3 ms·
Half life did the same, as I recall, as did many other titles. I assume that the CD simply had two "tracks," with the audio CD "partition," if I may call it th
by slau 9y ago
Half life did the same, as I recall, as did many other titles.
I assume that the CD simply had two "tracks," with the audio CD "partition," if I may call it that, being the first. This allowed the game developers to play music during the game using the CD-ROM drive's hardware audio decoding (remember that small molex that went from the drive to the soundcard?) without impacting the game's performance.
These days, it's impressive to think that decoding WAV audio could at one point be a limiting factor for a CPU.
- mrkrabo 9y agoIt will boggle your mind then to know that most games still have their sounds in .wav files, even the music sometimes. It's very rare for a game to have its music compressed, unless the hardware can decode it on the fly (think wma on the xbox, or adpcm on the ps)
- stordoff 9y agoIt's a balancing act thought - shipping audio as WAVs trades performance for disc usage, which can also be an issue (e.g. Titanfall shipping with 35GB of uncompressed audio, which is a pain to download). Also, I know a fair number of games that use Vorbis for music, so not sure I would say it's very rare.
- mrkrabo 9y agoIt is common for music to be compressed, that's true. But sfx, almost always you'll see wavs for those. I don't think cpu usage is a concern anymore, I believe it's about latency. That's why music is compressed. It doesn't matter if music takes 10 ms to start playing, but 10 ms of latency for a pistol shot sound is not acceptable.
- digi_owl 9y agoDunno. I was surprised a few years back when i discovered that one of the Unreal games used OGG compression for its music. This because a friend didn't know about the format but wanted to play them.