Games

This page includes a list of a few existing OpenAL PC games that have been made to work with Rapture3D's "User" or "Advanced" editions, although most of them require modification to your system. New OpenAL games should be able to support Rapture3D easily enough, so if you're writing a game and would like to know more, please get in touch!

Note that modifying games or system files may break them or your system and may void your warranties - and might just not work! Please follow the instructions here only if you're very clear what you're doing (some of this is very technical!) and have a back up of all relevant files etc. We can't take responsibility for what might happen here...

Also note that you can only use Rapture3D with other OpenAL games with the "User" and "Advanced" editions from this site. The "Game" edition that is included with specific games works for those games only and will not work with other games on this list.

If you've found another game that Rapture3D works with, please let us know!

Several of the notes below ask you to remove DLLs from your system. Move them somewhere safe, do not delete them - you may need to put them back to make the game (or other games) work again! It's probably worth explaining what's going on here:

The OpenAL Router

On Windows, the OpenAL Router allows games to find all the OpenAL drivers available on your system and list them in their "audio setup" page. However, a lot of games don't do this. Instead, they let the router choose a default. The default the router picks will depend on what drivers are present on your system and there's currently no way to tell it to choose Rapture3D over other drivers.

However, it will pick Rapture3D if there are no other drivers present, which is why there is a lot of mention of removing DLLs in the instructions below. Just don't delete them - keep them somewhere so you can put them back.

Note that installing new games will sometimes put new OpenAL drivers in your system directories, so you may need to remove them again to keep the changes active.

This isn't a great solution if you have audio hardware with built in audio acceleration (e.g. Creative Lab's excellent X-Fi cards, typically accessed via a driver file called ct_oal.dll) so you may wish to put drivers back for use with other OpenAL games. Acceleration can be helpful, particularly on machines with old CPUs, and the Creative cards do sound good. (We prefer Rapture3D, but then we're biased!)

Masquerading

Further, some OpenAL games won't use a driver unless it has a familiar name. Older games have never heard of "Rapture3D" and therefore won't use it, but will work fine if the driver calls itself "Generic Software". If you've removed the normal "Generic Software" driver (typically in wrap_oal.dll) then you can use the layout program (in the "Start" menu under "Blue Ripple Sound") to enable masquerading. Rapture3D will then claim to be the "Generic Software" driver, even though it isn't, and that's enough for many games.

OpenAL, EAX and EFX

Finally, some OpenAL games won't use Rapture3D because it doesn't support EAX. This is because it supports EFX instead, which is a newer (and open!) standard that covers all the EAX functionality.

The Games

Okay, we've got there at last.