Yesterday I teased an upcoming announcement related to the game I've been developing. Today, I'm pleased to announce the official release of Resonate, an audio manager for Godot.
Godot itself provides a simple and functional audio engine, but leaves the details of how it works up to the user. As we built Haunted, we quickly hit the point where simply triggering audio files was insufficient; we needed a more robust audio management solution. Obviously, we initially considered existing audio engines like FMOD and Wwise, but the licensing fees made those options less appealing. There are additionally many options for managing audio with the built-in audio engine, but most were heavily tailored towards 2D games, and our game is 3D. I did find one likely candidate, though: a nifty addon by a team called Huge Menace named Resonate. It seemed to support everything we needed, but there was one problem: it was deprecated after Godot 4.2.
The top of the Resonate git repository included a warning:
Resonate has been deprecated. — No further development will occur. It's still compatible with Godot 4.0-4.2, but higher versions are untested. If you would like to take over its development, please reach out via our Discord server.
So, I reached out to the developers on Discord. We had a nice chat about goals, experience, and open-source software, and they agreed to let us take over development of the addon.
Since that initial discussion, we have updated Resonate for Godot 4.3 and 4.4 and performed a cleanup of the repository. Since Haunted is currently built in 4.4, we considered that an appropriate point at which to release and announce our update. Godot 4.5 users don't need to fret, though; despite the breaking changes in Godot 4.5, we expect to have an updated version of Resonate ready for use within a few days.
In an effort to provide a smooth transition from the Huge Menace release of Resonate to our own, we have ensured that our changes thus far will have no impact on existing users of the addon. While we intend to expand on Resonate in the future, we will always do so with our existing users in mind, and updates should be as painless as possible.
Resonate is open-source, and that will never change. It is hosted on GitLab, and we encourage users to fork it, extend it, and make it their own. If you have an improvement or bug fix, please let us know! Ready to get started? Visit the Resonate wiki and start improving your Godot audio workflow today!