Thief Gold: Headphones, Directional Sound and EAX

[oceanclub]

Have Thief Gold installed from GOG along with T2Fix_1.27e_with_mods.exe.

When I tried earlier the in-game stereo test with my desktop stereo speakers (Realtek onboard sound), I heard distinct stereo sound.

However, when I then switched to my Sound BlasterX H7 headphones, left and right channel sounded the same (mono).

Hardware Acceleration was on. Then realized that EAX was not enabled - so I used Creative Alchemy to turn on the EAX setting.

And now can clearly hear stereo separation in my headphones again.

BUT I've seen people claim that EAX has nothing to do with positional sound, just the quality of the sound returned. So I'm confused - at least on my system, it does seem to affect sound position.

(Curious as I'm about to give up my headphones, which are on their last legs, for a pair of Razer BlackShark V2 headphones. But I've seen there is a version of Alchemy that works without having to have a Creative card?)

P.

[vfig]

i dont know anything about your specific headphones or the creative alchemy software. but i can speak about thief with newdark 1.27 that you are using:

firstly, stereo sound is the baseline level of sound support in thief and in the audio apis it supports. there ought to be no problem with basic stereo sound, hardware acceleration or no. you can use the speaker test menu option that plays a full left and a full right sound to test this. i am guessing that the apparent mono sound you were getting is a result of some setting in creative alchemy that was trying to do something smart with the audio instead of just letting it be bog standard stereo.

the EAX support within thief itself, toggleable from its sound options menu (but greyed out if it does not detect support for it), is for reverb effects only, from the old EAX version where there were a couple dozen reverb presets that games could apply to their sound output. this is only functional in the game if enabled and turned on in the sound options menu, as otherwise thief will simply not set the relevant parameters. i dont know what the EAX setting in creative alchemy is doing, but from what you describe it is not the same thing, and does not sound like it would be driven parametrically by thief.

thief did support 3d positional audio, through both the long-obsolete audigy a3d api, and through directsound. newdark is usually running on directx 9, in which positional audio was no longer a whizbang feature that microsoft trumpeted, but it still supports it if your audio drivers do. when hardware acceleration is on in the game options, the positional info will be sent to directx 9, so if creative alchemy and/or your headphone drivers are capable of using that info, you should be hearing it.

the final option with newdark (that was not present in original thief) is to use openal for audio instead of directsound. if you have openal installed, a secret, third option becomes available when you toggle the hardware acceleration menu item, “OpenAL”. (openal itself is fully software based, but thief doesnt need to know that!) with openal, thief will support enabling EAX in its menu for reverb effects. and openal itself can be configured to use the 3d positional info: possibly for multichannel positional sound like 7:1 headphones, although i have never had any such devices to know for sure; but it does support 3d positional audio over ordinary stereo headphones if you install a suitable hrtf definition and mess with settings in openal.ini.

i dont know if any of that is really answering your questions, but that summarizes the state of audio support in thief these days.

[Aja]

It should also be noted that while positional audio in Thief works pretty well, EAX sounds absolutely awful and isn’t worth the tradeoff. Everything sounds out of phase, with your footsteps sounding like they’re echoing between your ears and everything else is drenched in so much low-quality reverb that rarely sounds at all realistic. It’s a shame because it could be good and I’ve tried multiple times to convince myself that is, but I always end up back on good old clear stereo sound.

[vfig]

EAX sounds absolutely awful and isn’t worth the tradeoff. Everything sounds out of phase, with your footsteps sounding like they’re echoing between your ears and everything else is drenched in so much low-quality reverb that rarely sounds at all realistic.

that doesnt match with my experience with it, where i would have said the reverb effect is mostly pretty subtle. obviously there are differences in implementation quality with different drivers and/or settings involved.

[mikjames]

Seems this topic resurfaces every 5-10 years with new discoveries.
Think I may have opened the last threads 5-10 years ago. The conclusion back then was that Aureal 3D was the best option for Thief 1, but didn't make it to Thief 2.
EAX in Thief 1 is particularly rough, though the new discovery of HRTF profiles might change my mind on that. With OpenAl there also seems to be an option within the Thief ini files to set the reverb volume.
I seem to remember enjoying EAX a lot more after lowering the reverb volume to an acceptable echo.
Though I don't think footsteps echoing off center ever went away, it was more noticeable on speakers than headphones...or I just learned to ignore it, EAX just sounds so good in Thief.
There is also a solution available for software emulation of EAX 3/4 in DS btw, and it sounds even better than T1/2!

[Aja]

that doesnt match with my experience with it, where i would have said the reverb effect is mostly pretty subtle. obviously there are differences in implementation quality with different drivers and/or settings involved.

Maybe you're hearing something different than me, but any time I've ever enabled EAX over the years, it always applies this awful DSP-processing sound, very much like how things sound in Half Life 1: muddy, indistinct, out of phase, and echoey. Granted the positional audio with A3D/OpenAL is decent, but everything else sounds very strange. I don't know how to describe it without using audio production terms, but it sounds like there's an artificial widener on the player sounds, like someone doubled the sound and offset it by a few milliseconds between the left and right channels. It does sound wide but it loses a ton of clarity.

