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FMOD supports Javascript customization

You can file this under “I’m not sure how I didn’t know this exists.”

Last week I received news of a potential opportunity where audio middleware is going to be required.  However, the project is going to need some flexibility so custom scripting is a must.

I’ve been beating the drum about how fantastic I think it is that Wwise is going big on a custom scripting API.  What I didn’t know is that apparently FMOD has supported custom Javascript since Studio version 1.07 — check out this press release from two years ago.

Unfortunately even with the press release, I had to hunt pretty hard to get Google to bring me up any reference of Javascript usage in FMOD.  But since that’s the case, I did want to point out some more information about it for you, in case you’re interested.

The only scripting reference/API (that I’ve found or been pointed to) is on pages 223-239 of the FMOD Studio User manual.

In case you don’t know how to find that, you need to download FMOD Studio first and then go to Help > User Manual.  At first glance you should be super excited – as it looks like there’s a ton of available properties to affect.  The generous people over at Firelight also provide some example scripts for you too.

But it has gotten fairly frustrating for me fairly quickly after this point.  I say this with the caveat that I’m not the most well-versed in Javascript, so others may be able to easily pull out information I can’t.  Sadly I haven’t found an available list of objects you can actually affect.  The manual does a great job of explaining the relationships of different objects to each other, but doesn’t actually spell out what those things are.

Thankfully though, I have a good friend who has done a good bit of heavy lifting with FMOD scripting already (again, I have no idea how I didn’t know this…).  So I’m planning to put together a few resources that I’ll share in later posts in case you want to dig deeper into your own FMOD scripting.

I hope this opens up a whole new world of possibilities for you!  I’m super excited to break into making custom tools for all of these different platforms and people’s needs.

As always – any questions, ideas, or help you’re looking for just ping me@adamtcroft.com


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