I'm personally a supporter of smaller games (and programs in general). Certainly there's enough storage to hold them, but every time one installs an extra 500mb that's another 500mb that needs to be backed up, copied/archived, etc. Plus, its a whole lot easier to move a game around if its 50 mb than if its 500. I keep a lot of games (as many as I possibly can) on a portable drive so that I can use them on multiple computers without headaches. Copying those files around takes a long time, and when trying to play a large game over USB (swamp) there's noticeable lag. I'd also mention that not everybody has giant hard disks to install games on. I'd feel pretty confident in saying that some of our list members are still running machines with 150gb or less of total space.
As to your specific concerns about the lag the first time speech is used, when are you loading the files into memory? If you're loading them when they're first spoken, that's probably your reason right there. If you can load the files at game startup (or in the background), then you may be able to get rid of that lag. From: "Valiant Galaxy Associates" <v...@valiantgalaxy.com> Sent: Friday, April 10, 2015 17:56 To: "Gamers Discussion list" <gamers@audyssey.org> Subject: [Audyssey] sounds and sizes of audiogames Hi everybody from Aaron here at VGA. I've had a couple of helpers on our projects ask me why I don't switch my audio format for our sounds to ogg instead of just using straight up wav format. Interceptor (nearing release) is 256mb when installed. The installer is around 130mb. If I convert to ogg the size would be more like 45mb or so. I tested this, I converted everything to a high quality ogg format (I didn't want to lose any more sound quality than necessary) and tried running it. Keeping in mind that Interceptor uses the same speech output script (voiceover) that Traders of Known Space does, that is to say lots of chunks of prerecorded speech, I made some discoveries that were important enough that I decided I wanted to stay with wav format. They tell me that ogg files decompress really quickly. Well this may be true, but to my way of thinking, not quickly enough. I have latency between the speech chunks that were not there with wav. Using the speech file queue before end delay setting (as seen in TKS), I got rid of the choppiness this introduced, but it left a slight sluggishness while navigating menus that was not there originally for the first time a menu item was encountered. However, after the first time hearing a menu item it would be as responsive as we are used to with TKS is with its wav files for all the times it was heard there after. Also, the second time a sequence of files were used that were already used, the choppiness eliminated with the speech file queue before end delay was incorrect. So if it was choppy the first time you heard a string of combined recordings, the next time it repeated that same string it would be less choppy. If I fixed the queue before end delay so it wasn't choppy to begin with, it would overlap itself for subsequent repeats. I can make .ogg format work, but I don't really want to. My purpose for this mail is to see if anyone wants to comment on this. How do you feel about an audiogame that is half a gigabyte in size? It doesn't bother me at all, in fact I kind of like seeing that one of our creations has actually grown to be that large, but feel free to let us hear your side of it. I probably won't change my mind in the end, but hey if everyone backs me up on this I can say "well the community seemed to think it was ok so that's what we did". *grin* One obvious reason to do this is server space and server bandwidth, but I don't believe we've got much to worry about there. P.S., I did say Interceptor is nearing release. As in, development of the first release version has been complete for a week or so now and we are working on other things to be best prepared to deal with the various aspects of doing commercial business. Once some last minute things are out of the way we should be ready to roll. Just to be safe, I'd hesitantly say that we will have it out before July 2015, but our hope is sooner than that. It all depends on how long it takes this paperwork to go back and forth and some minor last minute code changes. Another game is possibly going to be release at nearly the same time as Interceptor, I believe Jeremy has mentioned this on our news page at http://valiantGalaxy.com. --- Gamers mailing list __ Gamers@audyssey.org If you want to leave the list, send E-mail to gamers-unsubscr...@audyssey.org. You can make changes or update your subscription via the web, at http://audyssey.org/mailman/listinfo/gamers_audyssey.org. All messages are archived and can be searched and read at http://www.mail-archive.com/gamers@audyssey.org. If you have any questions or concerns regarding the management of the list, please send E-mail to gamers-ow...@audyssey.org.
