[HN Gopher] Valve Makes All Steam Audio SDK Source Code Availabl...
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Valve Makes All Steam Audio SDK Source Code Available Under Apache
2.0 License
Author : LinuxBender
Score : 197 points
Date : 2024-02-20 16:29 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.phoronix.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.phoronix.com)
| ramesh31 wrote:
| Seems like they're giving up (on HMD hardware). Index will
| probably be the last headset Valve makes. It was a fun idea. But
| with the Vision Pro showing that even Apple can't make the
| "smartphone strapped to your face" version of VR work, it's
| becoming pretty obvious that it's a technological dead end for
| anyone but niche gamers.
| cma wrote:
| Vision pro is laptop chips and silicon backplane microdisplays,
| a bit of a move away from the smartphone on your face approach
| components wise, though I'm sure some of the sensors may be
| shared.
| BudaDude wrote:
| Thats a pretty hot take.
|
| It's way too early to say the Vision Pro is a flop. Remember,
| the first Apple Watch received mixed reviews. Yet, after
| several updates and feature additions, it became one of the
| most, if not the most, popular wearables.
|
| History often repeats itself with Apple products initially
| deemed failures. To illustrate, consider the initial reception
| of the iPod, as discussed in this link:
|
| https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/apples-new-thing-ipod.5...
|
| One more thing, Valve hasn't exited the hardware market. The
| Steam Deck is a clear indication of their ongoing commitment.
| jwells89 wrote:
| Yeah Vision Pro strikes me as typical Apple first gen more
| than anything. It might in reality be a flop, but I'd wait a
| few hardware generations before declaring as such with any
| level of certainty.
| smoldesu wrote:
| > History often repeats itself with Apple products initially
| deemed failures.
|
| Maybe, but that never saved the Lisa, the Newton or the
| Butterfly keyboard. Sometimes, Apple takes a big risk that's
| far too early, expensive or simply doesn't pay off.
|
| I don't think it's a particularly hot take to say that VR/AR
| content creation has been stagnant for a decade. Valve
| couldn't save it by moving mountains, Meta _barely_ made it
| mass-marketable with a barebones MVP, and Apple is...
| gentrifying the higher-end. It 's not so much an insult
| towards Apple as it is to the field and it's market fit.
| _Nobody_ has had an "iPhone moment" yet, not even Apple.
| HeWhoLurksLate wrote:
| In the case of the butterfly keyboard, market fit is a
| _very_ different thing from engineering failure
| taeric wrote:
| Vision Pro is going to be an interesting watch. I doubt it is
| bad gear, but it is hard to really understand the market
| Apple is chasing. In particular, the consumer VR market is
| dominated by gamers to an absurd degree. Trying to pull
| casuals into it feels way too strained. Similarly,
| professional use doesn't seem to be a strong value add,
| either. Will be interesting to see where things land.
| J_Shelby_J wrote:
| Vision Pro is to meta quest 3 what Starbucks is to local
| coffee shops.
|
| Meaning, quest 3 is amazing, and Vision Pro is the best
| thing to happen to AR.
|
| I hope steam doesn't pull out. Zuck can preach about
| openness but the platform is still antagonistic to pc
| users.
| taeric wrote:
| I'm still rather bullish against AR. The passthrough of
| the PSVR2 is nice, to get your controllers in hand and
| room setup. Otherwise, I don't see the value add, just
| yet. Heck, the best games make use of the headphones so
| well that I feel like I'm already in another room.
| TravelPiglet wrote:
| Apple Watch is a flop. It's not delivered on anything other
| than being a good fitness tracker.
| prewett wrote:
| I would dearly love to have a flop like the Apple Watch...
| If a product with tens of billions in yearly revenue is a
| flop, well, sign me up!
| smoldesu wrote:
| At this point, Apple could release a line of $99 drink
| cozies and sell out 5 minutes after they announce it. The
| fact that people buy what Apple sells isn't really an
| indication of whether the product is good or not.
| TillE wrote:
| It's been selling well for almost 9 years now! You can
| call it many things, but it is clearly not a "flop".
