Sounds in Nexuiz

[Ed]

I've been looking at the sounds in Nexuiz 2.0 and have some suggestions for improvement:

- medplat1 and medplat2 are duplicated, can these be removed?
- Many wav files. These could be encoded as OGG.
- Many high bitrate files. UT2kX uses 64Kbps OGG and sounds fine. Reduce the bitrate to at most 128Kbps. This will save space, memory and cpu usage.
- All sound effects should be mono. Most are already but some are stereo.

[SavageX]

I'm against encoding all .wav effects to Ogg. This is a lossy procedure and makes it impossible to edit the sounds at full quality later if it becomes necessary. Plus Ogg Vorbis has a rather large header (2-4 KB) so smaller effects won't gain much space at all.

Plus reencoding files that were already compressed lossilly is pure evil. It'll spawn unexpected results.

If it was for me Epic would have to up the bitrate a bit on their music. Some of it is very cool stuff but I can clearly hear compression artifacts on some of the songs - which is a shame (they were using an outdated Vorbis encoder, too - the horror).

[Ed]

I'm against encoding all .wav effects to Ogg. This is a lossy procedure and makes it impossible to edit the sounds at full quality later if it becomes necessary.

The original source files should always be held as uncompressed. What is distributed should be compressed. By seperating source from disrtibuted sounds you can work round all of the troubles you have pointed out which are very real if you don't keep an uncompressed source. The same can be said for graphics too.

[leileilol]

- medplat1 and medplat2 are duplicated, can these be removed?

Do you like "file not found" errors every time the platform has activated?

- All sound effects should be mono. Most are already but some are stereo.

Why take a step backwards? Darkplaces supports stereo files fine.

If disk space is the problem, then that's what TinyNexuiz is for [/plug]

[Ed]

Do you like "file not found" errors every time the platform has activated?

Yes but only one of the files should actually be used. Both of them are duplicated and I assume only one pair is actually used, the others are superfluous. The redundent pair should be removed for later releases.

Why take a step backwards? Darkplaces supports stereo files fine.

Why on earth would you want a stereo sound effect? That is not a step forward at all. It shows a misunderstanding. It's understandable to use stereo for music but not effects. The second channel is redundent as both channels will end up as one because they come from a single point in the sound field. The sound engine then calculates the intensities for each channel in output. You might as well have only mono as it'll sound exactly the same. If you were really silly you could record sound effects as 7.1. It would make absolutely no difference over mono as they'd still be downmixed to one as a result of being from a single point in the sound field.

All sound effects should be mono. Music can be multichannel. Announcers and ambient should really be mono as they are intended to be 'ambient' in that they have no directionality, the sound will be identical per channel (assuming identical channels).

[xcooling]

I agree with you ed.

The Nexuiz that you release to the public, should be optimised, so its extremely efficient.

This can be done automatically via shellscripts, that you run on the uncompressed and lossless sources.

Everything from optimising textures, to sounds, etc.

[mangopork]

I'm against encoding all .wav effects to Ogg. This is a lossy procedure and makes it impossible to edit the sounds at full quality later if it becomes necessary. Plus Ogg Vorbis has a rather large header (2-4 KB) so smaller effects won't gain much space at all.

Plus reencoding files that were already compressed lossilly is pure evil. It'll spawn unexpected results.

If it was for me Epic would have to up the bitrate a bit on their music. Some of it is very cool stuff but I can clearly hear compression artifacts on some of the songs - which is a shame (they were using an outdated Vorbis encoder, too - the horror).

*sigh*

Idealistic Amateur.

Seperate dev files from distributed files.
If you hate ogg, try another format. There are many, many different compressed formats out there. Do some research and choose a format, then If needed, code in support for it. I realize this isn't easy, but game development is never easy so that's no excuse.

While I agree that audiophiles such as yourself (and me as well) can hear the compression artifacts, the vast majority of users won't care because they're busy fragging. They just want good music to BE THERE and not bog down thier system.

Remember that guy who shows up to every dev meeting, and thinks of ten reasons why the latest idea won't work?

Yeah, DON'T BE THAT GUY!

[SavageX]

*sigh*

Idealistic Amateur.

Seperate dev files from distributed files.
If you hate ogg, try another format. There are many, many different compressed formats out there. Do some research and choose a format, then If needed, code in support for it. I realize this isn't easy, but game development is never easy so that's no excuse.

As a matter of fact I love Ogg Vorbis so relax.

While I agree that audiophiles such as yourself (and me as well) can hear the compression artifacts, the vast majority of users won't care because they're busy fragging. They just want good music to BE THERE and not bog down thier system.

Compressing the sfx won't make the game run better on any machine - quite the contrary. They have to be decompressed on run-time (more CPU load than directly reading PCM data from the PK3 archive) and once decompressed they take *exactly* the same amount of memory than the original files. No gain.

Remember, I'm talking about "boooooom", "spooooiiiiinng", "splaaaash", "splortsch" and whatever short effects.

The music already is encoded in Ogg Vorbis and is decoded and streamed on-the-fly.

Remember that guy who shows up to every dev meeting, and thinks of ten reasons why the latest idea won't work?

Yeah, DON'T BE THAT GUY!

Yay.

[tZork]

Why does som many ppl asume compresed files are better for preformace?

Anyhow. most of the non music filas are to small to benefirt from compressing unless you are planning on going back to modem. Mono would ofc be a good idea.

Something that would be preddy cool is variation souunds. ex 4-5 graneade bounce sounds picked randomly.

[tChr]

There are 3 sounds now.. I've made a pack of 6. it will work with the current ver, but only with 3 of the sounds.. I'll make it public during the day i guess.