I'm using OpenAL-Soft for a project, and right now I'm trying to decide whether I need to implement OpenAL source pooling.
Source pooling is somewhat cumbersome (I need to write code to "allocate" sources, as well as somehow decide when they can be "freed"), but necessary if the number of sources that can be generated by OpenAL is limited.
Since OpenAL-Soft is a software implementation of the OpenAL API, I wonder if the number of sources it can generate is actually limited by the underlying hardware. Theoretically, since all mixing is done in software, there might be no need to actually use one hardware channel per source.
However, I'm not sure about it. How should I proceed?
It appears that OpenAL-Soft indeed does have an upper limit on the number of sources, which can be defined in a config file. The default seems to be 256. It makes sense to limit the number of sources because of the associated CPU and memory costs. Looks like I'll end up implementing a source pool after all.