Wine Developers Plot Their Path For Integrating FAudio As The XAudio2 Reimplementation

A few days back Linux game porter/developer Ethan Lee joined CodeWeavers to work on Wine/Proton for Valve. In particular, he's going to be focusing on his FAudio project as a Windows XAudio(2) re-implementation. CodeWeavers appears to be eager on getting FAudio merged into upstream Wine.

FAudio is part of Ethan Lee's FNA-XNA project as a re-implementation of the Microsoft XNA Game Studio libraries. FNA and FAudio has already helped game developers port their code to more platforms and now FAudio is being hooked up in Wine to help Windows games run on Linux. FAudio has been developed as an accurate DirectX Audio run-time libraries including XAudio2, X3DAudio, and other components. FAudio is cross-platform itself and only depends on SDL2.

CodeWeavers is working on integrating FAudio directly into Wine for the XAudio2 implementation and it's great they are doing so as opposed to keeping it just in downstream Proton or their own CrossOver code. The current XAudio2 code within Wine has just been layered atop OpenAL, to which they have run into obstacles and isn't as well off as FNA's FAudio.

Andrew Eikum of CodeWeavers kicked off discussions for merging the FAudio code into upstream Wine following the discussions with Ethan Lee. The preferred route they are taking is to occasionally pull in the latest FAudio Git code into the Wine tree and from there make use of it as opposed to relying upon Git sub-modules, shifting FAudio's main development location to being Wine, or other possibilities. FNA/FAudio can still be developed outside of Wine.

The initial discussion has started on wine-devel. Hopefully it won't be much longer before FAudio gets pulled into Wine Git for improving the Windows on Linux gaming experience as far as better audio support is concerned.