SOUND COMPATIBILITY ISSUES WITH MICROSOFT VISTA

If your sound card ( or onboard sound chip ) utilises DirectSound's 3D hardware acceleration, you may experience sound problems in certain games as the audio stack has been completely rewritten in Vista. The DS audio hardware layer has been removed and replaced with a software mixer producing less that favourable results.

Risen3D is effected because it uses DirectSound3D and EAX which is no longer supported in Vista,  it now appears OpenAL will be the standard for future gaming.

Now for the good news, providing you have either a Creative X-FI or Audigy sound card, Creative now provide a work around called ALchemy, basically it converts DS functions into OpenAL, restoring 3D sound effects and reverb to any specified DirectSound3D game.

First download the ALchemy version for your specific sound card and then install the program - ALchemy

You then need to manually add Risen3D to ALchemy-enabled Games as illustrated below, ALchemy will then install two files ( dsound.dll, dsound.ini ) into your Risen3D\Bin folder -  the illustration below assumes you have Risen3D installed in D:\Risen3D.

Note: The following only applies for Vista, other Window's platforms utilise DirectSound 3D hardware acceleration.

IMPORTANT: Make sure the 3DSound option is enabled in the launcher for the above to work.

Enjoy