(credit: Valve Software)
Every hopeful gaming thread on the Internet has at least one person making this kind of guess: Valve Software will one day drop its next major project as a previously unannounced, out-of-nowhere surprise for immediate download. And it’ll do it for free, just for funsies.
Valve did exactly that on Wednesday. The release even kinda-sorta has a “3” in the title, but it’s pretty much the polar opposite of what you might expect: a massive, multi-functional middleware solution for more realistic and efficiently rendered 3D audio.
What’s more, this toolkit—dubbed Steam Audio—doesn’t even require its namesake digital delivery service to function. Developers can head to github right now and grab the tools, either as a Unity plugin or a C API, should developers wish to integrate it into their own engines. (Official support for Unreal Engine 4, FMOD, and Wwise has been announced but is not yet available for download.)
Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments
Source: Ars Technica – Valve surprise-announces middleware 3D sound toolkit, gives it away