OpenAL
OpenAL is a cross-platform 3D audio API used in games and other interactive applications. Its core model is based on a listener, sources and buffers, allowing sound objects to be rendered in spatial relation to a virtual listening position, with support for effects such as distance attenuation, Doppler shift and directional panning. Deliberately styled as an audio counterpart to OpenGL, right down to its naming conventions and API structure, the project positions itself as a vendor-neutral, open API for real-time positional audio workflows, intended as an open alternative to proprietary systems such as EAX and A3D. It has since been used in a wide range of commercial titles, including Heretic II, S.T.A.L.K.E.R., BioShock and Mass Effect, and while Creative's reference implementation later became proprietary, the open source OpenAL Soft implementation remains freely available.
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The idea for OpenAL first surfaced in 1998, in discussions on the OpenGL-GameDev mailing list about creating a portable audio standard to complement OpenGL. Little came of those early efforts until late 1999, when Loki Software, a company specialising in porting Windows games to Linux, took up the project in earnest to meet its own need for a proper 3D audio API on Unix-like systems, with key contributions from Joseph Valenzuela as lead developer, Michael Vance drafting the specification, and Bernd Kreimeier as maintainer. The first OpenAL 1.0 specification was published as a draft in June 2000, with early libraries released the same year for Linux, Windows, Mac OS and BeOS. Creative Labs joined the authoring effort soon after and released the first hardware-accelerated drivers in 2001, adding Sound Blaster Live support on Mac and Windows. Following Loki's collapse, the project passed for a time to the open source community before Creative Technology took over hosting and most of its development, up until around 2012; the reference implementation itself turned proprietary from version 1.1 in 2009. The original openal-devel mailing list, run by Creative, was active from 2003 until roughly 2012, and in January 2014 Ryan C. Gordon, a Loki veteran who went on to create Simple DirectMedia Layer, launched a new mailing list and website at openal.org to keep the project alive independently.
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