2013-02-09 18:31:22

I don't think the accessibility of FMOD has anything to do with whether the person trying to use it is blind, so much as whether the person trying to use it is good at low-level programming. Even though FMOD is much higher than nothing (it had to be built from somewhere, after all). I'm sure there are developers here who can use it. And if it surpasses XAudio2 in the 3D or DSP capabilities without serious bugs, someone is bound to use it. I'd try wrapping it in something simpler myself if my brain didn't have such a low threshold for exploding.

看過來!
"If you want utopia but reality gives you Lovecraft, you don't give up, you carve your utopia out of the corpses of dead gods."
MaxAngor wrote:
    George... Don't do that.

2013-02-13 09:08:25

Not to poor cold water on this or anything, but how many audiogames are out there that use FMOD to begin with? I don't know of any, and the last time I
looked at it all their design tools are completely inaccessible. WWISE had a horrifyingly confusing manual, but at least I could use it.

If by design tools you mean their FMOD sound designer, right, it's completely unaccessible. But I still don't understand what that program is useful for...

If most audiogames don't use FMOD, that's mainly because it's quite a complex audio API, but also especially because it's not particularely cheap.
If I remember correctly, they propose a shareware license for 500$, and a full license around 3000$. The audiogame market is so small that it's a quite big investment. Not everybody has the chance to sell 100 copies of 30$ each just enough to refund.

Note that the most powerful open source FMOD competitor, openAL, hasn't a greater success. I explain by the fact that it is again quite complex to use, and by the additional fact that you need another library to manage file formats load/save, because OpenAL doesn't do it (probably because of royalties issues, I don't see any other good reason not to handle it). Streaming songs is also not basicly supported, even local streaming; you have to program it yourself.

In fact you could see that many audiogames, if they don't use DirectX 7, 8 or 9 directly or any of its programming languages specific wrappers, use BASS. BASS is much simpler to use than FMOD, propose most of the same 2D/3D features, and is cheaper. It also supports more file formats through addons. (Price: 125€ for shareware license, ~1000€ for full; still too much imo but already more affordable)

There are 10 kinds of people : those who know binary, and those who don't.

2013-02-18 08:03:00

Hi there,

Maybe this thread is a bit old, but I would like to weigh in and say 3D audio support in FMOD is a significant step forward for audio games.

At this stage, rendering 3D audio is overwhelmingly technical. As middleware and with its design tools, FMOD lets sound designers (instead of programmers) create the sound environment. I think this will open up what is aesthetically possible in audio games. Also, FMOD is cross-platform and integrates with the game engine Unity, which is also cross-platform, and quite popular right now. Audio game development may be more financially plausible if developers know they can deploy to multiple platforms easily.

Additionally, both FMOD and Unity are free for non-commercial use, which I hope will encourage research and experimentation. FMOD may not be the perfect 3D audio solution, but it's definitely a good one!

2013-02-19 03:42:54

Anything that qualifies as a 3D audio solution is a good one at this point in time. smile

看過來!
"If you want utopia but reality gives you Lovecraft, you don't give up, you carve your utopia out of the corpses of dead gods."
MaxAngor wrote:
    George... Don't do that.

2013-03-18 20:27:14

Hello Everybody,
please excuse me for getting back to this thread so late. Thank you very much for the interest in binaural rendering! As I understand, many people here are not using FMOD for a variety of reasons (licensing cost, accessibility problems with FMOD Designer, etc.). I think that it's an interesting question in which form binaural rendering should come, so I started a new thread here: http://forum.audiogames.net/viewtopic.php?id=10205
Best regards,
Fritz