Our FMOD sound backend, that integrates CGE with the FMOD sound system, supports now 3D (spatial) sounds. This means that sound position in 3D is reflected in your ears — things that are closer are louder, things that are on your right are mostly in your right speakers etc.

The improvements outlined here make our FMOD sound backend at par (the same features, with the same CGE API) with our default OpenAL sound backend. This matters, as it opens the door for future integration with FMOD Studio. The goal of FMOD Studio is to make the work of sound designer easier. The sfx person can create sound effects in FMOD Studio, in a way that is agnostic to the game engine, and the code (like your game) simply sends “events” that may cause some sound effect (playing something, stopping something, fading in/out something…).

Note: OpenAL remains our default sound backend, as an open-source audio library, for our open-source game engine. The FMOD backend is just an option — when you are OK with using proprietary and commercial (though free in some cases, for indie devs) solution, in exchange for features like FMOD Studio and Nintendo Switch compatibility.

Our FMOD support improvements are:

• We now pass to FMOD correct values of sound 3D position, velocity, listener 3D position and orientation, request right-handed coordinate system, and we set sounds to be spatial when appropriate.

• The SoundEngine.DistanceModel is supported by FMOD (so you can change the distance model to “linear” if desired; default is equivalent to FMOD default, “inverse”).

• The TCastlePlayingSound.Offset (reading and setting) works with FMOD.

• Sound priority is now passed to FMOD in a more straightforward way, to allow FMOD to manage sound sources.

  CGE Priority (float in 0..1 range, higher is more important) is converted into FMOD priority (int in 0..256 range, lower is more important). Yeah, the word priority is inconsistent, and we cannot really win here — Unity, FMOD, Wwise, X3D… all have inconsistent ideas what does priority mean.

  If you’re curious about the decisions behind our TCastleSound.Priority definition, see this commit’s log. Sometimes it is just impossible to be consistent with everything… And inventing our own name for the same concept also felt wrong. We used the term Importance for quite some time, and it was documented as “This is a priority…” 🙂

• Internal example moved to examples/audio/internal/fmod_api_test/ . This is a useful example for people that want to work directly with FMOD or extend our FMOD backend in CGE. It should not be followed by normal CGE users.

There’s no new CGE API to present here. Just use the existing classes like TCastleSoundSource and TCastleSound (see previous news post, about sound API upgrades). They will work with FMOD backend as you expect, producing 3D sound.