
chris.kcat at gmail.com
Fri Oct 13 21:10:23 EDT 2017
I've been working quite a bit recently on the Alure2 API, which is a
complete rewrite of the old Alure1 API. I'm looking for feedback -- any
way it can be improved, anything that's unclear, any glaring omissions,
as well as any bugs if you try to use it, so that I can start
considering a release.
https://github.com/kcat/alure
For those unaware, Alure is a library that sits on top of OpenAL and
provides utility functions to implement common features (e.g. audio file
reading/decoding) and make common tasks easier (e.g. automatically
handle the buffer queue for source streaming). The original Alure was
modeled extremely closely on ALUT, which itself merely added functions
to help load files into OpenAL buffers. With Alure, I took that idea,
cleaned up the legacy cruft that had built onto the API, and added more
features onto it that many applications would find useful.
Ultimately though, I was never happy with the additions. They did what
they were supposed to do, but I felt a few early design decisions
created ugliness and baggage in the API. And because I wanted to
maintain ABI compatibility, I couldn't fix them without breaking it. So
if I was going to break ABI, I might as well redo everything and rename
the library (alure2) so it can sit along side the original.
The biggest change from Alure1 is that Alure2 is now a C++ API, where
Alure1 used C++ internally but exposed a C API. Specifically, it
requires C++11. It should be possible to make a C wrapper (it uses pImpl
and virtual class member functions to keep implementation details
hidden), but I'll worry about that once the C++ API is settled.
The second biggest change is that it manages OpenAL for you, rather than
the app still using OpenAL calls with OpenAL objects and only using
Alure as-needed. So rather than an ALCdevice* or ALCcontext*, you deal
with alure::Device and alure::Context. And rather than integer IDs for
sources, buffers, etc, you have type-safe alure::Source and
alure::Buffer objects, all of which providing appropriate member functions.
Because of that object management, it's also able to maintain a buffer
cache so you can retrieve the same buffer multiple times by name without
loading it multiple times (until you uncache it, then getting it again
will reload it), and sources can be prioritized. The latter point means
you can create as many alure::Source objects as you want and specify how
important each one is, but an OpenAL source ID is only taken when it
needs to play. When a Source plays and no more OpenAL sources are
available, it'll preempt the lowest-priority Source if it's lower- or
equal-priority to the Source trying to play, and take its internal
source ID.
There's quite a bit more available, but that's a good overview of the
big things. A number of examples are available showing it in action:
https://github.com/kcat/alure/tree/master/examples
And the header documents most of the public API:
https://github.com/kcat/alure/blob/master/include/AL/alure2.h
If there's any questions, feel free to ask. I still have things I want
and need to work on, but it's at a point where feedback would be helpful.
Thanks for looking!
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