Creative and id Software have announced an agreement which allows Creative to develop Eax Advanced HD 3D audio options for the Doom 3 engine.
"The DOOM 3 engine ushers in a new rendering paradigm that allows id and our licensees to bring cinema quality visuals to game players in real time," said Todd Hollenshead, CEO of id Software. "We look forward to further enhancing players' audio experience by working with Creative to leverage their EAX ADVANCED HD audio technology in the DOOM 3 engine."
"Working together with id Software, an industry icon, provides Creative with an exciting opportunity to enhance one of the hottest game engines around," said Hock Leow, CTO of Creative Technology. "We look forward to the challenge of implementing EAX ADVANCED HD Multi-Environment technology within the Doom 3 engine, and subsequently working with id to make these enhancements available to their licensees. We are also pleased with the agreement relating to Creative's patented shadowing technique and id's cutting-edge 3D graphics DOOM 3 engine."
A future version of the Doom 3 engine featuring Creative's Eax Advanced HD Audio technology is expected to be available to id Software licensees later this year.
This news might be a little bit strange since John Carmack has said that modern processors have more than enough power to render full 3D audio. He has also said before that Doom 3 would only use software audio rendering, and that the main reason for this was compatibility.
He said just getting 5 independant audio streams out of mainstream hardware was causing problems, and that using specific features such as EAX or some kind of decompression accelerator would be more trouble than it was worth.
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