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And there was a hilarious situation with audio in Titanfall, which included 35 gigs of uncompressed audio(whole game took 48 gigs).
by terafo 3y ago
And there was a hilarious situation with audio in Titanfall, which included 35 gigs of uncompressed audio(whole game took 48 gigs).
- klodolph 3y agoAs I recall, this was a purposeful choice. Titanfall came out in 2014. The minimum requirements were a Core 2 Duo at 2.4 GHz or Athlon X2 at 2.8 GHz. I think that puts it on processors dating back to 2006 or so. Games sometimes have a lot of sound effects. It's easier to stream 35 GB of data from disk than it is to decompress, like, 10 streams of audio at the same time with whatever CPU you can dedicate to audio. I do think they could have figured something out, like compressing the right subset of audio assets, but I just want to give the context for why they made that choice.
- recursive 3y agoThat's like 50 hours of uncompressed stereo audio at CD quality. (2×16bit@44.1kHz) Do games really have that much stuff in them these days? I mean, I wouldn't doubt it, but it's surprising.
- klodolph 3y agoMost of it is probably mono, so double the estimate.
- midnightclubbed 3y agoFor story based games (with voice acting) absolutely yes. Dozens of story characters, hundreds of supporting npc and all of them talking as either part of your missions or just to fill in the world. Maybe 50 hours is a lot for a non story based game but even then once you factor in all the sounds and all their variations to reduce repetition you might be up there.
- ant6n 3y agoDo they all talk at the same time?
- kevingadd 3y agoThe uncompressed audio was on purpose to manage CPU usage, you can find quotes explaining this in interviews. https://www.escapistmagazine.com/titanfall-dev-explains-the-games-35-gb-of-uncompressed-audio/ https://www.escapistmagazine.com/titanfall-dev-explains-the-... I can attest that MP3 and OGG decompression (the two audio codecs that would have likely been used at the time) are both pretty slow. It adds up.
- Sohcahtoa82 3y agoWhat a bunch of absolute horse shit. MP3 isn't slow. I was playing MP3s on a 100 Mhz 486 DX4 in 1996. Certainly a system in 2014 can handle decompressing MP3s on the fly. Even if you didn't want to do it on the fly during game play, they easily could have been decompressed at load time and it would have taken only a couple seconds. It's not like ENTIRE 35 GB of audio needed to be loaded all at once, nobody had that RAM back then, and very few people (especially gamers) have that much now.
- kevingadd 3y agoI've benchmarked it myself in my game. It adds a measurable amount of time to loads if you're decompressing all the audio up front to reduce latency, and during streaming it increases CPU usage. Obviously a modern machine can handle a few ogg/mp3 streams in the background during gameplay, but some games are playing dozens or hundreds of sounds at once. "It's not like ENTIRE 35 GB of audio needed to be loaded all at once" misunderstands the nature of games fundamentally. Some games do potentially need the ability to access any of thousands of sound effects at a moment's notice with the lowest possible latency.