Re: alGetError() at start of program behavior differs between Windows and Linux

On Saturday, June 18, 2011 5:20:36 PM Dan Kegel wrote:
> I guess the thing to do is to fudge wine's alGetError() to return
> AL_NO_ERROR instead of AL_INVALID_OPERATION,
> and/or report the bug to the game developer
> and/or report the bug to the developer of Windows OpenAL (whoever they
> are). Right?
> Or should the Linux OpenAL change to follow the behavior of the Windows
> one?

FWIW, the same problem would occur using the Windows build of OpenAL Soft 
without the router DLL, in real Windows. Hacking Wine's DLL thunk will just 
hide the problem.

It's a difficult problem to solve. Simply returning AL_NO_ERROR is just asking 
for its own problems:

ALuint src;

alGenSources(1, &src);
if(alGetError() == AL_NO_ERROR)
{
    // Without a context, the app will assume src is valid; not only will it
    // not be valid, but it's uninitialized junk
}

Keeping track of a separate "no context" error can have concurrency and 
locking problems.


The best option would be getting the game's developer to fix the app, but 
short of that I can add a hack to OpenAL Soft to check for an environment 
variable and return 0 when no context is available (similar to how it handles 
reversed Z for TrackMania, via __ALSOFT_REVERSE_Z=1, or half-angle cones, via 
__ALSOFT_HALF_ANGLE_CONES=1; things that break spec, but are needed to get 
certain apps working correctly).
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