Chronicles of Riddick Escape from Butcher Bay doesn't work

[gittybittycomboe]

DSOAL doesn't seem to make a difference with 3D Sound and EAX turned on in the game's menu. There doesn't seem to be reverb or echoes or anything in environments which would make sense to have them. I installed the 32 bit version of OpenAL, took the dll from the System32 folder, put it in the 32 bit directory of the game, along with the DSOAL dll.

I also tried using both dlls from release r10112, instead of using the one installed on my machine, and I also notice no difference.

Am I doing something wrong?

[AronNemeth2001]

1. You may need to download and run https://github.com/ThreeDeeJay/DSWRP/releases first, as current versions of Windows are coded to load dsound.dll from the system folders via the registry, preventing DSOAL from being loaded, and that patcher fixes that.
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2. dsoal simply needs to have a dsoal-aldrv.dll (soft_oal.dll under a different name) in the same folder as the game exe and dsoal's dsound.dll, there is no other OpenAL install necessary. It sounds like that you copied alsoft's soft_oal.dll, which isn't correct because the dsound.dll wrapper does not look for that filename. Also on 64 bit Windows (which I assume you have) System32 is actually the 64bit system folder, the 32 bit would be SysWOW64, so you would need files from the later for 32 bit apps.

3. If you want to know whether the game loads the wrapper, open Windows' environmental variables settings (a guide: https://www.computerhope.com/issues/ch000549.htm) and under system variables, create 4 new ones: ALSOFT_LOGLEVEL and DSOAL_LOGLEVEL, both with the value of 1, and ALSOFT_LOGFILE and DSOAL_LOGFILE with the values of alsoft_log.txt and dsoal_log.txt respectively. If you do this correctly, the two text files should appear in the game's folder every time you run it, provided that DSOAL is used. If you set a higher value for the two loglevel variables (the highest is 4, I think), they will get more detailed, but this will also mean that the files will be larger, so only do this if you want to provide the developers with logs for bug fixing. If you leave it on 1, it will only log errors in the file.

As a side note, I actually played through this game with DSOAL in the past and it definitely worked (altough I used the 64 bit exe, since dsoal also has 64 bit dlls), altough the logs for the game either had a bunch of "out of hw sources" errors in them if a version of DSOAL higher than r427 was used (r427 and older would have an error about an EAX property not being set correctly), so the game's EAX implementation seems to be somewhat buggy.

[gittybittycomboe]

I'll give this all a try. I'm using the 32 bit exe just because a cut scene at the beginning worked properly in it as opposed to the 64 bit one.

[mirh]

as current versions of Windows are coded to load dsound.dll

No, for the thousandth time windows version has nothing to do with it. It just depends on the game using COM rather than loadlibrary.

[AronNemeth2001]

as current versions of Windows are coded to load dsound.dll

No, for the thousandth time windows version has nothing to do with it. It just depends on the game using COM rather than loadlibrary.

Sorry, I think I mixed it up with a Pcgamingwiki entry that incorrectly implied that the issue was version related (IIRC the entry on DSOAL on the Directsound 3d restoration section used to have a note saying it may not work past a certain W11 version, it has been corrected to reference the registry patcher instead since then without mentioning OS versions).