FAudio Lands In Wine For New XAudio2 Re-Implementation

If the day wasn't exciting enough for Linux gamers thanks to the release of DXVK 1.0, long-time Linux game porter and FNA developer Ethan Lee has seen his FAudio implementation land in Wine for improving the state of XAudio2 support.

Ethan Lee has been working for CodeWeavers the past number of months to help out in their ambitions with Valve for improving the Wine (and ultimately Steam Play) support for Windows games running on Linux. The main focus for Ethan's work has been integrating FAudio as a new XAudio2 re-implementation. FAudio was born out of Ethan's FNA-XNA project re-implementing the Microsoft XNA Game Studio libraries.

FAudio has done a swell job for getting the DirectX Audio runtime libraries including XAudio2 and other components working on Linux and other platforms. Wine has supported XAudio2 as a layer on top of OpenAL while FAudio is much more feature-rich and better off. XAudio2 is the successor to DirectSound and has been part of the DirectX SDK for the past decade. This audio API is widely used by Windows as well as Xbox 360 games.

The FAudio code for Wine has been progressing this year while today it crossed the milestone of seeing the initial code merged into Wine. Ethan Lee shared that the FAudio code re-implementing XAudio2 has been merged. This should help out the support for newer Windows games on Wine/SteamPlay with now having this mainline support. Hopefully this is just the start of Ethan's exciting contributions to upstream Wine.