FMOD Migration

FMOD Audio Migration Summary

What is FMOD and Unity Audio? When you're making a game, you're going to want music, sound effects, and maybe voices—but you don't want to code all the complicated audio manipulation like volume changes, seamless music looping, or 3D sound spatialization from scratch.

FMOD is a third-party audio control plugin that can be integrated into your game engine to give users, including those with little or no programming experience, advanced control over audio. In this case, our audio engineer @1crystalash and I are both learning how to work with it.

In short:

• Game Developer: "When the player jumps, play a sound."
• FMOD: "Got it—I'll pick one of your jump sounds, randomize the pitch, and play it with some effects to make it feel immersive."

FMOD makes programming sound in games easier, more flexible, and more dynamic without needing to write a ton of custom audio code.

Why are we migrating? Currently, both Unity Audio and FMOD Audio are running side-by-side. This causes:

• Performance issues
• Audio distortion/corruption, especially on browsers that don't allow multithreading or on CPUs with low processing power

How will we do it? We'll be migrating every sound currently implemented in Unity over to FMOD. This will involve:

1. Rebuilding each sound in FMOD Studio
2. Re-integrating those sounds in Unity using FMOD's event system

Fortunately, the current sound library isn't very large, so this task is manageable.

When will it be done? The FMOD migration is scheduled for completion around July 16, and will be included in the v1.4.0 major release.