[Diablo II] Enabling 3D Sound & Environmental Effects (EAX)

[Manny]

You are doing the right thing bro. Cactus must remain pure and undefiled lol. And that totally wouldn't surprise me either if they were pirated. I always wondered about how/where they came from...

[hedgesparrow]

Yay, got the new sound files working, in Linux, thanks for your efforts fearedbliss . Quick test in 1.05b with my Bowazon in Act III Sewers: really sounds echoey, like in a cave but not over the top. Turn off 3D sound/EAX and it sounds flat!

Edit: Went back to town and you can hear the torches crackle .

[fearedbliss]

@hedgesparrow Yea it's definitely noticeable, especially when you start looking for the differences. I never played the game with 3D Sound / EAX before in my past 17+ years of playing lol, so I'm still learning what the new sound differences are. And np, I'm glad you are enjoying it.

Beware of foul demons and beasts.. beasts .... beasts .... beasts.....

[fearedbliss]

I've added the following documentation to Cactus' 3D Sound page:

Crash on startup when using -ns and dsound.dll



There's a bug with Diablo II where if you start the game with -ns and you are using the dsound.dll, the game will crash with an ACCESS_VIOLATION (c0000005) error. Simply remove the -ns when starting with the 3D sound system and everything should work. Alternatively, you can rename the dsound.dll to something else and then you'll be able to use -ns but you will lose 3D Sound.

This issue doesn't affect users that are using Singling since Singling actually skips the introduction cinematics completely, which coincidentally also skips the sound issue altogether.

This bug also doesn't seem to be a DSOAL issue since I was only able to get debug logs from DSOAL when -ns wasn't used, which indicates that Diablo II itself had an issue starting up the sound system in the first place.