Seems like you have it all figured out, that is by seperating the actual implementation from the engine you can ship the engine without FMOD. If the users then want to use it with FMOD then they just need to license and link with the FMOD-libs/dlls. It might also be nice to do a fallback solution that fallbacks on lets say XACT (if you are wrapping the FMOD designer API) or XAudio (for FMOD ex). It won’t be as powerfull as with FMOD but it will do the basic stuff.

So that means I can’t ship Fmod implementation even if it is in dll form and they have no source code access to the Fmod source code. Well that sucks, Their is no reason I am going to create a fmod implementation they they are going to have to pay you money to sell game they made with a engine they paid from us.

That’s right. Just like you expect to be paid for every game that uses your game engine, it’s reasonable for Firelight to expect to be paid for every game that uses their sound engine.

You’ll find that almost all middleware operates under the exact same terms, unless you are a very big player indeed (like Epic who inked a deal with Agiea to include PhysX with every license of the Unreal 3 engine).

First of all, I’m not working at firelight so I’m not really the person to answer these questions. Secondly, if you don’t like to wrap up FMOD which shouldn’t be all that timeconsuming then I guess the alternative is to write your own sound engine and to come up with something similar to FMODex you would have to invest ALOT of time so I really don’t see what you are complaining about. If you’re only supporting microsoft platforms then you could use XACT instead and get it all for free but you would loose some functionallity by doing that since XACT isn’t close to as complex as FMODex.

No you cannot resell fmod, so you have to buy a product license for every sale that you make.

If you gave your engine away for free, then you could do it, but if the user of your engine decided to sell a game using it, they would have to license fmod.

What if we don’t give me access to the sourc code, we give them access to the engine in a way of library files.

If you wrap up FMOD you could seperate the actual FMOD-code from your engine. Not only would it mean that you could ship your engine without having to license FMOD but also the code gets more modular which is nice.

What exactly do you mean by that?

Think about how our engine is going to be, let me know if this works. Basically our engine is going to consist to the normal things(Rendering Engine, Sound Engine, Physics Engine, etc…). Now each one of these parts can have different implemenations(for instance the Graphics Engine can use D3D9 or D3D10 or OpenGL). Basically my idea, and I am not expert and or should if this is possible, that we will have 1 interface into the rendering engine and they will be able to choice which implementation of the rendering engine they want to us(D3D9, D3D10, OpenGL). This goes teh smae for every interface including the sound, even if it onyl has 1 implemenation. This way we can give the use access to out interface code and then give them access to the implemenation(like the Fmodex implemenation) threough libraries or dll file, no access to the code. Woudl that allow poeple to develop as many games with that engine and not have to pay you for each game since the Engine is the product that has the Fmodex code and the game is using the engine to sound it sound but not accessing the Fmodex code?