pack-dist copies OpenAL32.dll out of the build machine's SysWOW64. That is
the same shape as the d3dx9_43 bug found this week - a runtime dependency
the dev box quietly satisfies - except here it does not fail outright, it
just means the audio implementation a customer gets is decided by whatever
was installed on the machine that happened to pack the release.
And what that machine has is Creative's 2009 stack. OpenAL32.dll v6.14 is
only a router; the real implementation is wrap_oal.dll v2.2.0.5 beside it,
with oalinst.exe bundled as a 791KB fallback installer. The router exists
so several vendors' OpenAL implementations could coexist on one machine,
which stopped being a thing about fifteen years ago.
Bundling OpenAL Soft instead is the fix: vendored like steam_api.dll is,
not lifted from the system. wrap_oal.dll and oalinst.exe go, dist gets
1.2MB smaller, and the same implementation runs on Windows and Linux -
which matters more than the size, because it means an audio bug reproduces
on both instead of being someone's Windows. It also removes the only
__declspec in the tree, which lives in Creative's al.h.
Only al.h, alc.h and efx.h are ever included, eleven sites across ten
files. efx-creative.h, EFX-Util.h and xram.h are vendored and referenced by
nothing, so they simply go.
Filed as a near-term item rather than a port phase, and written up in both
docs, because it stands on its own: OpenAL is not what makes the game hard
to move. The API is cross-platform and all ninety-one call sites compile
unchanged against libopenal - it is the reason audio barely appears in the
port plan at all. Dropping OpenAL itself would mean reimplementing EFX
reverb and rewriting ninety-one working call sites to remove a dependency
that is not in the way. The note says so, so nobody talks themselves into
it later.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
CydandClaude Fable 5
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