How music takes a toll on game performance
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 21 ก.ย. 2024
- I wrote the soundtrack to PirateSoftware's Heartbound. It's 100 songs long!
In this video I talk about how I ended up working on the game, and I also sit down with Thor as he shares his perspective on the soundtrack.
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Thor and I had a blast, thanks for watching ✨
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Do give them a watch if you have the time!
It's is understated how much of an impact audio/music can have on performance.
My eyes were opened to this over 10 years ago where my computer kept crashing when trying to play Dead Island... but only when playing Xian Mei, and only in specific situations.
Come to find out, it was the audio for the "heels on a hard surface" sound that crashed things. Changing my audio format to a lower bitrate helped, but ultimately changing my drivers fixed it.
I've also experienced system slow downs from audio, that resulted in my computer lagging enough to create a de-synch from host connection on a multiplayer game (this more recently in the last couple years).
Combination of my computer not handling poorly optimized audio/visuals (turning down/off settings helped), in combination with an indie dev's poorly optimized net code (was likely just out-of-the-box stuff, which they later fixed).
Sound is such a ubiquitous "background" element that we easily forget it's impact to our systems.
Tge only time my 3DS ever crashed, it was because of a specific sound being played in game (in my case the battery recharge noise in Binding of Isaac, so I had to make sure never to take that powerup again).
Reminds me of the time when I played Need for Speed: Most Wanted with busted audio drivers.
At the very start of the game, in the fifth or so race you compete against Razor in your starter BMW M3 GTR. The race is scripted to have your engine fail about 70% of the way through, in which case your car sputters and loses power, you become forced to stop, and then the game goes into a cutscene about how you lost the race and Razor gets your pink slip and takes your car away from you.
But since the script for having the engine fail starts with Mia, the deuteragonist, calling you to warn you that Razor sabotaged your engine _before_ it actually fails, and my busted sound drivers prevented the sound from playing, the script never triggered, and the engine never died, and I was able to fully finish the race. It still went directly into the cutscene where Razor takes your car away, but I found it neat how that worked.
Fun fact, Skyrim straight wont run unless you have an audio output for it.
@@TheRagingAura because no one can wake you up
@@roadent217Thats hilarious lmao. What a fantastic game that was though, I wish EA blackbox never got disbanded.
fun fact: the "segaaa' intro in sonic the hedgehog for the genesis takes up more space on the cart than the entirety of green hill zone
audio files are always fuckhuge, sometimes even when compressed to shit😂😂😂
That's an actual interesting and fun fact
😂😂😂😂😂
I thought it was bigger than the whole game because they wanted it crystal clear
"Fuckhuge" and similar vulgur word combos will never not be funny to me lmao
@@rinnnnnnnnnnrinCrap load, fuckton...
There are a lot of games that have an insane download size. And so much of that data is the other language audio files.
An exception is the original Cod4 on Steam. It has to redownload the entire game if you change the language.
@@BFedie518Many games ship like that.
Different builds for different languages
@@BFedie518 That's the better way of doing it, tbh.
"It's all audio?"
"Always has been."
I remember seeing an interview with the creators of MYST and apparently they had a hell of a time getting the soundtrack to be smooth and consistent back in the early 90s. They had to map out space on the disc so that they could load the music for the next 30s or something and then jump back to the game data to reduce lag as much as possible.
Ars Technica has this interview
Redbook audio solved that problem
It's why in the past games used to have a set library of sounds rather then songs. Then you can 'create' the song programmatic in game and reuse the sounds in other songs or sound effects.
I think most of us know it as MIDI, though that's a standard that games may not have used to accomplish the same task.
It's still very useful for creating instrumented music.
stuff like this is why im so much of an audio compression nerd, if you take the time to, you can create some really well compressed ogg files (im talking like ~700 kb for a 2 minute song that still sounds high enough quality to pass for its use in a game. aka shoutouts to variable framerates and noise tuning)
you can also just use opus with its default settings if the engine supports it, its the best format you can possibly use if you can
opus is excellent
Me screaming at godot to re-add opus support
@@XanTheDragon seriously, like why did they ever remove it? its LITERALLY a free to use thing (both in price and in license!)
