Hi Ken, Oh, it depends on a number of factors. How much you plan to charge for the game, how many platforms you intend to support, the size of your intended target market etc. For example, to sell a shareware game from $10 to $20 for a single platform is $150. That's not too bad for a developer who only wants to write games for a single platform and plans to keep his/her prices low. However, on the far end of the skale if you have multiple platforms, games that cost up to $40, a large distribution market, then you are looking at something like $6,000 for a commercial license. For USA Games we are looking at about $600for a license for FMOD which supports Linux and Windows and let's us sell MOTA and Raceway for something like $30 each. We are still working out the details with Firelight as the issue is complicated as I don't want to include the API in just a single game, but in our G3D Engine which generally is under a different type of license than the main ones they have. However, if you just want to release free games Firelight allows you to use the FMOD Ex API free of charge.
Anyway, FMOD Ex is definitely the leading audio API on the market right now. Firelight has been doing more to promote this thing than anybody else. On Windows they made the very good choice of making it a standard com component which means you don't have to be strictly a C/C++ developer to use it. They designed the Windows library in such a way that it will work with legacy languages like VB 6 as well as the new .Net languages. If you are in the mind to write wrappers you could in theory use it with Python and Java based applications as well. Then, for Linux and Mac developers they offer a compatible C/C++ library that makes it very easy to write games for Windows, Mac, and Linux without having to change audio APIs in the process. All of that is good, but the features of the API get even better. For instance, if you use anything like DirectSound, XAudio2, OpenAL, you have to write your own file open functions which isn't really that fun to do. If you want to support compressed file types like mp3, ogg, wma, etc you have to do that yourself as well. FMOD Ex has all that built into the API from the start. Just tell it to open an mp3, wma, ogg file, etc and it will open it up and use it. Saving developers x man hours writing our own open/decompress functionality for our games. If that wasn't enough it has stereo panning, 3d virtualization, as well as real time DSP effects like echo, low pass filters, etc which you can use to enhance the sound of the games ambience. Its really hard to compare it to anything else as it really has everything a game dev could want and more. Cheers! On 4/26/11, The Addictor <kenwdow...@neo.rr.com> wrote: > Oh wow! I didn't realize it would work with VB6. I'll have to look into > that. Bet it would cost a lot to buy a license to sell games with it though > eh? > Ken Downey > The Addictor > www.TheAddictor.com > --- Gamers mailing list __ Gamers@audyssey.org If you want to leave the list, send E-mail to gamers-unsubscr...@audyssey.org. You can make changes or update your subscription via the web, at http://audyssey.org/mailman/listinfo/gamers_audyssey.org. All messages are archived and can be searched and read at http://www.mail-archive.com/gamers@audyssey.org. If you have any questions or concerns regarding the management of the list, please send E-mail to gamers-ow...@audyssey.org.
