Firelight Releases FMOD Ex Audio Engine

Firelight has announced its newest offering: FMOD Ex, a next generation audio engine with advanced features and capabilities. FMOD has been used in games including World of Warcraft and Far Cry, and FMOD Ex is a new API, with extensive cross platform support, expandability, flexibility, and future hardware in mind. FMOD Ex comes with the new "FMOD Designer" sound designer tool and data driven programmers API. This new tool, available for Windows and Macintosh platforms, allows sound designers to create all game content with one interface. With this tool the events they create can be from simple randomized sound playback, to multi-layer, filtered and envelope controlled audio models. When it comes time to implement the audio into the game, it is triggered and updated with simple start event and update parameter commands, with parameters defined by the sound designer. All media types, from streams, samples, midi files and mods are now controlled through a simple Sound class. Firelight Technologies are fully committed to all future platforms, and FMOD Ex now supports 9 platforms, including Xbox 360 and PSP. The company is also seeking to add Linux AMD64 bit support, and PlayStation 3 support. FMOD Ex has been written from the ground up using 10 years of experience from FMOD and user feedback. A trial edition is available from the downloads section of the website, and a full list of the additions and features has also been posted.