quake4.jpg Creative Labs' Sound Blaster website has a new interview with Zachary Quarles, Senior Sound Designer/Music Composer at Raven Software regarding the audio for id/Raven's Quake IV, and commenting on how Creative Labs helped out with multiple parts of the audio for this Doom 3 engine game, particularly mentioning: "EAX Advanced HD takes advantage of all of the reverb environments and low-pass occlusion elements of the game."

While Creative Labs clearly do make excellent product, the interview doesn't seem to mention anywhere that Creative Labs reached an agreement with id software in late 2004 to use EAX Advanced HD 3D audio for future Doom 3 licences. This agreement was mandated by Creative Labs, based on Creative's holding of a software patent for shadowing techniques which id co-founder and engine programmer John Carmack had separately implemented into that game's engine, apparently unaware of the patent.

At that time, John Carmack commented on the contentious software patent issue: "The patent situation well and truly sucks. We were prepared to use a two-pass algorithm that gave equivalent results at a speed hit, but we negotiated the deal with Creative so that we were able to use the zfail method without having to actually pay any cash." Seems like a rather unfortunate way to get this tech into Doom 3 engine titles, but apparently, nobody minds talking about the results - so maybe it doesn't matter?