revolstar wrote on 2025-10-07, 07:35:

So what's the deal here? The VOGONS Wiki lists Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines as a game that supports EAX 2.0. When I enable the in-game 'Environmental Audio' option, all I get is some crappy slap-back delay - no positional audio, no occlusion, nothing. I've tried it with bothe SB Live! and Audigy, sounds the same in both cases. I do realize the game was not finished when it dropped, but there's a ton of community patches and fixes for the game's numerous woes - is there maybe an unofficial patch/fix for better environmental audio?

We inherited that EAX 2.0 entry from the old list on Wikipedia. I've checked the game myself a few times, since it's one of my favorites, and couldn't find any references to EAX in its documentation or executable. And yes, I was testing the retail CD version with just the official 1.2 patch. To clarify, the game does have reverb in some areas (e.g. during the intro when LaCroix speaks) but I'm not sure if it actually uses EAX for that.

And while I can easily remove the entry on the Vogons wiki page, I'd like to see where the original reference for EAX 2.0 came from before doing that.

I'm giving this a try: https://www.nexusmods.com/vampirebloodlines/m … tab=description

So far, the crappy slap-back delay is gone when I enable 'Environmental Audio'. Works OK in stereo mode.

If there was any support, the box cover should have something like Creative EAX HD on the back.

The Serpent Rider wrote on 2025-10-07, 09:30:

If there was any support, the box cover should have something like Creative EAX HD on the back.

I have a physical copy of the game, and there are logos for Activision, White Wolf, Troika, Source, Bink and Nvidia.

No mention of Creative, not even in the specs blurb.

Yeah, no surprise here, because Valve were done with proprietary 3D audio in Source.

I distinctly remember hearing echoes when playing HL2 back in 2004/2005 on the family's then new household computer, with no special sound hardware present aside from built-in audio. Both Bloodlines and HL2 obviously use Source and it's likely that the Environmental Audio is simply just the audio DPS effects from Source, which are possibly a continuation of the software reverb from GoldSrc/HL1.

That's my assumption, of course, but in my time playing Bloodlines on both Audigy and Audigy 2 cards on various computers I've never heard anything in it that suggests EAX room type usage, something that would stick out as "aha, that's EAX-type reverb!". That's not to say that every game with EAX support necessarily uses it perfectly well (c'mon, Gearbox's Halo PC port , Far Cry and F.E.A.R.! No reverb for gunshots at all!? WTF!) but you would usually notice SOMETHING different if it had EAX support, not to mention that the Environmental Audio option would be greyed out or crash my system if I had enabled it with my Athlon 64 3200+ PC's built-in Realtek sound solution (which never happened).

Had some spare time this weekend, so I did another test with Bloodlines. I installed my retail copy of the game on an Athlon64 3400+ with a Radeon 9600 XT running WinXP+SP3. I only applied the game's official 1.2 patch. No fan fixes or mods of any kind.

For the sound card, I deliberately used an old ESS Solo-1, because it has no EAX support whatsoever. Despite that, I was able to turn on "Environmental Effects" in the game's audio options, and the Prince's speech during the intro cutscene had its usual reverb effect.

This definitively confirms that Bloodlines doesn't use EAX. Therefore, I have removed it from the Vogons Wiki EAX list.

Using DSOAL with HRTF active + environmental effects and high quality audio both enabled + the sound settings below that I found on pcgaming wiki I was able to get rid of that audio delay and other audio problems. The audio delay appears to be caused by "snd_mixahead" which was set to 0.35 in pcgaming wiki (apparently this command only goes up to 0.1 anyway) I just changed it to 0.035 and the delay is gone now. setting it to 0.02 or 0.01 causes a lot of crackling. If you still hear crackling at 0.035 you can increase snd_mixahead more.

snd_mixahead "0.035"
snd_surround "1"
snd_gain "2.2"
snd_gain_max "1.58"
dsp_on "1"
dsp_spatial "73"
dsp_dist_max "9999"
hisound "1"
footstep_pc_vol "0.31"
// footstep_npc_use_templates 0

bluehuman wrote on 2026-09-12, 10:34:

Using DSOAL with HRTF active + environmental effects and high quality audio both enabled + the sound settings below that I found on pcgaming wiki I was able to get rid of that audio delay and other audio problems. […]

Haven’t seen this short thread in a while! I couldn’t ignore the fact that this appears to be your first post, bluehuman, so… welcome to VOGONS!
You did make me curious about tweaking the DSP and other audio variables in Bloodlines, next time I decide to play it.

Dipshidian wrote on 2026-09-12, 11:53:

bluehuman wrote on 2026-09-12, 10:34:

Using DSOAL with HRTF active + environmental effects and high quality audio both enabled + the sound settings below that I found on pcgaming wiki I was able to get rid of that audio delay and other audio problems. […]

Haven’t seen this short thread in a while! I couldn’t ignore the fact that this appears to be your first post, bluehuman, so… welcome to VOGONS!
You did make me curious about tweaking the DSP and other audio variables in Bloodlines, next time I decide to play it.

I remember your name from your Youtube channel, your videos are great. I wanted to share this because the delay was annoying me and I found this thread talking about it
Also, disregard what I said about it only going up to 0.1 - 0.1 is just the default setting, not the limit