Sound & music limitations
Posted: Tue Jan 21, 2014 5:48 am
There are a few things that bother me about the way sound is handled in LoG modding:
- 3D sounds that are not 16-bit, 44100Hz cause an OpenAL error and crash the game, so it is quite annoying to be a Mac or Linux user and download a mod made by a Windows user who didn't know (or didn't care) about this issue.
- Again with OpenAL, if it runs out of memory, you also get a crash.
It would be nice if LoG2's sound system didn't crash the whole game in cases like these. For example, if you stick with OpenAL (which is quite good, don't get me wrong!), I would like it if the game caught its out of memory errors and simply printed a warning on the screen; OpenAL itself recovers fine from them to my knowledge, it just won't generate the sound source it had too little memory for. For the first issue, the mod exporter could scan the headers of all included WAV files and warn the user if any are incompatible. Or even transcode them automatically
The other thing that bothers me is not being able to use Ogg for most sounds (only background music, which is locked to its level). So far the biggest example I have seen of this being problematic is Demiosis Domain. The author wanted more control over music, and ended up making all the music into WAV sound effects. The mod is 642 MB compressed. I estimate about 190MB of its uncompressed size is taken up by this music, which would decrease to around 35MB in Ogg format with decent quality.
I also wanted to do dynamic music in my own mod, implementing what would be essentially a MOD player, but am seriously turned off by the amount of space taken up by instrument samples.
Would it be reasonable for LoG2 to support Ogg sound effects? Decoding them at runtime seems like it shouldn't increase load times that much these days. Of course memory is a concern as well as filesize; maybe my opinion on this issue is just warped by living in an area with very poor download/upload speeds.
- 3D sounds that are not 16-bit, 44100Hz cause an OpenAL error and crash the game, so it is quite annoying to be a Mac or Linux user and download a mod made by a Windows user who didn't know (or didn't care) about this issue.
- Again with OpenAL, if it runs out of memory, you also get a crash.
It would be nice if LoG2's sound system didn't crash the whole game in cases like these. For example, if you stick with OpenAL (which is quite good, don't get me wrong!), I would like it if the game caught its out of memory errors and simply printed a warning on the screen; OpenAL itself recovers fine from them to my knowledge, it just won't generate the sound source it had too little memory for. For the first issue, the mod exporter could scan the headers of all included WAV files and warn the user if any are incompatible. Or even transcode them automatically
The other thing that bothers me is not being able to use Ogg for most sounds (only background music, which is locked to its level). So far the biggest example I have seen of this being problematic is Demiosis Domain. The author wanted more control over music, and ended up making all the music into WAV sound effects. The mod is 642 MB compressed. I estimate about 190MB of its uncompressed size is taken up by this music, which would decrease to around 35MB in Ogg format with decent quality.
I also wanted to do dynamic music in my own mod, implementing what would be essentially a MOD player, but am seriously turned off by the amount of space taken up by instrument samples.
Would it be reasonable for LoG2 to support Ogg sound effects? Decoding them at runtime seems like it shouldn't increase load times that much these days. Of course memory is a concern as well as filesize; maybe my opinion on this issue is just warped by living in an area with very poor download/upload speeds.
).