| smoldesu wrote:
| I didn't call it a "flop", I said it's status as a flop
| doesn't correlate to how good a product is. The Butterfly
| Keyboard never flopped, but it also never got a
| legitimate competitor. People bought them because they
| were forced to, same as they were with Airpods and
| arguably the Apple Watch.
|
| I feel the same way about a lot of Apple products. The
| Magic Trackpad would sell out instantly if it got a new
| model with USB-C - but Apple knows they can ship more
| Lightning cables if they avoid it. It's part of the
| sinister math that goes into making you and I rely on
| Apple's constant... _ahem_ , _Innovation_.
| zlsa wrote:
| The Magic Trackpad comes with a USB-C (computer) to
| Lightning (Magic Trackpad) cable.
|
| https://www.apple.com/shop/product/MK2D3AM/A/magic-
| trackpad-...
|
| (I agree with you, for what it's worth - Apple is weirdly
| slow to update some of their products; AirPods Max stand
| out here as missing USB-C and the lossless audio of
| AirPods Pro.)
| FirmwareBurner wrote:
| _> If a product with tens of billions in yearly revenue
| is a flop, well, sign me up!_
|
| Windows 11 also sold incredibly well yet I still consider
| it a flop.
| WheatMillington wrote:
| Over 50 million units sold and the most popular wearable
| device ever made. Yeah, total flop.
| iamthepieman wrote:
| I take it you mean flop differently than a successful
| product from a business and profit perspective. Like a
| comedian can flop around on stage in a hilarious bit of
| slapstick humor which you might call a successful flop. But
| the two hour comedy special the slapstick is part of might
| be panned by critics and audiences and that would be a flop
| of an entirely different sort.
| dr_kretyn wrote:
| I'm clearly just a casual passer-by. Any chance you could
| elaborate the connection between opening an audio SDK and
| giving up on hardware? To me that feels like a big leap.
| webkike wrote:
| Giving up on hardware? The steam deck OLED was released last
| November
| taeric wrote:
| With how well the steam deck was received, I'd expect them to
| lean more into it? Is it better in press than it was in actual
| sales?
|
| And I know I have tentative plans for the next VR thing they
| try. I have the PSVR2 and it is really good at the games it is
| for. To the point that I'd expect next generation efforts to be
| amazing.
| 0cf8612b2e1e wrote:
| The problem is that Valve's profit margin on the store is
| very healthy. Low production runs of a hardware device are
| just not making them a lot of money comparatively.
| taeric wrote:
| Fair. That said, I get the impression they still do a lot
| because they want to. Not necessarily because they have to.
| ffsm8 wrote:
| Valve is a privately held company. It's not forced to
| maximize quarterly returns for shareholders, it just does
| whatever Gabe wants.
| pennomi wrote:
| That being said, Steam Deck probably sells more games than,
| for example, the Steam Controller did. Probably sells more
| games than their VR headset did too.
| ranger207 wrote:
| I have a copy of every piece of Valve hardware except for a
| Steam Machine, and if there's anything that that's taught me,
| it's that Valve cannot make hardware v2 in anything. I snapped
| up the transparent case OLED Steam Deck immediately because I
| do not expect there to be a Steam Deck 2
| mtsr wrote:
| I've understood it as: Valve isn't really in the hardware or
| console business. They release these fairly open devices in
| the hopes they get copied by others. Either to create a new
| market for Steam or to ensure an upcoming market has at least
| some Steam compatible devices.
| themaninthedark wrote:
| Valve knows how to count to 2, it just takes a long time. Now
| I would never expect a v3 of anything...
| hgs3 wrote:
| > it's becoming pretty obvious that it's a technological dead
| end for anyone but niche gamers.
|
| Even if that's the case, it's OK to have a niche product.
| Gaming is a multi-billion dollar industry so the market is
| worth pursuing.
| jsheard wrote:
| This is the Impulsonic middleware they acquired back in 2017.
| They quickly made it free in binary form, but third party uptake
| seems to have been practically non-existent, probably in large
| part because they only made it available on PC and Android but
| not any of the consoles or iOS. They also promised Wwise
| integration but that never materialized and doesn't appear to be
| anywhere in the open source release.
