Super-Dumb Question About Implementation

Hey, so I am a bit embarrassed to ask this, but I couldn’t find it anywhere. If I want to send an FMOD project and audio files to a my game designer – well, how do I do that? Do they need the FMOD project file? Does it have something to do with the “build” feature? Banks? If this step is complicated, is there a guide I could follow?

Hi musicbender,

Short answer yes, all that is needed by the game is the .bank files. What you actually deliver depends on what the designer needs - for example you could deliver all of the .bank files in the Build directory, and the GUIDs.txt. This will give the them all of the content, and a text file which contains the paths and IDs of all the events in the banks which can be used to work out what to hook up where. You could also provide a document describing the events and which game objects they correspond to.

Building is not complicated, you just assign the events to banks, and click build. There are some factors to consider when building such as encoding format, encoding quality, which tracks should be streaming. Here is a rough guide to those things:

Encoding format
PCM - huge memory usage, don’t use this unless you have a good reason.
ADPCM - moderate compression, fast decode, lower quality. This is great for low power platforms such as iPhone/Android, and quite useful on all platforms to squeeze the most out of a tight CPU budget.
Vorbis - high compression, slow decode, high quality. This format is quite expensive to decode, but the quality is really high and the size on disk and in memory is quite small.
MP3 - moderate compression, slow decode, average quality. This format is generally inferior to Vorbis and comes with licensing issues, don’t use this unless you have a good reason.

Quality
Each of the encoders provides some control over the quality such as: bitrate or samplerate. Try to find the right trade off of quality/memory to meet the requirements of the project.

Streaming
If you select an event in the banks view you can see the STREAM button on each track. It is advised to set any long sounds that play a single instance at a time of a given sound such as dialog and music, to be streaming. This can offer a big saving on memory as FMOD doesn’t need to load the entire sound, only the part which is currently playing.

Which .bank files? from the “Banks” or the “Build” folder?