FMOD 2.02 support for Unreal Engine 5.6+

Unreal Engine
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Hi! Could you clarify the roadmap around FMOD 2.02 and Unreal Engine 5.6 (and later)?

  • Will FMOD 2.02 support UE 5.6, or is 2.02 now deprecated/EOL? If so, what’s the maintenance timeline (bugfixes, security, backports)?

  • If 2.02 won’t be supported, is FMOD 2.03 the designated stable/LTS going forward? Any expected support horizon you can share?

  • Is FMOD 2.03 production-ready across major consumer platforms/hardware (Windows, macOS, Linux, iOS, Android, plus consoles like PS5, Xbox Series, Switch)? Any known regressions or gaps compared to 2.02?

  • For teams targeting UE 5.6+, is the recommended path to upgrade to 2.03 now (or wait for a specific 2.03.x)?

  • Will critical fixes continue to be backported to 2.02 for a while, or should teams plan to move off it soon?

Thanks for clarifying!

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Sure thing, I’ll address each of your questions:

Will FMOD 2.02 support UE 5.6, or is 2.02 now deprecated/EOL? If so, what’s the maintenance timeline (bugfixes, security, backports)?

We have no plans to add UE 5.6 support to 2.02. Usually, we add new Unreal versions to whatever our most recent stable branch is. 2.02 isn’t considered deprecated and it will continue to receive important bug fixes. We watch the download numbers for older branches to judge when the majority of the user base has moved on for making our deprecation decisions. Usually, this follows two major versions ahead being out of early access. So, for example, when 2.04 leaves early access we start evaluating if the numbers are low enough to deprecate 2.02.

If 2.02 won’t be supported, is FMOD 2.03 the designated stable/LTS going forward? Any expected support horizon you can share?

2.03 is designated stable, you can see on the downloads page whether a version is early access or not, if not, we consider it stable and ready for prime time. Support for 2.03 will follow the pattern I mentioned above regarding 2.02.

Is FMOD 2.03 production-ready across major consumer platforms/hardware (Windows, macOS, Linux, iOS, Android, plus consoles like PS5, Xbox Series, Switch)? Any known regressions or gaps compared to 2.02?

Yes 2.03 is production ready across all platforms, we keep the early access label until we think we’ve resolved the majority of new issues found. We don’t have any known regressions compared to 2.02, there will be bugs (nature of the business), but we actively resolve them as discovered.

For teams targeting UE 5.6+, is the recommended path to upgrade to 2.03 now (or wait for a specific 2.03.x)?

Yes, upgrade now to start the upgrade process. We’ve recently had a couple of big games push 2.03 through certification which results in heavy QA, meaning there are a couple of new fixes coming in 2.03.10, patch releases can be safely dropped in, so we recommend taking those until you release. That said, if you want to hold off for the next patch, it’s currently in QA, so probably 1-2 weeks away.

Will critical fixes continue to be backported to 2.02 for a while, or should teams plan to move off it soon?

Yes, as mentioned in the first question, 2.02 will receive critical bug fixes for the time being, but won’t receive new features or new Unreal versions.

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I can tell from my personal experience:

I am coding for my project now for over 3 years and the project size reached the size and complexity of a full AAA game you can buy in the store ( just to give you an idea of the project, no bragging) , it is close to being finished and will release in a few months.
Usually I updated each Unreal Engine version 1-4 weeks after release, but only when there is an official FMOD release available for that engine version. to see all the bug reports coming in from other peoples, also I test a bit around before converting the project.

I think I started on 2.02.something and I am now on 2.03.08 (because .09 doesn’t give me anything I need).
I can tell you, the only thing that ever was causing trouble was Unreal Engine, I had only 2 times trouble and not because of FMOD.

  • I am using the async physics tick in Unreal Engine and an engine version changed the way transform were available to FMOD so the “Doppler” effect was broken. If FMOD doesn’t confirm its their fault it was Epic Games fault. It caused weeks of headache to me until I randomly stumbled upon the fix by disabling the doppler on one of my events.
  • In 5.6.1 Epic Games decided to change the way UHT reads header files which broke FMOD’s plugin as well and you cannot role back hotfixes. its easily possible to fix FMOD’s build.cs and includes manually when you know how, but again, that is not FMOD’s fault.

Also I can only talk about the features I am using, I am using a few custom written dps’s for FMOD, I am doing a lot of c++ in Unreal Engine with FMOD, I am using (localized) audio tables, 2d/3d events and timelines, a lot of parameters per event, programmer sounds, some relatively complex nested events, logic tracks, sidechaining, reverbs, routings (groups), I load and unload banks all the time, I have an ingame music player, I do everything sound related in FMOD and it just works very good with great performance and I never had any crash because of FMOD that I didn’t produce on my own. But also everything on Windows PC. I cannot talk about consoles. On Linux I can say the documentation is so bad for FMOD that I think there is a problem with FMOD and custom dps’s and we banged our head against the walls.

Anyways, I never had any other trouble with the FMOD plugin in Unreal and can say the product is comparably very stable overall.

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