How to play many sounds at once in OpenAL

Posted by Krom Stern on Game Development See other posts from Game Development or by Krom Stern
Published on 2010-12-27T10:13:18Z Indexed on 2013/10/30 22:20 UTC
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design-patterns

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openal

I'm developing an RTS game and I would like to add sounds to it. My choice has landed on OpenAL. I have plenty of units which from time to time make sounds: fSound.Play(sfx_shoot, location). Sounds often repeat, e.g. when squad of archers shoots arrows, but they are not synced with each other.

My questions are:

What is the common design pattern to play multiple sounds in OpenAL, when some of them are duplicate?
What are the hardware limitations on sounds count and tricks to overcome them?

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