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.
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