@@whamer100 Presumably it's harder to integrate with everything else.
Audio is so important for the full experience too. It can really make or break a game imo
oh that just triggered a memory of learning about the fact that having too many sounds playing in Minecraft at once would drastically reduce the frame rate and other performances. If you turned off the sound, it ran fine. I remember learning that a while back. Particularly when it came to too many collisions.
Reminds me of Titanfall which shipped uncompressed audio to save CPU performance. For a total size of 50 GB in 2014.
Raycevick said it best. When possible it should be a player choice - someone might have a powerful machine or prioritise framerate while not having a gigabit fiber optic.
Or vice versa, I've played games on laptops with 250 GB SSD, I'd happily wait a couple seconds to download textures for my competitor's cosmetics rather than giving 20% of my storage just in case.
How much of that 50 gig storage space was dedicated to providing dubbed audio in EFIGS+CJK plus a handful of periphery languages like Polish, Hungarian, Thai, etc.?
I agree that it should be a choice. I remember installing PC games and having the option of "typical" or "full" installation.
I thought part of the reason it was 50GB had something to do with piracy. If we make this game this file size that's an online only MP games, less people might pirate it or something. At least I thought I heard that was one of the reasons for why they did that.
@@PC-tan In reference to my earlier comment, Titanfall allegedly had 35 gigs worth of audio, most of which was all dubbed versions of the dialogue.
I say allegedly because I don't remember the exact portion.
@@729MendicantTide I don't think it was 35GB. I have the game and from what I remember it was at least 25GB of those 50GB that were uncompressed audio. But then again I could be wrong.
Makes me think of Perfect Dark and Goldeneye on the N64.
Those games had such jams on that cartridge. And fantastic soundeffects all around too!
N64 games were old enough that they were still reading MIDI-style instruction sets and playing back highly compressed custom soundfonts. Still one of the most space-effective ways for game music to function, and it let you do things like dynamically enabling and disabling instrument channels based on context, see: Banjo-Kazooie.
Rare also had a fun trick when they came out with Bad Fur Day, where the only way they were able to fit all the voice lines on such a tiny cartridge was by storing them highly sped up (so the files are shorter and thereby smaller), then using code to play them back slower when they're pulled from memory in the game.
There are even wilder stories about how the production of the DKC soundtracks back on the SNES were accomplished, but I don't even really understand the details. It sounds like the sort of workflow I wouldn't wish on anyone, and the fact that Rare's composers so consistently approached those systems with the express intent of pushing their music systems to their absolute limits and kept pulling it off, is boggling.
Watching these reminds me that sound designers are as vital as they are underappreciated. It takes a lot of patience to create soundscapes that have to both fit in the world you're presented into as and be functional. Editing sounds for my own projects easily takes up way more time than I realize. Mad respects to audio designers and engineers.
Everybody that had a 386 without a Gravis Ultrasound feels this. If you turned the sound quality on One Must Fall 2097 to max, you immediately noticed the performance drop.
Or if you tried to make music with trackers... Hoo boi. You couldn't play too many samples simultaneously, since everything was done on the CPU, it would poop the bed pretty quickly. Good times. Then I got a GUS. Even better times.
This is why cartridge-era consoles have sound chips. Instead of loading entire, uncompressed audio files, the game sent a programmed set of instructions to the sound chip to 'play these notes on these channels under these circumstances.' One of the big draws of the Playstation was the ability to FIT all those music files, to the point where they could be listened to like a CD.
Ever since my first pc back in 98 i always had a dedicated sound card. From the sound blaster 16 to the newest AE5 and everything in between. I was stuck without a sound card for a few weeks and it sucked. People underestimate what difference a good sound card and a pair of headphones can make.
