Is there any real reason to use XAudio2 over OpenAL? Such as quality? Or is it because XAudio is the latest and OpenAL is just old.
Lower latency and native decompression on XBox One (and legacy reasons, native decompression on Xbox 360 which was a target platform for Gears of War).
We already have an OpenAL implementation (that isn’t feature parity with our XAudio2 implementation unfortunately) for Linux and HTML5 if you want to try to get it to work for PC.
Why doesn’t it work for PC?
I’m sure it does – it’s not used for PC currently so it’ll probably take some work to get it to work on PC in terms of dealing with changing the platform dependencies, build.cs files, etc.
Also our OpenAL implementation isn’t feature parity with our XAudio2 implementation – for example, there aren’t any lowpass filters used, omni-directional blending, stereo spatialization, etc. So it would take some work to get it up to feature parity.