How many sounds can the game output simultaneously?

Path of Exile is written in c++. C++ is a powerful langauge n' all, but it's expensive to develop in, it's not like GGG built their audio engine stuff in mind for being able to swap it out whenever. Low level code written in c++ isn't that flexible. It would be hundreds of programming and QA hours to integrate a new sound engine.

Any indie developer writing their own engine from scratch is going to go with openAL, despite its age. At least, I don't know of any better free alternatives, it's what I'm using for my game. openAL might be old, but 32 sounds is certainly sufficient when you're first building your game and you aren't thinking in the very long, optimistic term, where you have dozens of enemies and players fighting at once.

What I really want to know though is why GGG chose to mix Direct X with openAL.

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Andrew_GGG wrote:

XAudio2 would be great, if it wasn't for the fact it would still take many people out of action for far too long.

Something you guys need to consider is that we still have fairly limited resources and switching to a new audio engine, like Xaudio2, would require a huge amount of work. Anything audio would pretty much have to be re-written from the ground up, which would take a programmer months. I really can't stress enough how much work would go into doing something like this!

IF we ever had the chance to do this in the future I would only really want to go for FMOD. It's an incredible tool and I have had enough experience with it to know how brilliant it could make the audio in path of exile.

But it's unfortunately not going to happen any time soon.

You got a point about 'from the ground up' (I knew that,) and perhaps I come off too strong at times, but always know I mean well for Path of Exile since I DO want to see it succeed much more.

P.S. Sometimes I wish a lottery winner who was a fan of PoE would come around and donate a few million to PoE so that you guys can get the job. I know if I was a lottery winner PoE would be one of the things on my list to heavily donate to for more help, more changes, faster progress, etc.

Money is the root of all annoyances since you can't progress or do much without it...