I was at the GANG party during GDC and I got to have a bit of a look at the new FMOD studio. I must say from a composer standing I was incredibly impressed with the software as a whole. As I mentioned while there, everything I’ve wanted from FMOD in a composers setting has been answered.
There are a lot of pieces I can’t explain well but these are the ones that made me incredibly excited.
The timeline is fantastic and feels familiar as a DAW so it’s easier to work with
The ability to produce generative audio as opposed to looping with relative ease can move music in games in an awesome direction
Those two alone are my biggest pieces of excitement because it’s something I’ve wanted for awhile.
Overall, I’m super excited to get my hands on Fmod Studio and get to work making some demo tutorials. Thank you all for doing such an awesome job.
It seems the single biggest thing to help with the large leap in generative audio is the ‘events’ within events’ as well as these ‘subevents’ being able to be controlled by other events outside their own layer. However, this seems to be more of a sound design thing, as a composer I’m not quite grasping where this can come in musically? Perhaps for a 12 tone score, or a very special case where an entire cue is divided up into it’s individual tracks (which will probably only happen for sampled recordings) and each one is triggered in layers by different gameplay elements.
Really looking forward to this.
Specially the snapshot mix thingie. In a very complex environment with lots of action, the mix is (IMO) the weakest point in game audio at the moment. Just throwing sounds in the game is 1%. Having tools and control to really create dynamic and responsive mixes will be a huge plus.
FMOD’s licensing model will be the same as FMOD Ex, there’s a slight difference. A full game license is $15k for 1 platform with studio tool being used. If the Studio tool is not used and just the low level engine by itself it is $9k. Casual is still $3000 and $500 as before.
There will also be licenses for 3rd party professional audio plugins from Izotope, McDSP, AudioGaming and Little Endian. Pricing for these will be announced on the website at release.