Sound Engine, How Does That Sound To You?

[hoak 0]

I'm a Sound Designer, using compressed audio formats like OGG, MP3 etc. is not a very good idea in games for anything but ambient sounds, and is a good idear to avoid in general when ever possible. Compressed audio decodecs add processing overhead and latency to sounds you want precisely triggered and synched with animations, and the more sounds playing the worse this can be. Compressed triggered sounds can also cause issues in the DirectX submixer... We're well past any concern for the space sound and Foley occupy in a game so using WAV or RAW formats will not only free up precious CPU and APU cycles, and tighten up sync -- you'll get more fidelity if it's there in your source material.

:)

Edited June 11, 2009 by Hoak

[SaBrE_UK 0]

using compressed audio formats like OGG, MP3 etc. is not a very good idea in games

Interesting, do the sound mod guys know this? I guess they do.

[sparks50 0]

Here's one of my favorite videos. You can really hear both the hit from the 30MM, and then the roar.

You have to remove all of the URL except for the part after the = for the youtube tag to work:)

Yes, awesome video. It also shows the importance of the sound delay system that the BI games sports.

Edited June 14, 2009 by Placebo

[Mark XIII (DayZ) 18]

I did, I'm sure other's do... I only use wss, ogg is a compressed format which to me sounds nasty when loud.

Arma 2 adds plenty of things for sound guys like me to play with, however we'll need bis to enlighten us regarding changes to the config. ie whats new compared to Arma.

p.s.. The gau is nasty, not at all a real clip which makes me wonder if the other sounds have been sourced the same way....

[TangoRomeo 10]

We're well past any concern for the space sound and Foley occupy in a game..

You could have also wrote "...past any concerns for cpu overhead".

There are pro´s and con's to each. :)

I agree that uncompressed audio yields the best possible quality, but codecs these days evolved alot - just think of flac. People without a trained hearing and audiophile equipment won't be able to tell the difference, this is true for the majority of people playing computer games.

What i don't agree on is working without a RAM budget. More RAM for audio means less for other assets. Just the same as with cpu cycles. Dependant on Hardwareconfiguration and Software demands this means more frequent swapfile usage, which in turn causes a quite noticeable performance impact.

I.e. i´m redoing some ingame sounds; uncompressed the package has a size of ~70mb in 44100hz, Quality VBR compression gets it down to ~11mb. If adding this up for all sound emitters ingame, we`re at several hundred megabytes just for audio, if not cutting on either quality or length, to minimize repetition and having sufficient duration.

As far as .ogg quality is concerned. It´s better than most other lossy codecs. On a P. A-109 via MDR-V700 or MS Avant 902, i cannot make out a difference. Though this is certainly no audiophile setup, it's more than what the average user has hooked up to his comp.

[Akaskero 10]

Great video by the way. There's a reaction you just can't help yourself but to do. Cheer and laugh! Fantastic!

Sounds like there's alot of talent out there that's taken an interest in all this.

Will be great to see how this thread turns out. :)

I hadn't seen that vid by the way so any other hard to find ones would be awesome.

[Leopardi 0]

I couldn't believe my ears when I first heard the cannon of A10. It's a goddamn joke! Sounds like someone loading a huge spring powered egg-timer????????? When it should be a scary "MOOOOO" after the impact.

[Akaskero 10]

haha yeah for sure! In fact it's kinda funny. We were joking in the office here that the GAU-8 obviously owns the target and then a couple of seconds later when you hear it, it goes n00000000000000000000000b! haha

Sorry:o

[hoak 0]

You could have also wrote "...past any concerns for cpu overhead".

There are pro´s and con's to each. :)

No, because that would be incorrect; resource overhead in decompressing compressed audio formats is still a concern even on the highest performance Windows systems due to the way Windows handles both audio and networking in ring 0, only on Core 0 in multiple core/CPU systems, and poorly manages audio thread priority.

The issues due to audio resource handling are complex and are obviously more of a Windows failing (and this applies to all versions of Windows up to and including Windows 7). In the worst cases you'll hear popping and sounds will loose precise synchronization with events -- the latter may be subtle, but events like weapons firing will lose aesthetic punch when they desync with animation...

Then there's the issues in the DirectX sub-mixer as well as the sub-mixer handlers in Sound Mangers like FMOD and XAudio which will behave very badly when confronted with multiple compressed audio streams and events; the compander gets confused, and you get all sorts of anomalies from the subtle, to audibly anomalous compading and AGC, to occlusion breakthrough. Compressed audio is a very bad idea in Windows games for well documented reasons...

Even though I love BI's games, to be blunt the Audio is no where near the measure of the rest of the games design and engineering -- in fact it's horrible, even in ArmA 2... But then that's the case of literally all games, and is as much due to the lack of good engineering in sound managers and sub-mixers as it is to do with so many Sound Designers that so obviously lack a real Engineering background and the understanding of the limitations they're working with.

:butbut:

Edited June 14, 2009 by Hoak