4 ms·

At one point, I think it was TitanFall2, the pc port of a game deliberately converted it's audio to uncompressed wav files in order to inflate the install size,

by somat 11mo ago

At one point, I think it was TitanFall2, the pc port of a game deliberately converted it's audio to uncompressed wav files in order to inflate the install size, They said it was for performance but the theory was to make it more inconvenient for pirates to distribute. When the details of exactly why the game was so large came out, many people felt this was a sort of customer betrayal, The publisher was burning a large part of the volume of your precious high speed sdd for a feature that added nothing to the game. People probably feel the same about this, why were they so disrespectful of our space and bandwidth in the first place? But I agree it is very nice that they wrote up the details in this instance.

ryandrake 11mo ago
> When the details of exactly why the game was so large came out, many people felt this was a sort of customer betrayal, The publisher was burning a large part of the volume of your precious high speed sdd for a feature that added nothing to the game. Software developers of all kinds (not just game publishers) have a long and rich history of treating their users' compute resources as expendable. "Oh, users can just get more memory, it's cheap!" "Oh, xxxGB is such a small hard drive these days, users can get a bigger one!" "Oh, most users have Pentiums by now, we can drop 486 support!" Over and over we've seen companies choose to throw their users under the bus so that they can cheap out on optimizing their product.
- mghackerlady 11mo ago
  Maybe that'll start to change since ram is the new gold and who knows what the AI bubble will eat next
recursive 11mo ago
I remember seeing warez game releases in the late 90s that had custom packaging to de-compress sound effects that were stored uncompressed in the original installer. It seems no one takes pride in their piracy anymore.
maccard 11mo ago
> They said it was for performance but the theory was to make it more inconvenient for pirates to distribute. This doesn't even pass the sniff test. The files would just be compressed for distribution and decompressed on download. Pirated games are well known for having "custom" installers.
- ycombinatrix 11mo ago
  >The files would just be compressed for distribution and decompressed on download All Steam downloads are automatically compressed. It's also irrelevant. The point is that playback of uncompressed audio is indeed cheaper than playback of compressed audio.
  - duskwuff 11mo ago
    > The point is that playback of uncompressed audio is indeed cheaper than playback of compressed audio. Even when Titanfall 2 was released in 2016, I don't think that was meaningfully the case. Audio compression formats have been tuned heavily for efficient playback.
    - nearbuy 11mo ago
      Uncompressed audio is typically used for sound effects, while music is compressed. Latency is the primary benefit. Uncompressed audio will play immediately while an mp3 will have a few frames delay. Sounds like gunshots or footsteps are typically short files anyway, so the increased memory usage isn't that painful. Games also can stack many sounds, so even if the decoding cost is negligible when playing a single sound, it'll be greater if you have 32 sounds playing at once.
      - duskwuff 11mo ago
        > Uncompressed audio will play immediately while an mp3 will have a few frames delay. I'm not sure what you mean by this. Encoding latency is only relevant when you're dealing with live audio streams - there's no delay inherent to playing back a recorded sound. > Sounds like gunshots or footsteps are typically short files anyway, so the increased memory usage isn't that painful. Not all sound effects are short (consider e.g. loops for ambient noise!), and the aggregate file size for uncompressed audio can be substantial across an entire game.
snet0 11mo ago
This is conspiratorial nonsense.
ycombinatrix 11mo ago
Wasn't that Titanfall 1? I remember Titanfall 2 having a much smaller installation size.

by somat 11mo ago

ryandrake 11mo ago

> When the details of exactly why the game was so large came out, many people felt this was a sort of customer betrayal, The publisher was burning a large part of the volume of your precious high speed sdd for a feature that added nothing to the game. Software developers of all kinds (not just game publishers) have a long and rich history of treating their users' compute resources as expendable. "Oh, users can just get more memory, it's cheap!" "Oh, xxxGB is such a small hard drive these days, users can get a bigger one!" "Oh, most users have Pentiums by now, we can drop 486 support!" Over and over we've seen companies choose to throw their users under the bus so that they can cheap out on optimizing their product.

mghackerlady 11mo ago
Maybe that'll start to change since ram is the new gold and who knows what the AI bubble will eat next

recursive 11mo ago

I remember seeing warez game releases in the late 90s that had custom packaging to de-compress sound effects that were stored uncompressed in the original installer. It seems no one takes pride in their piracy anymore.

maccard 11mo ago

> They said it was for performance but the theory was to make it more inconvenient for pirates to distribute. This doesn't even pass the sniff test. The files would just be compressed for distribution and decompressed on download. Pirated games are well known for having "custom" installers.

ycombinatrix 11mo ago
>The files would just be compressed for distribution and decompressed on download All Steam downloads are automatically compressed. It's also irrelevant. The point is that playback of uncompressed audio is indeed cheaper than playback of compressed audio.
- duskwuff 11mo ago
  > The point is that playback of uncompressed audio is indeed cheaper than playback of compressed audio. Even when Titanfall 2 was released in 2016, I don't think that was meaningfully the case. Audio compression formats have been tuned heavily for efficient playback.
  - nearbuy 11mo ago
    Uncompressed audio is typically used for sound effects, while music is compressed. Latency is the primary benefit. Uncompressed audio will play immediately while an mp3 will have a few frames delay. Sounds like gunshots or footsteps are typically short files anyway, so the increased memory usage isn't that painful. Games also can stack many sounds, so even if the decoding cost is negligible when playing a single sound, it'll be greater if you have 32 sounds playing at once.
    - duskwuff 11mo ago
      > Uncompressed audio will play immediately while an mp3 will have a few frames delay. I'm not sure what you mean by this. Encoding latency is only relevant when you're dealing with live audio streams - there's no delay inherent to playing back a recorded sound. > Sounds like gunshots or footsteps are typically short files anyway, so the increased memory usage isn't that painful. Not all sound effects are short (consider e.g. loops for ambient noise!), and the aggregate file size for uncompressed audio can be substantial across an entire game.

snet0 11mo ago

This is conspiratorial nonsense.

ycombinatrix 11mo ago

Wasn't that Titanfall 1? I remember Titanfall 2 having a much smaller installation size.