OpenAL Troubleshooting

This normally happens because the computer's sound isn't working at all, which we can't do much about, sorry! Try to see if you can make sound come out of your speakers or headphones using the test tone button in the layout program. If you can't get sound here then the problem is probably with your sound card configuration or wiring.

If you can get sound, the problem is probably with how the game is using OpenAL (see our notes on making games work with Rapture3D).

This can happen if you run Rapture3D at higher quality settings or tighter timings than your hardware or Operating System can cope with. Try clicking on the "Set Defaults" button in the layout program. If this doesn't work, try setting the decoder method to "Basic" or "Panner", try lowering the spatialisation or effects quality settings, or raising the buffer size or buffer count values (a buffer size of 512 and count of 3 will fix most problems). With the Advanced edition, you can also try turning on the "multi-core decoder" (particularly if you're using a very complex decoder). See the manual for more details.

This is suprisingly common. It happens when Windows is set into 5.1 surround-sound mode but actually only stereo speakers are attached. This means that we're feeding the engineer's voice to a front centre speaker that isn't actually there.

To fix this, use your Windows Control Panel to set your Windows speaker layout to stereo.

In some surround-sound speaker sets, the Front Centre speaker is a special "dialogue" speaker optimised for voice. Because of this, by default this speaker is only used for dialogue and not for general environmental sounds - so this is correct behaviour. However, if you have a Front Centre speaker that behaves in the same way as your other speakers you can enable it for general use by going into the Rapture3D "Speaker Layout" program and selecting one of the "Front Pan" methods on the decoder tab.

If you're using the "Advanced" edition, you can customise your layout, change the Front Centre speaker from "Front Centre (Dialogue Only)" to "Front Centre" and generate new decoders.