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I've been trying to diagnose an irritating sporadic soft-clicking noise in BF2 when the hardware sound option is selected, and in doing so found a couple of additional audio.con settings you can play with (if your a dork like me).
AudioSettings.setAlwaysAllowSystemOpenAL 1
This does 2 things as far as I can tell:
1) Allows you to select Creative X-Fi and UltraHigh even if you do not have an X-Fi card. But still loads BF2OpenAL.dll rather than OpenAL32.dll in the system directory. Selecting X-Fi will enable EAX 5.0 if allowed by the current drivers, and the current drivers only allow EAX 5.0 for X-Fi cards. If EAX 5.0 is not allowed, then BF2 uses EAX 3.0.
2) If you do have an X-Fi card, then BF2.exe loads the OpenAL32.dll directly from the system directory. BF2OpenAL.dll is the BF2 directory is ignored completely. If you've already replaced BF2OpenAL.dll w/the latest OpenAL32.dll as you should (if you want real hardware acceleration), then this param should do anything for you.
AudioSettings.setForceNumberOfVoices x
This lets you specify the number of channels (ie. number of simultaneous sounds) used in the game. Low and Medium both use 16 channels, High is 32 channels, and I'm pretty certain that UltraHigh is 64 channels.
If you set it to 1 then you will indeed hear only 1 sound at any one time. And if you specify 64 channels and have an Audigy2 ZS (which I have and is only capable of 63 channels max), then there are missing sounds in game, eg. start a single player game w/32 bots on Karkand map and get into the middle of the action. Start firing away in single shot mode and notice your gun shot sounds dropping in and out.
In fact, anything higher than 58 results in sporadic missing sounds w/my Audigy2 ZS based on my testing. I've had it set to 48 for a while, but am not sure if it really makes much of a difference with my Audidy2 ZS. X-Fi is capable of 127 simultaneous sounds, btw.
AudioSettings.setAlwaysAllowSystemOpenAL 1
This does 2 things as far as I can tell:
1) Allows you to select Creative X-Fi and UltraHigh even if you do not have an X-Fi card. But still loads BF2OpenAL.dll rather than OpenAL32.dll in the system directory. Selecting X-Fi will enable EAX 5.0 if allowed by the current drivers, and the current drivers only allow EAX 5.0 for X-Fi cards. If EAX 5.0 is not allowed, then BF2 uses EAX 3.0.
2) If you do have an X-Fi card, then BF2.exe loads the OpenAL32.dll directly from the system directory. BF2OpenAL.dll is the BF2 directory is ignored completely. If you've already replaced BF2OpenAL.dll w/the latest OpenAL32.dll as you should (if you want real hardware acceleration), then this param should do anything for you.
AudioSettings.setForceNumberOfVoices x
This lets you specify the number of channels (ie. number of simultaneous sounds) used in the game. Low and Medium both use 16 channels, High is 32 channels, and I'm pretty certain that UltraHigh is 64 channels.
If you set it to 1 then you will indeed hear only 1 sound at any one time. And if you specify 64 channels and have an Audigy2 ZS (which I have and is only capable of 63 channels max), then there are missing sounds in game, eg. start a single player game w/32 bots on Karkand map and get into the middle of the action. Start firing away in single shot mode and notice your gun shot sounds dropping in and out.
In fact, anything higher than 58 results in sporadic missing sounds w/my Audigy2 ZS based on my testing. I've had it set to 48 for a while, but am not sure if it really makes much of a difference with my Audidy2 ZS. X-Fi is capable of 127 simultaneous sounds, btw.
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