#XEAR 3D DS3D EAX UPDATE WINDOWS 8#
On Windows 8 or 10, you may need to make changes to the registry for dsound.dll to be loaded from this location.(1) The Guild Wars installation directory where GW.exe resides.Copy dsound.dll into ONE of the following two locations:.With DS3D and EAX broken, GW hasn’t sounded “right” in any version of Windows since XP. Rather than fix it, Microsoft deprecated DirectSound and pushed developers to adopt its new XAudio2 API for future games. Like most games of its era, GW’s audio system was designed around DirectSound and DS3D, and owners of high-end PCs could get the “definitive” audio experience with EAX.Īll that ended in 2007 with Windows Vista. PC’s with a high-end Creative sound card also had access to EAX, an extension to DS3D with a suite of hardware DSP effects for occlusion, obstruction, reverb, echo, etc. DirectSound had a 3D audio component called DirectSound3D, or DS3D, that could pan and amplify/attenuate sound sources based on their position relative to the camera in the game’s 3D world. When GW was released in 2005, the audio component of Microsoft’s DirectX API was something called DirectSound. Put simply, this makes it possible to activate GW’s “Use 3D Audio Hardware” and “Use EAX” options and to hear GW's sound effects as originally intended. The default setting is one-third (0.333…).ĭownload link for latest version: …eases/tag/r420%2Bgw1_rev1ĭSOAL-GW1 is a fork a DSOAL that has been modified to work with Guild Wars 1.ĭSOAL is a DirectSound-to-OpenAL compatibility layer that is able to emulate DirectSound3D and EAX in software.
A setting a 0 totally disables diminution of sound with distance (which sounds terrible and is not recommended). A setting of 1.0 makes no change to the rolloff strength as set by GW, and thus gives the authentic experience. The smaller you set this value, the farther sounds will carry. If you don’t like the default, you can change the fudge factor by setting the environment variable DSOAL_ROLLOFF_FUDGEFACTOR to any floating point value between 0 and 1.0. This departs from the authentic “GW sound as originally intended” experience, but most listeners consider it a large improvement. Since many people didn't care for how abruptly sounds diminished with distance, I've updated DSOAL-GW1 to add a fudge factor to make sounds carry farther, so their diminution with distance better accords with perceived in-game distance. [Edit: DSOAL-GW1 was updated to r420+gw1_rev1 on.