For others who wonder the same: the announcement is from the 19th this month and they licensed it under Apache 2.0.
This is really cool to see! I hope they are testing the waters for releasing the source engine as free software. I remember Gabe Newell stating that they would consider it if people were interested. Doesn’t have to mean anything, but a woman can dream~The biggest hurdle to open sourcing proprietary stuff is often 3rd party code, but we can indeed hope.
I don’t get it. Is it just audio tweaking tools that developers can use, that they have now made open source?
It’s more than just a simple tool with which you can tweak audio. Some features are listed at https://valvesoftware.github.io/steam-audio/. The tool is mainly intended for the development of games (also under Linux).
And yes, it’s basically just about the fact that Steam Audio is now completely open source.
Is this for streaming video game soundtracks or ??
It’s a tool for easily creating realistic audio in games. Basically you can give it a 3d environment, and it can bake sound propagation information so that sounds have realistic reverb and filters. They’ve used it for some of their recent games (most notably Half-Life: Alyx).
God the sound design in Alyx was insanely good. I felt like I was legitimately in City 17 and it was terrifying. It was a really good showcase of what Steam Audio can do.
