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).