Audio Plugins in Unity

As I work my way through the course, the entire career path, of which I had no idea when I started this journey, of audio plugins for Unity continues to occupy a lot of my time. I am about as confused as I ever was.

Little to no documentation: as is so often the case, especially given Google’s abandonment of the information game, details about how (or even IF) any of this works are very thin. Only through forum posts on mostly unrelated topics was I able to even get an install going. I still have no idea if there really is a responsive realtime set of plugins out there to benchmark against. I don’t know if the stickiness I experience with my plugs is just the nature of the beast, or something I need to optimize. I do know, as I watch experienced unity developers, that the poor response, bugs and slow controls are par for the course, so I’m a bit scared that even at 100% these plugins would be really too slow for any sane audio engineer inside Unity (could all be a triple oxymoron).

And now I am introduced to the concept of middleware, some software meant to bridge the gap between Unity’s audio system and a proper DAW, I guess. According to Wikipedia, “Middleware for games is a piece of software that is integrated into a game engine to handle some specialized aspect it, such as physics, graphics or networking.” I had to reboot my eyes after seeing the price for this stuff. GREAT work if you can get it I guess!

The futility of google searches

So far there seem to be two bits of middleware that could be relevant to me. FMOD and Wwise. I can’t quite tell if either truly supports VST or some other standard format, but I did get an email back from Wwise about 3rd party plugins. They will either send you an SDK so you can work this out yourself, or, for a percentage, will let you sell in their marketplace. Looks good to me actually! Over the next few months, I will be attempting to make Wwise plugins. Still waiting for an email back from the FMOD guys.