4 ms·

I heard that the main issue with decompressed assets was audio, not video (granted, video is image and audio so one is a strict superset of the other). One game

I heard that the main issue with decompressed assets was audio, not video (granted, video is image and audio so one is a strict superset of the other). One game - Titanfall or a CoD game, IIRC - had something like 20 GB of uncompressed audio in a 35GB installation footprint. Rationale was saving CPU cycles. Meanwhile here I am with a sound card in my desktop PC for no real reason anymore :\

ratww 6y ago
That doesn't really compute. Audio decompression is pretty light on CPUs these days. It takes about half a second in a single core to decompress a 4 min MP3 to WAV in my 2012 MB Air, including writing to disk. In a gaming machine it will be way less. If anything, the audio could be decompressed and cached on demand, when loading levels, or even during installation. Also sound cards do not participate on the decompression process. It's been CPU from the start, baring rare exceptions. Sound cards just receive raw PCM. There used to be hardware codecs but they're not really common, especially in consumer/gamer-grade soundcards.
- dharmab 6y ago
  Keep in mind that Titanfall had to ship on the Xbox 360 and PS3.
  - ratww 6y ago
    Interestingly, those two consoles had dedicated hardware decoders. It doesn't make any sense to have uncompressed audio for them.
    - gruez 6y ago
      If it's any similar to the hardware decoders on iPhones, they're probably limited to n streams. That might be good for playing some background music or ambient sounds, but it gets tricky really quickly when you have multiple sounds playing at once.
      - ratww 6y ago
        Not really: The Xbox has 320 independent decompression channels according to its marketing material, which is kinda powerful. The PS3 had similar tech in its Motion Decoder, but they didn't disclose how powerful it was. And even if it had just a single decoder, there's always the possibility to pre-decode audio. Or just decode the music/film.
  - jorvi 6y ago
    All the console versions shipped with compressed audio due to the anemic hard drive and disk speeds, as well as tiny RAM amount. In general it doesn't make sense to use wavs. Games have been using compressed audio since the late 90s without any significant trouble, and mp3s are aurally transparant at 320kbps.
- klik99 6y ago
  Couple of things to note: MP3 is not appropriate for use in real time due to a variable amount of silence added to the start of the sample intrinsic to the compression. You can sometimes use it for music But if there’s any changes based on game events mp3 is unusable. A lot of work has been put into optimizing mp3 including at os and hardware levels but that’s not usable in games. Commonly it’s some custom spin on vorbis which is Additionally, there can easily be 20-40 sounds playing at once, more if you haven’t optimized yet (which typically happens in the last few months before release). These also need to be preloaded slightly, and once playing stream from disk, so source starvation needs to be handled and the codec needs to not be glitchy if missing some packets. It’s also happening in a system that needs to be real-time and keep each frame timer on the order of milliseconds, though Moore’s law moving to parallelization has helped a lot. You’d be surprised how under powered the consoles are in this regard (caveat: I haven’t developed on the upcoming gen, which is getting better) As for loading and caching on demand, that’s limited by memory, given the sheer amount of samples used in games, it’s just not practical. For specific example in a very well known game, there are over 1600 samples for boxes hitting stuff (impact sounds). What I’m building right now is meant to make generative audio easier and reduce the number of samples needed, so more tools to process sound could make this naive caching approach practical
  - usrusr 6y ago
    > For specific example in a very well known game, there are over 1600 samples for boxes hitting stuff That almost sounds as if it could be worthwhile to synthesize on demand from a very small set of (offset/overlaid) base samples through a deep chain of parameterized FX. With 1600 FX parameter preset tuples as the MVP, bonus points for involving game state context.
    - klik99 6y ago
      That’s literally my startup, I won’t get deep into the reasons why good tools for this don’t exist yet, but if you imagine game development is like regular development but with orders of magnitude more chaos you can understand how difficult it is to build stuff for reuse. After 15 years in the industry, my approach is just the same as yours
moritonal 6y ago
Rumour I heard was that it was because they realised 20% of their customers using much older PC's wouldn't be able to decode fast enough, so they distributed it with the uncompressed to everyone because no distribution platform allowed "optional" downloads.
- sitkack 6y ago
  This sounds like the most plausible.
bayindirh 6y ago
> Meanwhile here I am with a sound card in my desktop PC for no real reason anymore... I think better opamps and audio quality is always enough reason to have a separate sound card in your PC.

