Valve Open Source Steam Audio - 3D Game Audio Solution - Including Unity, Unreal, FMOD and C++ SDKs

hello ladies and gentlemen it's Mike here at game from scratch here today we are talking about steam audio specifically because steam audio was just fully open- sourced by vve software so first a bit an overcap of what exactly steam audio is and basically you can think of this as a 3D sound API this is for making uh sounds that participate with a 3D interactive world uh kind of more immersive on top of that it is an entire ecosystem you have things like Unity unreal and fod plugins available as well now one thing you're going to notice right away is this is for PC and mobile so I think that might be one of the big limitations of this guys it's not necessarily a console solution and that might be holding it back from adoption but there are several hundred games that have used this as we will look at in just a second so what exactly does it provide well it provides better audio integration than hrtf if you're wondering what the hell an hrtf is that stands for a head related transfer function as a mathematical equation for basically checking out how a head would hear audio so it uses fully featured spatial audio attuned to the physical attributes of of your in-game geometry combined accurate occlusion reflection Reverb and hrtf effects for natural sounding immersion it simplifies the spatial audio design so it's easy to implement and deploy for all major audio engines this is where the game engine plugins would come in because you need to Define uh audio properties of objects in your 3D World for this to actually work uh game engines and platforms tweak high level parameters to optimize immersion and performance quickly and easily and full control over spatial effects from uh fully automatic physical sound simulation to Unique hand CED tuning between and everything in between so why would you use this it delivers a full featured audio solution that integrates environment and listener simulations hrtf significantly improves immersion in VR uh physics based sound propagation completes oral immersion by consistently recreating how sounds interact with their virtual environments and we have this excellent quote with steam audio sound appears to flow and wrap its way around mazes and corridors accurately and adapts to changes in geometry and materials on the Fly it's pretty great this is coming from Emily ridway who is a totally unbiased Val employee uh on top of that so we got features occlusions and reflection real time sound propagations it works with virtual reality and Bas Sonic support performance is good 3D audio is there P baked propagation again you have those Integrations in popular middleware such as fod and unreal and unity game engines and support uh so the big thing here is let's look at their update section the last update news piece here is from 2018 okay but if we head on over to the steam Community Hub we will find out more by the way if you want to go ahead and download this you can click the download links and you will find there is a Unity plugin an Unreal Engine plugin an fod Studio plugin as well as a Capi so if you want to implement this into your own custom engine or you want to integrate it into another engine such as like Joe or o3d or something like that you can do so and of course it is an open source project so back to today's announcements that steam is now uh steam audio is now open source uh so excited to announce that the the release of steam audio the complete source code of the steam audio SDK is now available as open source uh with this release our goal is to provide more control to developers which will lead to better experiences for users and hopefully valuable contributions back to the wider community of developers using steam audio um receiving a lot of value feedback and contributions from the community to the plugins that already available as open source such as Unity unreal and fod and we want to bring those same benefits to the core SDK this will allow developers to tailor SDK to their needs and deliver improved experiences to everyone using the technology and will continue their ongoing work on Steam audio including the release of bugs and new features uh so choice of features they work on is often driven by the needs of internal projects for example during the development of Half-Life Alex we spent a lot of time working on our hybrid Reverb and pathing features which we later uh released as part of steam audio 4.0.0 uh these priorities might not always align with our prior our partner priorities so we want to remove that roadblock and so here we are that prevents Partners from implementing spatial audio features that require access to the core steam audio SDK as an example we may be working on performance issues in Steam audio affecting an internal project but a partner may need steam audio ported to a console platform again goes back to one of the glaring missing features of this is it's not say on Xbox or Playstation uh making the entire SDK available as open source allows Partners to manage the port themselves and optimize it to their needs while also allowing them to contribute their changes back if desired uh so the entire audio codebase including the sdks and all plugins is now released under the Apache 2.0 license Apache is a very liberal LIC in terms of what it allows you to do uh this allows users to use steam audio in commercial projects and to modify and redistribute it under their own licensing terms without having to include source code we welcome contributions from developers who uh fix bugs or add features to steam audio for more details see license.md and contributing to MD in the GitHub repository on top of that there were some other features in the 4.5.2 release uh fixes mostly uh nothing too magical there the big deal about this particular release is this line right here this is the first first open source release of the steam audio SDK source code so again if you want to go ahead and check this out it is up on GitHub as mentioned earlier under earlier on it is under the Apache 2.0 license which is uh pretty again permissive in what it allows you to do uh anytime you want to learn more by the way you can come in here and drill down on the license link so you will find the core is available here uh this is a c project I think we have yeah so 93.8% of this is C++ and 3.5% is C and 1.5% is CP so this is pretty much a C++ project if you are curious uh it is broken into the three categories so you have the core which is the um the API of the SDK itself and then you also have the implementation so the uh fod plugin the unity plugin the Unreal Engine plugin are all here as well so if you're wondering where the C code came from almost guaranteed that it was here in the unity plug-in section so uh the whole fat the entire project has been implemented as open source under the Apache 2.0 license now if you're wondering to yourself okay who exactly uses steam audio well the number one answer is definitely steam uh so you're going to look through this game list and you're going to notice some games that just generally aren't on consoles that much and definitely a lot of games from the steam ecosystem or VR games uh so uh you see here the number one is the uh VR powered halflife Alex uh it sounds like a lot of the uh VR stuff was specifically created for this game on top of that you have portal revolution in here you got uh phasmophobia uh and you got things like bone Works another VR title same with Pavlo VR another obviously VR titles um so you're seeing a lot of VR related things in here as well but you're going to notice Counter-Strike to is in here uh using it and then a ton of other games a lot of these are going to be PC only titles or VR only titles again it kind of comes back that that whole um missing piece of console support seems to be a big deal although some of these titles I think from Steam have had console releases so I'm kind of curious uh if they have their own internal Port of it that works on consoles but i' be curious to see now that this is out there and I'm just going to basically randomly scroll through we're getting into a lot of games I've never actually heard of and as you'll notice there are uh seven pages of them so I believe it's 600 yeah 68 total titles are using this particular thing but once you start getting to the bottom end stuff it's not necessarily uh real stuff anymore but um definitely being used again very PC and VR Centric in its implementation and I do think some of that will come back down to um again that the lack of console uh implementation and the fact that it is now fully open source and companies can potentially add that and integrate it back in does make it more enticing also I could see um someone doing I almost guarantee someone is going to make a um implementation of this for the good game engine uh and probably o3d o3d could actually really use it because its own internal sound engine uh they were using exclusively fod and I know they're trying to move away from that to something that is more open source so this would make a lot of sense for someone like o3d o3d to implement as an example but that is it ladies and gentlemen so the uh steam audio is now open source um it's going to be interesting to see if this leads to like wider adoption and better implementation or if this is vve just washing their hands of it I don't think it is I I'm actually almost surprised that this wasn't already an open source project but let me know what you think of this announcement that's it I will talk to you all later goodbye

Channel: Gamefromscratch

Views: 18,218

Keywords: Steam Audio, Steam, Steam Audio SDK, Steam Audio Open Source, Open Source, 3D Audio, Steam 3D Audio, Halflife, Halflife Alyx, Gamedev, Game Development, Unreal, Unreal Engine, Unity, Unity3d, Unity Engine, C++, gamefromscratch, game audio, FMOD

Id: THr6GyPomeI

Length: 8min 25sec (505 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 21 2024