[All Source 1 Titles] [Feature Request] Add "Steam Audio" to Source 1

[TrenchcoatCraig]

Back in the day, the quality and delivery of audio in games (including those in the Source engine) could be improved with hardware acceleration solutions such as EAX from Creative and DirectSound from Microsoft. A lot of this functionality has been lost over the years as the dependencies in Windows to enable support were removed with the release of Windows Vista. To this day, the 7.1 Speaker arrangement option in TF2, Portal 1 and 2, Left 4 Dead 1 and 2, Day of Defeat: Source, and Half Life 2 is functionally useless by default as hardware-accelerated audio is still a requirement, which requires going all the way back to Windows XP to enable without the end user manually editing the Windows Registry and installing drivers from potentially unsafe sources.

On Linux, a different issue arose over time. The Source engine could use OpenAL as a fallback audio API, allowing for directional audio, HRTF, occlusion; almost everything the Windows versions used dedicated hardware support for implementing. At some point in time I haven't been able to determine, the Linux versions stopped allowing for OpenAL to be used in the place of the intended audio API, further limiting the ways in which audio can be delivered, and how the audio is delivered.

Valve has already developed a solution that can be adapted to fill the gap left by these depreciated technologies and then some across both Windows and Linux. Steam Audio is already available for use in Unreal, Unity, FMOD, and has almost undoubtedly been baked in to Source 2 from day one.

These are the following features that can be added or re-added to Source 1 with the implementation of Steam Audio:

• Head-Related Transfer Function (fully directional audio through stereo speakers) (This was also previously in CS:GO)
• Audio occlusion (sounds becoming muffled through walls)
• Audio reflection (sounds changing properties based on the surrounding materials)