| sunshowers wrote:
| Interestingly, the repo's readme says it works on
| Win/Mac/Linux, Android and iOS. Wonder if they had builds going
| but never released them to others.
|
| https://github.com/ValveSoftware/steam-audio
| jsheard wrote:
| It always supported Win/Mac/Linux (that's what I meant by PC)
| but iOS seems to have landed on GitHub a couple of months
| ago, and they neglected to update the website.
|
| https://github.com/ValveSoftware/steam-
| audio/commit/b86a4284...
|
| Still no consoles or Wwise out of the box, but I suppose
| developers now have the option to do that plumbing themselves
| if they think it's worth it.
| spondyl wrote:
| > It always supported Win/Mac/Linux (that's what I meant by
| PC)
|
| I would guess that for a lot of people, PC is read as
| "Windows". Probably in part due to the marketing campaigns
| of the mid-2000s that would compare "PC vs Mac" which is of
| course dumb but even in reading that myself, my brain
| swapped out PC for Windows
| taeric wrote:
| From Valve, specifically, they have gone a long way to
| making it so that PC reads as "Steam." Has some
| shortcomings, I think, but largely works.
|
| Does leave Mac out a bit. Such that I think you have a
| point. Not sure how much the market for this software
| makes that distinction, though.
| cassianoleal wrote:
| A lot of games on Steam work natively on mac. With the
| game porting toolkit, it's likely that the vast majority
| of them work - though maybe not all too well.
| bugbuddy wrote:
| I bet they did not release the source code immediately because
| they wanted to make sure there was no patent infringement
| hiding anywhere in it.
| jorvi wrote:
| I wish they developed this further as a cross-platform competitor
| to Windows Sonic / Dolby Headphones / DTS Unbound.
|
| It's quite nice to got quasi-surround from a 5/7.1 source with
| just some headphones and HRTF magic, and its one of the biggest
| things I miss with gaming on Linux.
| viraptor wrote:
| You can enable that manually as long as the app exposes enough
| outputs. https://kaeru.my/notes/pipewire-surround-headphones
| justin66 wrote:
| A couple of impressions from someone whose knowledge of this is
| limited entirely to the project landing page:
|
| https://valvesoftware.github.io/steam-audio/
|
| First, one of the little screenshots references Sansar, so it
| must be good!
|
| Second, I sense that whatever software is responsible for the
| screenshot in the background would flunk an Old Man Murray Start
| to Crate test:
|
| https://www.oldmanmurray.com/features/39.html
| tapoxi wrote:
| Since they hired Erik and Chet it's been an inside joke at
| Valve to fail the crate test as soon as possible.
|
| (Erik left and returned, Chet has a YouTube channel now.)
| justin66 wrote:
| Awesome.
| dark__paladin wrote:
| Question from someone who is pretty far separated from game dev:
| Is this now an open source alternative to fmod and wwise?
| jsheard wrote:
| Steam Audio is only concerned with spatial audio rendering,
| which is a subset of what Fmod and Wwise do.
|
| Any time you hear dynamically mixed music in a game, for
| example, that was probably arranged using Fmod or Wwise.
| on_the_train wrote:
| What in particular feature enables or facilitates dynamic
| music? Is that not just a different music file?
| jsheard wrote:
| They provide the editing tools for a musician to build up
| the dynamic composition and state machine that drives it,
| plus the runtime component which executes all that inside
| the game.
|
| It's basically a whole DAW specialized for games:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7A1HMOsD2eU
| on_the_train wrote:
| I see, thanks
| henriquecm8 wrote:
| I am starting to learn gamedev, in specific I would like to make
| a stealth game.
|
| Ever since I first read about steam audio, I've wondered if it
| would be possible to use the sound propagation to determine if a
| npc has heard a sound. There are probably better ways to do this.
| And not always the most realistic approach is the best approach.
|
| But I've always found that some games are very inconsistent about
| how npcs hear you. Sometimes you are in a closed room and make
| very little sound, and they hear you from outside, other times
| you are in an open place and they don't hear anything. It seems
| like some games only check the distance to sound origin, without
| taking occlusion/attenuation into consideration.
