edit
also, people have been praising how sound works in this game... wat
as far as i can tell, walls dont attenuate it even a bit, it propagates simply spherically
its shit?
It has support for hardware accelerated sound, supporting both Creative EAX and Aureal A3D 2.0. The A3D in particular was stunning, not just for its time but even now. It's 3 dimensional, binaural sound propagation back in 1998:
Playback on this next video's disabled on other sites but just skip to 24:56 for the Thief footage
Sadly it doesn't work anymore because:
- Creative sued Aureal for copyright infringement, they were found not guilty in court but the lawsuit bankrupted the company in 2000 and most of their tech was bought up by Creative in bankruptcy court. Who then discontinued the API immediately, sat on the tech for the next decade and either sued or bought out anyone else who tried to bring any similar 3D audio tech onto the market. This also wasn't Creative's first rodeo, look up what they (allegedly) did to AdLib in the early 90s and Sensaura in the 2000s
- Microsoft killed DirectSound, and by extension DirectSound3D starting with Vista/the Xbox 360, killing hardware accelerated audio in the process (lmao take that Creative you buncha cunts - have fun being the kings of an industry that doesn't exist anymore)
It's still there in Thief: The Dark Project and Thief 2 though. It's not like Half-Life where Valve forcibly removed support for it decades ago. Thief 1 and 2 still support binaural, 3D audio. You just have to play it on a Windows 98 machine with an Aureal Vortex 2 soundcard