Firelight recently released a new stable
FMOD Ex branch (v4.14) which inevitably breaks compatibility with my
FMOD Ex classes for REALbasic. The only issue I can see this time around is a potential crash when trying to read
FMEx.OutputsAvailable on Windows while using raw speaker mode and ASIO output - in other words, most users won't even notice. The fix is simple; just update these private constants to the values noted below:
FMEx.kAdvancedSettingsSize = 66
FMEx.kMinimumVersion = &h00041400
The next revision will contain these fixes but I didn't think this warranted a full release at this time. Please let me know if you run into any other problems with the FMOD Ex 4.14.xx releases.
In other REALbasic related news, I've decided to pass the torch in regards to maintenance of my PNG Utilities and ZZip Utilities plugins. Both of these will require updates in the coming months for better compatibility with new REALbasic and Mac OS X releases, but I haven't actually used these plugins in my own projects for years so the motivation to keep them updated simply isn't there. I've already found a company willing and capable of taking these on, and you can be assured they will remain free and open source. Expect more details and possibly some preliminary updates closer to the end of May.
If you've noticed a trend away from REALbasic plugins here on Chaotic Box you're not imagining things. Fact is, there are fewer and fewer reasons where plugins make more sense than native code/declares nowadays, and there are more and more reasons to avoid plugins. I'll admit the new Rb plugin SDK is now more sensible and homogenized, but much of the lower-level functionality has been deprecated in favour of "dynamic access" APIs, which require more code, and are often much slower. I still rely on plugins when performing certain math operations on large sets of vectors, and for loading pixel data straight to raw memory buffers, but other than those and perhaps a few other situations (like wrapping C++ libraries) there's little reason to touch the plugin SDK.
