I'm done with the graphics and physics for my game, so now I'm looking into sound. I'm going to use OpenAL, since, well, OpenAL looks pretty awesome.

That said, I'm developing on Tiger, and I see from Apple's OpenAL faq, that they've got version 1.2, presumably pretty well optimized, since Apple's FAQ says its optimized for games and so on.

Now, obviously, I could download the OpenAL framework from Creative -- which dates to sep 10, 2004, and is version 1.0 -- and I could run install_tool to make it embeddable in my game's Contents/Frameworks/ folder.

Should I do this? This would allow for Panther support which is a Good Thing. But then, I wouldn't have the newest ( and presumable most optimized ) version.

What do you guys think?

Also, is there a way to have the game, at run-time, determine which to use?

You can get the source to the Tiger version of AL from CVS. It builds and runs just fine on Panther. You can then embed that in your app bundle as you would any other framework.

If you want to choose which to load at run-time, I think you'd have to use dlopen or CFBundle or something...

Well, openal.framework is only 296kb, so I guess packaging it is no big deal. Which CVS has it? Creative's or Apple's?

whatever the instructions at http://openal.org/ say -- creative's, I think.