Valve has open sourced the Steam Audio SDK to provide more control to developers. As explained in the Steam Audio v4.5.2 release notes, this is the first time the source code for the SDK has been made available.
“With this release, our goal is to provide more control to developers, which will lead to better experiences for their users, and hopefully valuable contributions back to the wider community of developers using Steam Audio,” added Valve in a blog post.
“This comes after receiving a lot of valuable feedback and contributions from the community to the plugins already available as open source (Unity, Unreal, and FMOD Studio), and we want to bring those same benefits to the core SDK.”
Valve said the move will allow developers to tailor the SDK based on their specific needs to the benefit of everybody using the technology.
The company will continue releasing Steam Audio bug fixes and features, but acknowledged it often chooses where to focus its efforts based on the requirements of its own internal projects. That might have left some developers waiting on a specific feature or fix that required access to the core Steam Audio SDK. Now, they can take matters into their own hands.
“As an example, we may be working on fixing a performance issue in Steam Audio affecting an internal project, but a partner may need Steam Audio ported to a console platform,” continued Valve. “Making the entire SDK available as open source allows partners to manage the port themselves, and optimize it for their needs, while also allowing them to contribute their changes back if desired.”
The entire Steam Audio codebase has been released under the Apache 2.0 license, enabling developers to use the technology in commercial projects and modify or redistribute it under their own licensing terms without needing to include the source code.
For more information visit the Steam Community blog.