| sclangdon wrote:
| Most games don't have the time budget for that. Visuals take
| precedence, and it's not easy to get to 60fps as it is,
| especially if you're doing a lot of other processing.
|
| And stealth games especially will probably rely a lot on
| shadows and other visual things, which make rendering more
| expensive.
| henriquecm8 wrote:
| That's true, I just like when stealth games go beyond just
| player visibility, some of my inspirations do that:
|
| - Thief Gold, sound was important, each surface would make a
| certain amount of noise, and you could damp the noise by
| covering the ground in moss, or reduce it by walking slower.
|
| - Splinter Cell Chaos Theory: which had a sound-meter with 2
| indicators, one for the noise you are making and the
| background noise. I specially like this system because of how
| it allows you to make much more well-informed decisions.
|
| - Sniper Elite: you can cover the sound of your rifle with
| loud background noise in some maps, they are regular, and
| they have cue moments before the loudest part.
| jvanderbot wrote:
| Not PvE, but Hunt Showdowns use of sound is worth
| mentioning. Like you mentioned, every surface has a sound
| and level, animals react to your sight and sound and will
| make their own noises, weather and env effects cover or
| uncover sounds, you can use items or gunfire or anything
| else to decoy. Really great. All a pvp game so you're
| trying to sneak up on actual people
| kevinh wrote:
| I'm not sure if anything has it built in, but Thief: The Dark
| Project (in 1998) had sound propagation. There's some
| discussion about it here:
| https://www.ttlg.com/forums/showthread.php?t=151206. I wonder
| if you could query Unity's navmesh to calculate the distance,
| but that wouldn't work with, say, someone on the second floor
| hearing someone outside through the window.
| lytedev wrote:
| Wouldn't you have an alternate navmesh for sounds with the
| appropriate "cost" heuristics based on how well sounds
| propagates through the mesh's material and across media?
| jjmarr wrote:
| This sounds like a great use of hardware accelerated
| raytracing. The problem itself is very similar. Sound
| attenuation can be modelled as transparency.
| arafalov wrote:
| I am - very slowly - learning Unreal and they do seem to have
| such functionality. E.g.
| https://dev.epicgames.com/community/learning/tutorials/5Ed/u...
|
| Since they have a full sound engine built-in as well, I suspect
| they deal with attenuation, et al correctly.
| ssfrr wrote:
| What you probably want is to place a virtual listener/receiver
| where the NPC is, so the system would use the same rendering
| that it does for the player. Then you put an envelope detector
| on the signal and you have an approximation of how much sound
| is reaching that NPC.
|
| You could also render the player sound separately from
| environmental sounds. So the NPC only hears the player if their
| sound exceeds the environmental noise.
|
| You could get real fancy and do some directional processing on
| the NPC so they'll go in the apparent direction.
|
| It's probably overkill though. You could probably do a much
| cheaper approximation and it would feel about the same to the
| player. It would be fun to test it out and see though!
| duped wrote:
| I'm no expert but one issue is that "correct" sound propagation
| needs to handle frequency dependent refraction (why sound is
| muffled coming from the other room, in additional to leakage
| through the wall).
|
| One total hack I would imagine would work alright is to render
| the scene twice, once displayed to the player and the other
| where the only light sources are the player's sound and
| walls/windows/etc just have some opacity changed. If the light
| around the enemy is above a threshold the player is detected.
| You wouldn't need to render the whole scene, just the area
| immediately around the player, and avoid doing it if there are
| no enemies.
|
| Another hack that would be more involved would be to compute a
| kind of graph for the whole level and when a player makes
| noise, you propagate it through the graph using precomputed
| weights. You'd have to handcraft a graph for every level. But I
| could imagine this getting the best results in terms of
| performance and gameplay, since you could tune it per scene.
| jestarray wrote:
| How does this compare to fmod?
| diimdeep wrote:
| That's good, since similar project from [1] Google as often
| happens is dead.
|
| [1] https://github.com/resonance-audio/resonance-audio
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