when i tried this game once on vortex2 with A3D everything just sounded very muffled, though i don't recall whether it had the cutting out issues you describe. what worked flawlessly for me was a live! card with liveware drivers, granted that just does EAX reverb as opposed to the A3D HRTF, but you get the "reference" implementation instead of the aureal software layer that may or may not be of reduced quality, seeing as part of A3D processing already runs on the CPU... the EAX implementation in HL is actually pretty well tuned compared to things like that UT patch which drowns everything in bathroom reverb.

the issues you describe really sound like it's hitting voice limitations due to a poor A3D implementation... things to test would be a different game version (the game saw important regressions even pre-steam), reducing hardware acceleration or messing with some of the ingame console sound parameters, though i wouldn't put much stock in it, A3D was generally troublesome in my experience.

auron wrote on 2020-05-21, 05:50:

when i tried this game once on vortex2 with A3D everything just sounded very muffled, though i don't recall whether it had the cutting out issues you describe. what worked flawlessly for me was a live! card with liveware drivers, granted that just does EAX reverb as opposed to the A3D HRTF, but you get the "reference" implementation instead of the aureal software layer that may or may not be of reduced quality, seeing as part of A3D processing already runs on the CPU... the EAX implementation in HL is actually pretty well tuned compared to things like that UT patch which drowns everything in bathroom reverb.

the issues you describe really sound like it's hitting voice limitations due to a poor A3D implementation... things to test would be a different game version (the game saw important regressions even pre-steam), reducing hardware acceleration or messing with some of the ingame console sound parameters, though i wouldn't put much stock in it, A3D was generally troublesome in my experience.

Thanks for the response!

The issue only appears when there's a lot of debris producing sounds -- when you just break boxes or blow up barrels, there are no issues. So far, the mentioned place (pipe breaking through ceiling) is probably the only place I have seen this happen.
Apparently it behaves the same in Software mode -- I thought A3D should fix this limitation -- apparently not?

Also I don't really remember if I previously had this issue when initially tried the game on different motherboard -- I played with both EAX and A3D and don't remember sounds cutting off.
I decided to turn off EAX anyway, since it's basically "fake" effect, compared to A3D. But in Unreal it might sound better sometimes though -- A3D doesn't provide such "massive" reverb in places where you'd expect it.

It might be just a coincidence -- that I completed the game to this specific point where the issue appears. Otherwise I'd have forgotten about this problem. Now I basically need confirmation if it's "normal" or something is wrong with my HL, Drivers, or the sound card itself.

I use HL 1.1.1.0, but it's the version I always used. I can try the CD version (1.0.0.x), not sure if it'll change anything though.

Can someone who has HL and AU8830 card launch the end of the "Blast Pit" chapter and reproduce the issue? This will help me to understand it it's "normal".

Both EAX and A3D should be enabled.

It's same area (pipe you need to use to get to "power up" chapter).
First, shoot the silo walls when standing on th epipe, then -- shoot the pipe walls when located inside it. Do gunshot sounds stop abruptly?

To reproduce the first issue, just go further and wait until pipe breaks. Listen to the debris -- do they sound like on this video? https://youtu.be/-gu_f-Q1mcI?t=5835
EAX can be disabled.

auron wrote on 2020-05-21, 05:50:

when i tried this game once on vortex2 with A3D everything just sounded very muffled, though i don't recall whether it had the cutting out issues you describe. what worked flawlessly for me was a live! card with liveware drivers, granted that just does EAX reverb as opposed to the A3D HRTF, but you get the "reference" implementation instead of the aureal software layer that may or may not be of reduced quality, seeing as part of A3D processing already runs on the CPU... the EAX implementation in HL is actually pretty well tuned compared to things like that UT patch which drowns everything in bathroom reverb.

the issues you describe really sound like it's hitting voice limitations due to a poor A3D implementation... things to test would be a different game version (the game saw important regressions even pre-steam), reducing hardware acceleration or messing with some of the ingame console sound parameters, though i wouldn't put much stock in it, A3D was generally troublesome in my experience.

In half-life you can tune the A3D settings to your liking with console commands.
Muffled sound can be fixed easily.
http://web.archive.org/web/20000614040942/htt … hhelp/gm_hl.htm

Several people reported problems with muffled sounds when Half-Life was first released. If you are encountering this problem, make sure you are using the latest A3D Drivers. If they do not help you, you can also adjust the console variables to these values:

s_distance 18
s_2dvolume 0.88
s_verbwet 0.15
s_min_distance 8
s_refgain 0.34

Unfortunately I've never experienced the cutting off sound issue OP has, so I can't help with that. Did you try deleting the a3dapi.dll in half-life's directory? This should force it to use the more modern version your drivers supplies since it ships with an older version of it.

Thank you for your response!

I've also seen that URL, yes -- but even after entering these "proper" values, deleting a3dapi.dll and installing A3D driver 2041 (the only one I shoud use, because later ones are buggy) I still have this issue: https://youtu.be/-gu_f-Q1mcI?t=5835
Looks like it will always happen in that particular level, regardless of which sound card you use. Probably number of sound effect channels is hardcoded into the engine itself, but I need confirmation.

The other issue (gunshot stopped by bullet hit sound when I enable EAX) might be caused by the way it's implemented in later Vortex drivers -- to emulate reverb, it just takes A3D channels and plays same sound through them so it sounds "reverberated". Probably because there are not too many channels (16, according to Aureal) left for A3D-processed sounds, some sounds start cutting off. That's just my theory. But anyway there are only like 3-4 sound sources -- weapon, wall and the waterfall -- less than 16!
This made me think my Vortex can be defective -- some channels are "disabled" when they shouldn't be. Or it's normal situation, and if it's defective, I should have encountered different issues?

I've decided not to use drivers with EAX emulation because they introduce other bugs like flipped stereo channels.
Too bad you cannot use both EAX and A3D when you actually have two cards in your computer. That way I coulsd just "pass-through" output of one card into AUX in of the another and see what happens.

i was running my mx300 in a pentium 3 667 system - a bunch of games didn't play well with it - dark forces 2 jedi knight being the worst, giving me bad positional audio, sometimes flipped, other times the samples played too fast or not at all. music was fine, speech was fine, but everything else was messy. i tried everything from game patches to upgraded aureal software to reinstalling windows. moving it from the socket 370 pc (via chipset) to a socket 462 (nforce2) somehow made it all better.

try a different pci slot?