If your game crashes complaining about openal

[bilbous]

I had many problems with the openal sound system that PS uses causing pslaunch to crash and psclient to crash if openal was set as the sound renderer in planeshift.cfg. I always knew it was an openal problem and now I have managed to fix it. It seems there is a file in the home directory that does not get created and another one in /etc/openal/ which has all options commented out.

At any rate what I did to fix the problem was to create the file .alsoftrc in my home directory and put in it :

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[alsa]
device = hw:0,0
This tells openal to use the first alsa hardware device.

[bilbous]

While this works on my system (mandriva 2010.0) I have had a report that it may not work on other systems (fedora 12, specifically) and I discovered that while it got sound on my system it was not a correct method as shown by the following terminal output:

DEBUG: Initializing OpenAL sound system
DEBUG: Retrieving available devices.
DEBUG: Available OpenAL device: ALSA Software
DEBUG: Available OpenAL device: OSS Software
DEBUG: Available OpenAL device: Wave File Writer
DEBUG: Default OpenAL device: ALSA Software
DEBUG: No device specified
DEBUG: Falling back on default device
DEBUG: OpenAL context frequency: 48000 Hz
DEBUG: OpenAL context refresh: 750 Hz
DEBUG: OpenAL context uses asynchronous (threaded) context

What I think this means is that I really ought to have edited the /etc/openal/alsoft.conf file where I could set the options properly.
If the above advice does not work for you I would suggest doing a search for openal and seeing if such a file is on your system.

[bilbous]

Having finally gotten fedora 12 installed I discover that the standard install (gnome) uses only pulseaudio and does not use alsa at all.
Since I am having problems with fedora 12 in regards to my nvidia drivers and fedora's crappy third party rpmfusion repositories I wish you luck if you want to use this distribution.
You might try installing alsa.

[qwertymc2]

I created .alsoftrc but I still have the warnings:

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DEBUG: Initializing OpenAL sound system
DEBUG: Retrieving available devices.
DEBUG: Available OpenAL device: ALSA Software
DEBUG: Default OpenAL device: ALSA Software
DEBUG: No device specified
DEBUG: Falling back on default device
DEBUG: OpenAL context frequency: 44100 Hz
DEBUG: OpenAL context refresh: 43 Hz
DEBUG: OpenAL context uses asynchronous (threaded) context
DEBUG: OpenAL context should support 255 mono sources
DEBUG: OpenAL context should support 1 stereo sources
I have no /etc/openal directory...

[Cuhar]

Bilbous fix worked in my laptop (ubuntu 10.04 x86). Thanks  a lot!

[Elvors]

No luck for me, I'm getting a segfault after it falls back to the default device (ALSA in my case).

[Gilrond]

Just to add, that if one is using OSS4 as a sound subsystem instead of ALSA, the configuration in .alsoftrc should be

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[general]
drivers = oss
Tested it in Debian with PlaneShift and it worked.