ratww 6y ago

That doesn't really compute. Audio decompression is pretty light on CPUs these days. It takes about half a second in a single core to decompress a 4 min MP3 to WAV in my 2012 MB Air, including writing to disk. In a gaming machine it will be way less. If anything, the audio could be decompressed and cached on demand, when loading levels, or even during installation. Also sound cards do not participate on the decompression process. It's been CPU from the start, baring rare exceptions. Sound cards just receive raw PCM. There used to be hardware codecs but they're not really common, especially in consumer/gamer-grade soundcards.

dharmab 6y ago
Keep in mind that Titanfall had to ship on the Xbox 360 and PS3.
- ratww 6y ago
  Interestingly, those two consoles had dedicated hardware decoders. It doesn't make any sense to have uncompressed audio for them.
  - gruez 6y ago
    If it's any similar to the hardware decoders on iPhones, they're probably limited to n streams. That might be good for playing some background music or ambient sounds, but it gets tricky really quickly when you have multiple sounds playing at once.
    - ratww 6y ago
      Not really: The Xbox has 320 independent decompression channels according to its marketing material, which is kinda powerful. The PS3 had similar tech in its Motion Decoder, but they didn't disclose how powerful it was. And even if it had just a single decoder, there's always the possibility to pre-decode audio. Or just decode the music/film.
- jorvi 6y ago
  All the console versions shipped with compressed audio due to the anemic hard drive and disk speeds, as well as tiny RAM amount. In general it doesn't make sense to use wavs. Games have been using compressed audio since the late 90s without any significant trouble, and mp3s are aurally transparant at 320kbps.
klik99 6y ago
Couple of things to note: MP3 is not appropriate for use in real time due to a variable amount of silence added to the start of the sample intrinsic to the compression. You can sometimes use it for music But if there’s any changes based on game events mp3 is unusable. A lot of work has been put into optimizing mp3 including at os and hardware levels but that’s not usable in games. Commonly it’s some custom spin on vorbis which is Additionally, there can easily be 20-40 sounds playing at once, more if you haven’t optimized yet (which typically happens in the last few months before release). These also need to be preloaded slightly, and once playing stream from disk, so source starvation needs to be handled and the codec needs to not be glitchy if missing some packets. It’s also happening in a system that needs to be real-time and keep each frame timer on the order of milliseconds, though Moore’s law moving to parallelization has helped a lot. You’d be surprised how under powered the consoles are in this regard (caveat: I haven’t developed on the upcoming gen, which is getting better) As for loading and caching on demand, that’s limited by memory, given the sheer amount of samples used in games, it’s just not practical. For specific example in a very well known game, there are over 1600 samples for boxes hitting stuff (impact sounds). What I’m building right now is meant to make generative audio easier and reduce the number of samples needed, so more tools to process sound could make this naive caching approach practical
- usrusr 6y ago
  > For specific example in a very well known game, there are over 1600 samples for boxes hitting stuff That almost sounds as if it could be worthwhile to synthesize on demand from a very small set of (offset/overlaid) base samples through a deep chain of parameterized FX. With 1600 FX parameter preset tuples as the MVP, bonus points for involving game state context.
  - klik99 6y ago
    That’s literally my startup, I won’t get deep into the reasons why good tools for this don’t exist yet, but if you imagine game development is like regular development but with orders of magnitude more chaos you can understand how difficult it is to build stuff for reuse. After 15 years in the industry, my approach is just the same as yours

moritonal 6y ago

Rumour I heard was that it was because they realised 20% of their customers using much older PC's wouldn't be able to decode fast enough, so they distributed it with the uncompressed to everyone because no distribution platform allowed "optional" downloads.

sitkack 6y ago
This sounds like the most plausible.

bayindirh 6y ago

> Meanwhile here I am with a sound card in my desktop PC for no real reason anymore... I think better opamps and audio quality is always enough reason to have a separate sound card in your PC.