Added Tomb Raider to "Honorable Mentions".

This game supports 5.1 only (with BL and BR enabled instead of SL and SR -- the same wrong mapping consistently exhibited by every 5.1-only game tested so far. This is almost-certainly pulseaudio's fault.)

With Tomb Raider also being Feral, I'm wondering why there is so much difference between their ports. Maybe it's because that's the latest and they have now included it into their library. In that case it'd be nice to have updated versions of other games. Especially Alien Isolation.

Quoting: EhvisWith Tomb Raider also being Feral, I'm wondering why there is so much difference between their ports. Maybe it's because that's the latest and they have now included it into their library. In that case it'd be nice to have updated versions of other games. Especially Alien Isolation.

They don't test it. They just assume that if it works in the Windows version, it will work in the Linux version.

How do I know this? They told me when I contacted them about Alien Isolation. Here are some snippets from their reply:

QuoteWe have not changed any of the audio data in the game, so as the original Windows version supported 5.1 you should be able to get it to function on Linux.

[SNIP]

We do not test using surround sound during development, so please do let us know if you are able to configure the audio to output in 5.1 in case there are any others experiencing similar.

Their surround support is really hit-and miss: Tomb Raider, XCOM? Yes. Alien Isolation, Shadow of Mordor? No. Why the inconsistency? I dunno. It doesn't seem to have anything to do with the age of the game. (Aspyr has similar issues: Civ BE? Yes. Borderlands2? No.)


[EDIT: I accidentally reported my own post when trying to click the edit button. Please ignore this report. Thank you, moderators.]

Lol. We should do a kickstarter to buy Feral a kick-ass surround system. That way, they'd have no excuse for not testing, and could at least note "stereo only" in the additional notes for their linux ports on their respective store pages, so I don't waste time and money on broken crap.

Shadow of Mordor was really disappointing, becuase it was 40+ gigabytes to download. It took me nearly a week. If they'd noted it on the store page, they could have saved me a lot of time as well as the power needed to keep my desktop continually running for that time, just to download junk I'd be refunding only a few minutes later. The power alone probably cost me an extra $5, at least.

Added Total War: Atilla to shame list.

This game has in-game settings for 5.1 and 7.1, but they don't do anything.

Added XCOM 2 to shame list. This comes as a bit of a surprise, since XCOM: EU worked. Not too surprising though, since it's a Feral port, and they seem to have a coin-toss-equivalent success rate.

Since PA I had problems with surround as well, even now there is some channel crossover and bad sound artifacts. I tried all kinds of config flags but I cant get it to work as flawlessly as with plain ALSA.
One thing I don't experience though is swapped channels, but I only have a 5.1 setup. Since all the audio problems I ever had on linux were PAs fault, I'd default to blaming it :P
(I hate bluez for dropping ALSA support, now there's no way I can get rid of that cancer)

On a side note: the thing I'd care for even more than proper surround audio would be stereo 3D. Tomb Raider apparently supports it on windows judging from the grayed out config flag.

Everything on this page plays back fine for me in Chromium, in VLC, and in kodi.
https://www2.iis.fraunhofer.de/AAC/multichannel.html

Blender seems to properly output 7.1 to pulse or JACK. Not sure about LFE channel. BGE export works on Linux and Windows for me. Auto-detects 7.1 and gets it right.

Blender from Steam works properly.
First Gold Star! ... but not a game.

Visiting that fraunhofer web page in Steam overlay's web browser while playing a stereo-only game (tf2) exhibited a bad-mapping bug. SR and SL were swapped with BR and BL