Valve Makes All Steam Audio SDK Source Code Available Under Apache 2.0 License

Michael Larabel reports via Phoronix: With Valve's release today of the Steam Audio SDK 4.5.2 they have made the software development kit fully open-source under an Apache 2.0 license. Steam Audio 4.5.2 may not sound exciting in the context of a version number but as described in the release announcement is now "the first open source release of the Steam Audio SDK source code." The rest of this work in this Steam Audio SDK release amounts to bug fixes and other standard changes.

In a SteamCommunity.com announcement posted today entitled "Steam Audio Open Source Release," it notes: "The entire Steam Audio codebase, including both the SDK and all plugins, is now released under the Apache 2.0 license. This allows developers to use Steam Audio in commercial products, and to modify or redistribute it under their own licensing terms without having to include source code. We welcome contributions from developers who would like to fix bugs or add features to Steam Audio." You can learn more about Steam Audio via the project site.

Awesome tool

[Kiddo 9000]

Steam Audio is a super powerful audio API, it's really nice that it is finally fully open-source for all game devs. Half-Life Alyx's sound design is a great demo of what Steam Audio is capible of in the right hands.

Re:

[tlhIngan]

One of the big things is it's one of the few engines that handle surround sound right there - it's always nice in a Source application because I could select 5.1 audio.

There aren't many games that natively support surround sound.

Something to add to my ever-growing list of C libs

[devious_malcontent]

I remember, when I was a young lad thinking I could change the world, and I went on the journey to develop my own game engine, surprisingly one of the hardest parts was finding a good sound component/engine. - I'm thinking of the mind set I had 10\15 years ago, there was [library that had a name that sounded like 'audio tutorial' but I cannot for the life of me find it], OpenAL and fmod, and that was it.

Proprietary audio libraries are also the reason why we ended up getting the Linux port of doom when th

Re:

[devious_malcontent]

[library that had a name that sounded like 'audio tutorial' but I cannot for the life of me find it],

Audiere!

Sound mixing in the early 90s

[DrYak]

I remember, when I was a young lad thinking I could change the world, and I went on the journey to develop my own game engine, surprisingly one of the hardest parts was finding a good sound component/engine. - I'm thinking of the mind set I had 10\15 years ago

Funnily, that part was a bit easier earlier in the 90s, specially when making simple 2D games, as there weren't that many fancy effects.

A "sound engine(*)" was mostly mixing multiple samples (in software, unless you were lucky to have a Gravis, or later an AWE) and playing them over the soundcard.
Which by then mostly meant either a Sound Blaster-family card or something at least compatible with the SBPro, so with a relatively narrow number of hardware interfaces to support.
(And throw in support for digital

Re:

[packrat0x]

Will these [slackbuilds.org] (eawpats) help?

Nice !

[Tom]

I found Unity's sound handling pretty simple, and found Steam Audio by pure chance, and it essentially is everything that you'd think would be built into an engine. But for some reason, engines these days do all kinds of crazy and impressive things with graphics, and very little with sound.

I'm hoping that open-sourcing it will make it more popular and improve it even further.

Features

[dintech]

Examples of what it can be used for are here: https://valvesoftware.github.i... [github.io]

Wonder why

[DarkRookie2]

Because when I think Valve, I don't not think incredible sound design.