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The neat thing about audio is that you can stream it in. Decompressing the most important sounds right at the beginning of the load screen for a scene or before

The neat thing about audio is that you can stream it in. Decompressing the most important sounds right at the beginning of the load screen for a scene or before the last one ends, and then streaming in the rest, would probably work well enough. (and sandbox games have idle zones and low-CPU times, so that's when you can do that.) Players don't expect much from load times anyway. And, no, my time as someone who plays video games is much cheaper than today's SSD storage. I wondered a few days ago why my Windows disk was so full. Video games. Literally 50% of it was video games. If I could save a couple GB on that, I'd be willing to give up a couple more seconds on every level reload.

khedoros1 10y ago
> And, no, my time as someone who plays video games is much cheaper than today's SSD storage. Flash storage is cheaper than it's ever been, and my time means more to me than it ever has. If I could spend a few dollars to have more gigabytes of fast storage, that sounds like a bargain.
- striking 10y ago
  To upgrade my storage capacity, I can... double my SSD space. Which costs $100 (from 256GB to 512GB). That's the equivalent of upgrading from an RX 480 8GB to an nVidia GTX 1070 8GB. I don't know about you, but I have better things to spend money on than storage that could otherwise be slightly further compressed. I'd rather wait a couple seconds longer and burn my money on upgrading the graphical fidelity of my machine. Better yet, I could buy 3-10 games on Steam on sale for that money. Do you still think that's a worthwhile upgrade? Or would you rather wait another 3 extra seconds for every level reload in your game? If you have more money than time, you could always disable compression. My problem is that I can't enable any sort of good compression and I'm broke.
  - khedoros1 10y ago
    We're obviously at different places in life. I'll always go for the larger storage options, for reasons of time and convenience. The cost is reasonable, and I'll get the benefits for the entire time that I have the hardware. 3 seconds extra between levels, plus 20 seconds during the initial engine load, plus 5 seconds closing down the app, etc...Time adds up. If I've got half an hour available to play a game, I want to get in+out fast. My SSD can stream data faster than my CPU can decompress it. Why would I want to handicap the hardware that I paid good money for? On the other hand, 15 years ago, I remember shifting data around to fit on my 20GB hard drive, doing the minimum install and running games from the CD to save disk space. My priorities would've been a lot different, then.
eropple 10y ago
> The neat thing about audio is that you can stream it in You can stream music. You cannot stream effects; the timing of effects is such that you can't afford a frame's delay or people will notice it's off-kilter. And, as it happens, effects are precisely what are loaded uncompressed; almost every game engine's streaming-music feature uses MP3, OGG, or whatever.
- izacus 10y ago
  Sound effects are almost always streamed in - remember, most of modern games are built for consoles as well, which have significantly less memory storage. Hence lack of compression - it lets you stream in audio from a spinning BR directly without spending more CPU power.
  - eropple 10y ago
    That could be the case on consoles, but I've never seen an engine that didn't strongly recommend preloading triggered effects on platforms with a RAM budget.
- striking 10y ago
  Often you can predict what effects your scene will need. Sometimes you can't, and in that case you can't compress. But it's entirely possible that you could decompress some of that audio into RAM beforehand if you're not confident every device can play that audio compressed immediately. Or store back a cache file temporarily. Or just not even worry about the CPU because the vast majority of users are GPU-limited rather than CPU-limited.

khedoros1 10y ago

> And, no, my time as someone who plays video games is much cheaper than today's SSD storage. Flash storage is cheaper than it's ever been, and my time means more to me than it ever has. If I could spend a few dollars to have more gigabytes of fast storage, that sounds like a bargain.

striking 10y ago
To upgrade my storage capacity, I can... double my SSD space. Which costs $100 (from 256GB to 512GB). That's the equivalent of upgrading from an RX 480 8GB to an nVidia GTX 1070 8GB. I don't know about you, but I have better things to spend money on than storage that could otherwise be slightly further compressed. I'd rather wait a couple seconds longer and burn my money on upgrading the graphical fidelity of my machine. Better yet, I could buy 3-10 games on Steam on sale for that money. Do you still think that's a worthwhile upgrade? Or would you rather wait another 3 extra seconds for every level reload in your game? If you have more money than time, you could always disable compression. My problem is that I can't enable any sort of good compression and I'm broke.
- khedoros1 10y ago
  We're obviously at different places in life. I'll always go for the larger storage options, for reasons of time and convenience. The cost is reasonable, and I'll get the benefits for the entire time that I have the hardware. 3 seconds extra between levels, plus 20 seconds during the initial engine load, plus 5 seconds closing down the app, etc...Time adds up. If I've got half an hour available to play a game, I want to get in+out fast. My SSD can stream data faster than my CPU can decompress it. Why would I want to handicap the hardware that I paid good money for? On the other hand, 15 years ago, I remember shifting data around to fit on my 20GB hard drive, doing the minimum install and running games from the CD to save disk space. My priorities would've been a lot different, then.

eropple 10y ago

> The neat thing about audio is that you can stream it in You can stream music. You cannot stream effects; the timing of effects is such that you can't afford a frame's delay or people will notice it's off-kilter. And, as it happens, effects are precisely what are loaded uncompressed; almost every game engine's streaming-music feature uses MP3, OGG, or whatever.

izacus 10y ago
Sound effects are almost always streamed in - remember, most of modern games are built for consoles as well, which have significantly less memory storage. Hence lack of compression - it lets you stream in audio from a spinning BR directly without spending more CPU power.
- eropple 10y ago
  That could be the case on consoles, but I've never seen an engine that didn't strongly recommend preloading triggered effects on platforms with a RAM budget.
striking 10y ago
Often you can predict what effects your scene will need. Sometimes you can't, and in that case you can't compress. But it's entirely possible that you could decompress some of that audio into RAM beforehand if you're not confident every device can play that audio compressed immediately. Or store back a cache file temporarily. Or just not even worry about the CPU because the vast majority of users are GPU-limited rather than CPU-limited.