[mikjames]

Maybe you're hearing something different than me, but any time I've ever enabled EAX over the years, it always applies this awful DSP-processing sound, very much like how things sound in Half Life 1: muddy, indistinct, out of phase, and echoey. Granted the positional audio with A3D/OpenAL is decent, but everything else sounds very strange. I don't know how to describe it without using audio production terms, but it sounds like there's an artificial widener on the player sounds, like someone doubled the sound and offset it by a few milliseconds between the left and right channels. It does sound wide but it loses a ton of clarity.

No that's pretty much the default sound that you're describing. It's not a high sample rate reverb like today, so you can hear a lot of issues with it in smaller enclosed spaces with a lot of early reflections.
I got around it by cranking down the reverb volume within some OpenAl settings, or you could try configuring a HRTF profile and see if that fixes some issues.
Still I think it's better to have it than not have it once you get it setup. Especially on good open back headphones, the EAX algorithm adds crossfade between the left and right channels, that helps a lot with sounds that are panned 100% left or right.

[Aja]

I need to play around with it some more, but I'm mainly using Steam Deck for Thief nowadays, and every time I enable OpenAL the audio starts popping after a few seconds, pretty much whenever a sound loops, which happens almost constantly in Thief. I haven't found any solutions online, so I may have to live without.

[nacho_chicken]

I need to play around with it some more, but I'm mainly using Steam Deck for Thief nowadays, and every time I enable OpenAL the audio starts popping after a few seconds, pretty much whenever a sound loops, which happens almost constantly in Thief.

I had this problem in T2. It ended up being caused by the OpenAL32.dll I was using. If you have one in your game folder or in the game's prefix, try deleting it and installing the default OpenAL dll through winetricks/protontricks. In case it may be some other software issue, I was able to get EAX through OpenAL working perfectly (no audio crackling/popping/stutter problems) in both Thief Gold and Metal Age through DSOAL; using the dlls in dsoal-latest.7z hosted at http://vaporeon.io/hosted/dsoal-builds/ (SHA-1: 3f6f2ed1b0616c3f56e0202275effa78f3c29797).

I happen to own Gold on Steam as well as GOG, so I tested both and managed to get it working on my Deck through both with the following steps:

- Install the game
- - If installing through Steam, run the game at least once
- Install TFix
- Install OpenAL through winetricks or protontricks
- Download dsoal-latest.7z from the above link, and extract the files to the game install directory

I really hope this helps.

I haven't found any solutions online, so I may have to live without.

I literally made an account just to post this because I didn't find a single discussion about it months ago when I had the same problem. Took me a good hour of tinkering before I had it working... Be the change you want to see and all that

[Aja]

Hey, I really appreciate your help, but I must be doing something wrong. I followed your steps on a fresh install of Thief Gold, but I’m not getting the option to enable OpenAL in the game menu under Hardware Acceleration.

Couple things: I installed the Windows version of OpenAL 1.1 from openAL.org. Is there a different version? I see something called OpenAL Soft, so maybe I should be using that, but I’m not sure how exactly to install it. Do I need to enable anything in a config file?

[Aja]

I'm not quite sure how, but I managed to get it working. I don't know how you know for certain that it's using the DSOAL DLL, but it seems to be because I'm not getting any pops and clicks. However, I'm also not getting positional audio, only EAX. So I'm gonna work on that, and I will report back. All Thief knowledge should be on TTLG!

[Muleke]

Have Thief Gold installed from GOG along with T2Fix_1.27e_with_mods.exe.

T2Fix was made for Thief 2, not Thief Gold.

[Aja]

For posterity I'm reposting this here since I finally got EAX and positional audio working on Steam Deck.

Thank you for your help. It is an issue not just on steamdeck, but on linux overall. I did some experimenting and figured out that the last properly working version of openal32.dll for thief1&2 is 1.22.2 released on June 27, 2022. I think there were some big changes (like routers) in 1.23 that broke something in thief games. Also, you can still use hrtf on pre 1.23 dlls and I recommend doing so.

TLDR:
- Download openal-soft-1.22.2-bin.zip from here or here and extract it somewhere.
- Rename bin/win32/soft_oal.dll to OpenAL32.dll and copy it into the thief main folder.
- Create a new txt file in the thief main folder with this inside:
Code:

[General]
channels=stereo
resampler=cubic
stereo-mode=headphones
hrtf=true
frequency=48000

and save it as "alsoft.ini"
- Download the HRTF/3D audio profile (xxxx-4800.mhr) that sounds most positionally accurate to your ears and copy it to the thief main folder.
- Settings in game: audio channels - 48 ; Hardware Acceleration - OpenAL ; EAX Setting - on
- That's it, there is no need to install OpenAL system/prefix wide.

PS There is a lutris installer "thief-gold-gog-newdark" that uses OpenAL 1.23.1 but for some reason it moves soft_oal.dll into the folder of the same name instead directly into the game folder (I think it some bug/mistake in installer) which obviously doesn't work and then relies on default gog installer OpenAL 2.0.7.0(which sounds awful). Even when you fix it and move soft_oal.dll where it should be, you get back to zero with popping audio again...
TLDR: Don't use it.

For HRTF profiles, you can watch this video to find the profile that sounds best to you and download the profiles here.

[Valet2]

Here's my comparison of various eax implementations, and I must say I totally love what eax (even the ancient one) adds to the old games -- they suddenly become so real:

https://www.ttlg.com/forums/showthre...=1#post2404735