Any Pitfalls Using Bass.dll For Games?

[dxgame]

I'm currently evaluating Bass.dll (http://un4seen.com) and everything is working very well. Mods, multi channel sound fx, etc, etc. It actually went very smooth converting over to the Bass engine. I asked on their forum if anyone had any tips, pros, cons, about using Bass in a shareware game and the author (Ian?) said not many coders use Bass for games. This has me concerned because I would assume if Bass was good enough, alot of indy coders would use it. The unlimited shareware license is only about $130.00 so I doubt that's the reason for low number of game coders using bass?

So, does anyone know of any pitfalls about using Bass? Compatibility problems, performance issues, etc? Even on an old 400mhz, my game with mods, multi channel fx, is still cranking over 70fps so I'm hoping there is no gotchas with this library. :confused:

[TheMysteriousStranger]

There is one endorsement that will top all others....

Popcap use it for their games.

I also use it, but I'm small-time, so that probably doesn't mean much. Personally I think it's great. I originally started out using FMOD, but then switched to bass, partly because the license options are much better, and partly because I love the API.

I haven't found any pitfalls as such. The only issue I had was that my system32 folder had an older version of the dll in it, and this older version had trouble with jumping to a specific location in mod music files. Unfotunately, because it was in my system folder, it was trumping the one in the game folder, and it took me ages to find the problem. Other than that though, the bass library seems excellent and flawless. You can see on the forums that the only issues seem to be with advanced stuff like CD decoding and hardware spatial effects. Even then, it's quite often a case of the dev not knowing enough rather than the library being unable to do it.

[dxgame]

Hi TheMysteriousStranger, that's a pretty good endorsement! I visited their dev forum and several users were trying to get other audio libraries to work in the popcap framework, but they all pretty much came back to bass. So this really helps boost my confidence in using Bass. Thanks!

[revve]

I've noticed most indies uses either OpenAL (free) or FMod for their games, because it's cross platform. Last time I checked, BASS was Windows only - meaning that as soon as you decide to port your game, you need to rewrite the sound code from scratch using another library.

[PeterM]

The Bass site says it's for OS X too now. No linux though AFAIK.

[Davaris]

Popcap use it for their games.


I converted my game to use the PopCap FrameWork recently and tried to use FMod with it (as I had used FMod in the past). Unfortunately FMod wouldn't work with the PopCap Framework and I had to abandon it and use Bass. Similar problems were experienced by other people using the PopCap framework.