Right. When you enter conversation, Oblivion uses non-3D sounds to play the dialog which isn't normally affected by EAX. There is a hack I could do to make reverb apply to non-3D sounds, but that would also make it affect UI sounds (mouse clicks, message box thumps, etc), and even music if I can get that fixed.


Can you take a pic of it? It doesn't sound like anything I've ever seen in Oblivion, and it isn't anything the DLLs would do themselves (they don't touch graphics at all).

I tried, but it refuses to come out. It is, pretty much, a semitransparent block of black superimposed over the game that looks like this;

Out of Memory

It disappears in menus and loading screens sometimes, and on occasion for long periods during gameplay itself, but always eventually reappears.

Do you have any OBSE plugins installed? Do you use anything like Fraps?

While watching some "Let's Play"s of Morrowind I saw something like you're describing, except it was the framerate drawn in red in a semi-transparent black box in the upper-right corner of the game screen, and it only showed when that portion of the screen didn't redraw (eg, while loading areas). I always assumed it was something to do with the capture program.

What kind of computer do you have? Store bought or built from scratch? That looks to me like a system message, but not to sure. Being that it comes and goes, and you said you removed the .DLL's, tells me something else is going on.

Raed

P.S. Try in windowed mode. See if that takes fixes it. Just a thought.

Huleed, finally got around to installing this and I'm not getting any sounds at all. No music, effects or anything. I noticed after installing everything that all the sound sliders had been reset to 0, but even after restoring the sliders, I still don't hear anything. Now I don't think my sound card (basically on-board sound with the Supreme FX II) supports EAX, but your drivers are supposed to fix that, right?

Sounds like it's failing to open the sound device. What Windows version do you have?

Win 7 64.

Can you run Oblivion form the command line, redirecting output to a log file?

cd "C:\Program Files (x86)\Bethesda Softworks\Oblivion"Oblivion.exe 2> output.log

Replacing Oblivion.exe with obse_loader.exe as needed. Then let me know what's in output.log.

Here you go:

AL lib: mmdevapi.c:284: Unhandled channel config: 6 -- 0x0000060fAL lib: mmdevapi.c:397: Unhandled extensible channels: 6 -- 0x0000060fAL lib: mmdevapi.c:432: Failed to set Signed Short, got 32/32-bit insteadAL lib: mmdevapi.c:459: Failed to initialize audio client: 0x80070057err:dsound:DS8Primary_Create Could not create context (0xa001)!AL lib: mmdevapi.c:284: Unhandled channel config: 6 -- 0x0000060fAL lib: mmdevapi.c:397: Unhandled extensible channels: 6 -- 0x0000060fAL lib: mmdevapi.c:432: Failed to set Signed Short, got 32/32-bit insteadAL lib: mmdevapi.c:459: Failed to initialize audio client: 0x80070057

I'd say it's not very happy

Also, I had actually uninstalled this because one of the components made the CS crash. I actually use the CSE. I can try renaming the OblivionEAX.dll because the CSE does have an issue if you have too many OBSE plugins, but that dll got injected just fine, so I don't think that's the issue.

Edit: Yup, hit the plugin limit again. I renamed OblivionEAX.dll and the CSE starts up fine. So we're good in that regard.

Seems you have a pretty odd 5.1 setup, using side-left/side-right instead of the usual back-left/back-right. Is that intentional?

Nope. I just switched it to back-left and back-right. I didn't realize Win 7 made the distinction and quite frankly, I never noticed a difference

I just changed it using Win 7 sound config. So you want me to test it again? Or do I need to do something else?

Back-left/back-right are supposed to be further behind you than side-left/side-right, which are more toward your side. Any difference largely depends on the app playing sounds, but the version of OpenAL supplied doesn't currently handle that configuration.


From what you posted, that should be all you need to do to fix it. Go ahead and try again.

With 5.1, it appears you can place the "rear" speakers behind you or beside you. And in the Win 7 setup, beside you seems to be the default. They are actually behind me, so back left-right makes more sense. Ok, let me get everything set up again and I will give it a go.

Ok, it's working now, sort of I get sound effects and all that, but no music. I think you know about that already. However, for me, the game is unplayable. The FPS drops to 3 or 4 and it even takes forever to bring up the console or menu. I guess I need a dedicated sound card to make this feasible. To bad though - there were bird sounds overhead and they really sounded cool!

Do you want the contents of the log? I didn't run Ob from the command line, but I can if you want.

This has made such a great difference to my game. However i noticed that NPCS echo too much. They echo in area's that they shouldnt, Any way to sort this out? Also when i ingage conversation with NPCS they dont echo anymore.

The echoing in improper areas is a limitation of the EAX plugin. As is the non-echoing of NPC's during conversations. You'd have to make adjustments to the EAX plugin itself to correct those. If you are using EAX Control, you can adjust the volume to rid yourself of those improper echos.

You can try, though I doubt it'll have anything that sheds light on the problem. It'll be pretty difficult without profiling to see what's taking so much time, but it doesn't happen for me so I can't check. I can try setting real-time priority for OpenAL's mixer by default, which may or may not help depending on where the hold-up is.


Where were you when you noticed they echo "too much"? What areas were you in when they echo that they shouldn't? NPCs losing the echo when in conversation is due to a quirk in the game engine, and not much I can do about it (an OBSE plugin could possibly solve it, but that's way beyond what I can do; only thing I could do is add a hack to make it affect all sounds, including UI and videos).