4 ms·

When Metal Gear Solid 4 released on Ps3, they used uncompressed audio. I think part of it was just to show off how much storage Blu Ray had. The game Titanfall

When Metal Gear Solid 4 released on Ps3, they used uncompressed audio. I think part of it was just to show off how much storage Blu Ray had. The game Titanfall on PC has the audio in it twice, compressed and decompressed. The decompressed was for machines with dual core or less so that there was enough overhead to keep the game running.

zorked 2mo ago
Why would it play the compressed version if it had the decompressed audio right there though?
- williebeek 2mo ago
  Because with lossless compression you can save a lot of storage space without losing any quality. You are thinking about lossy compression.
  - fizzbuzzbarbazz 2mo ago
    I think you misunderstood his question. Given two files, a compressed file which must be uncompressed to play, and an uncompressed one which does not require extra processing - why would the game ever bother uncompressing te compressed file when the same data is already available uncompressed? There's no true use case for that that I can see.
    - Uvix 2mo ago
      With hard disks, I could see reading the compressed version from disk and decompressing giving you the bytes faster than reading the uncompressed version. With SSDs that advantage likely went away.
      - unregistereddev 2mo ago
        Yep. If you had the CPU overhead available, you could speed up your entire computer by enabling full-disk compression and then defragmenting. It's difficult to accurately describe just how slow it was to move data to and from a spinning platter over a PATA interface.
    - benj111 2mo ago
      I would guess to save on installed size?
      - RobotCaleb 2mo ago
        It's not about size or file count or disk space consumed. The question is about why would you require the extra overhead of playing the compressed version which involves decompressing it on the fly in some way, versus just playing the already decompressed version. In this case it was stated that both the compressed and decompressed versions live side by side. So there is no install size saved.
        benj111 2mo ago
        The OP stated "The game Titanfall on PC has the audio in it twice, compressed and decompressed." 'has it twice' could just be on the install media, and compressed/ uncompressed chosen as a trade off between install size and performance. Anyway searching around the OP seems to be misrembering. Titanfall seems to be well-known for 35gb out of the 48gb install being uncompressed audio. I couldn't find a reference to it also having compressed audio also.
4thguy 2mo ago
The video game Uru shipped with the sounds as ogg files. Post installation they were decompressed to wav files, I'm guessing so that they can squeeze some more performance out of the game
- basscomm 2mo ago
  > Post installation they were decompressed to wav files, I'm guessing so that they can squeeze some more performance out of the game Maybe, but there could be other reasons. In a former life I briefly worked at a game developer, and the PC port of a game we shipped did the same thing. The reason I got was that the assets were just barely too big for the game to ship on one CD-ROM and going to a second disc was going to cost too much. The solution was to encode all the sound assets into .ogg (because it was free and unencumbered) to put on the disc and then convert them all to .wav post-install because the in-house engine couldn't play .ogg files and there was no time to add support before publishing.

zorked 2mo ago

Why would it play the compressed version if it had the decompressed audio right there though?

williebeek 2mo ago
Because with lossless compression you can save a lot of storage space without losing any quality. You are thinking about lossy compression.
- fizzbuzzbarbazz 2mo ago
  I think you misunderstood his question. Given two files, a compressed file which must be uncompressed to play, and an uncompressed one which does not require extra processing - why would the game ever bother uncompressing te compressed file when the same data is already available uncompressed? There's no true use case for that that I can see.
  - Uvix 2mo ago
    With hard disks, I could see reading the compressed version from disk and decompressing giving you the bytes faster than reading the uncompressed version. With SSDs that advantage likely went away.
    - unregistereddev 2mo ago
      Yep. If you had the CPU overhead available, you could speed up your entire computer by enabling full-disk compression and then defragmenting. It's difficult to accurately describe just how slow it was to move data to and from a spinning platter over a PATA interface.
  - benj111 2mo ago
    I would guess to save on installed size?
    - RobotCaleb 2mo ago
      It's not about size or file count or disk space consumed. The question is about why would you require the extra overhead of playing the compressed version which involves decompressing it on the fly in some way, versus just playing the already decompressed version. In this case it was stated that both the compressed and decompressed versions live side by side. So there is no install size saved.
      - benj111 2mo ago
        The OP stated "The game Titanfall on PC has the audio in it twice, compressed and decompressed." 'has it twice' could just be on the install media, and compressed/ uncompressed chosen as a trade off between install size and performance. Anyway searching around the OP seems to be misrembering. Titanfall seems to be well-known for 35gb out of the 48gb install being uncompressed audio. I couldn't find a reference to it also having compressed audio also.

4thguy 2mo ago

The video game Uru shipped with the sounds as ogg files. Post installation they were decompressed to wav files, I'm guessing so that they can squeeze some more performance out of the game

basscomm 2mo ago
> Post installation they were decompressed to wav files, I'm guessing so that they can squeeze some more performance out of the game Maybe, but there could be other reasons. In a former life I briefly worked at a game developer, and the PC port of a game we shipped did the same thing. The reason I got was that the assets were just barely too big for the game to ship on one CD-ROM and going to a second disc was going to cost too much. The solution was to encode all the sound assets into .ogg (because it was free and unencumbered) to put on the disc and then convert them all to .wav post-install because the in-house engine couldn't play .ogg files and there was no time to add support before publishing.