Loading of WAV files requires that the operating system uses little-endian data. We need to modify the system so that consoles, older OS X systems, and some Linux distributions aren't effected by this issue in case these systems are being used by the game or in the preparation for the possibility that Source modding is ported to these systems.

There is an issue where the system wont properly seek back to the beginning of a sample's file when set to loop. This could be related to Source's Seek method not returning error information, or it could be related to the looping code itself.

Currently the sample pool takes little account of samples that require positional audio. To fix this, at least three changes are needed:

-Upon creating the sample, the pool must take notice of any parameters that exists to mark a sample as positional or not.

-The sample pool needs to be made responsible for updating positional properties of all samples that depend on positional parameters.

-The OpenAL manager needs to take care of properly updating the listener position, orientation, and velocity. Currently the threaded design prevents this because GetAbsOrigin's are calculated from frame to frame, and are not always valid. The IsAbsQueriesValid function always returns true for threads other than the main thread, making it difficult to implement the update code using this function.

Valve files should not be included in this project for the following reasons:

• This aims to be simple to install on any SDK version. Portability should be a high priority. Copying the file from a specific SDK does not guarantee support with later versions, nor does it help with forward-compatibility with the Source SDK. The more code that we need to maintain from Valve's SDK files, the more work will be needed on our end to support new SDK versions or possibly licensed Source games interested in the project.
• There Source SDK's license seems to be unannounced based on my searching. I'm not sure if we can legally provide modified copies their files.

Instead, we should have a routing class in a file of our own that we can have users include with a few short lines in an installation documentation file explaining the rerouting process and any limitations that maybe be imposed from this method.

If an end user is having trouble using the OpenAL system, there should be a cmd line parameter such as -disable_openal to prevent the user from being unable to play a mod using it. The router would then pass all sound events back to the default Miles system, and only a bare minimum of the OpenAL code will be executed.

Currently, IOpenALSample only supports audio streaming. This is possibly inefficient for small sound effects, as they should instead be completely loaded - played - and then disposed of.

There is no reason why this should be streamed. Although, I don't think there's too much of a performance decrease either way.

Ideally, samples should have a SetStreaming() method.

The number of buffers are hard-coded to 4. This makes life hard for samples trying to play sounds with less than 4xBuffer size of data, because it's unable to fill all buffers. The system is then led to believe that the stream is not containing audio data.

See the first loop at IOpenALSample::Play()

A standard loader interface is in need of development to allow developers to easily create samples without needing to take into account the specific type of file that is going to be loaded.

A sample is a specific sound, while a source is a description of where/how the sound is being emitted. This project initially kept the source and sample together within the same object, but there are noticeable performance gains available when using them as separate objects.

The most notable gain would be that multiple sources using the same sound file don't need to load the sound file multiple times. If we have 10 of the same monster, for instance - they are currently all loading their sound files separately instead of sharing the same resources.

Furthermore, as per issue #5 we also would benefit from caching these sounds outside of IOpenALSample for another performance gain.

To fix this, a complete rewrite of the soundscapes is required.