Well- now I think I understand why so many games have audio issues. Neat.
Dang, didn't know Stijn did the music for this game!
Thank you for making games for ancient craptops
similar but i have had similar issues when dual-screening and watching other media on my second monitor while running games that are otherwise buttery smooth on the main monitor. i'm talking some SERIOUS frame-dips in games that were hitting 120-180 uncapped framerates on a blank-slate
I wonder if Microsoft ever fixed MultiPlane Overlay so it improves performance (as intended) instead of worsening it.
In most high-end games textures are most of the memory, but since a lot of indie/old games textures are reused they don't take as much space, and also music has a much higher minimum required for human to have fun, than graphics do.
Bruh i thought he was talking about games in general for a sec. I was bouta say that insane that audio takes up that much memory and space.
As someone with a 10-year old laptop used for gaming, I thank you for your efforts.
My mentor is amazing at computing music in python with libraries. I planned to learn.
pro tip: if you want music to take up less space, you could try sequencing. Sequencing is where you basically have the music generated from a midi file and instruments you put in the game. It was done on basically every game before the GameCube, even in DOOM.
iirc the original LEGO Star Wars on PC had lossless quality soundtrack that totalled near 1GB, overweighting the rest of the data by a landslide (and this was a CD release so it was massively compressed to fit in the disc and took a while to install)
The Complete Saga remaster switched to far lighter OGG for audio
"Machines with integrated graphics from 10 years ago" ah, so exactly my machine, thanks for the consideration "^^
As one who's been using one of those terrible laptops with integrated graphics from 10 years ago, thank you boss
So when I turned off audio on my N64 emulator back in 2005 I wasn't tripping, performance did go up
7 yr old comp, and heartbound works smooth as butter
Love seeing devs put an effort in supporting older machines. Not everyone has brand new $2500 zillion core gaming "rigs" with dual GPU setups.
Wow. I never thought about this!
Its crazy, the consideration he puy into the gaming industry, to even think about pcs from 10 years ago to be able to run a pixel art game. Im working on my own solo game and i already know itll have a hard time on cards older than 30 series card
I once put together a chunker. Basically i/o reel time feed for memory chunk out data at 8 to 256 bits at a time. Kinda like p2p networking.
It's usefull but not likely at texture calls... be great for audio though. It'll parse the compression and transfer on the fly. I may have had a little pirate in me back in college. Maybe
Wow
Found out the hard wsy that audio can actually affect performance. I was playing gta v and it was stuttering at intervals almost perfectly spaced apart. Turns out it was an out of date audio driver causing the issue lol
I have giving this some thought the last couple years, I used to play a lot of ESO, and every single line in that game is voiced, I can't remember the exact size of the game, I think it's about 100gb+ their is no way they fit all the audio in their, it all has to be streamed, their is no way otherwise.
That's why elden ring and dark souls series lag
Na, from soft just has horribly unoptimized games in general for PC, common knowledge.
@@StrangelyIronic oh mb, they know how to compress but not optimize I guess
I'm playing pirated so i don't know if this happens in the normal version, but when i open the game there's a 50-66% chance that, until i close the game and open it again, the audio keeps stopping and then going back to normal every couple of seconds in elden ring.
Also the audio is bugged in every cutscene
@@BRAZILIAN_MIKU no that never happens in the normal game, why not buy the base game though? I don't want to shame you or anything cause I didn't even buy it my brother did but I'm going to buy the PS4 version, is it because you don't have enough money or do you think spending money on the game is not a good idea? I'm just curious.
@@stevebolduc9903 i don't have money rn my dude, plus in my country piracy is legal if you don't make money off it, i plan to pay it someday though that's in the far future rn
I wish he could generate all the sound and music in game so he could have a tiny game size like Animal Well
"Integrated graphics from ten years ago" i found out that my laptop that I got 2 1/2 years ago is in that club. Really had graphics card.
That's like GTA San Andreas.
Full game have about 4 GB, after deleting audio from cut scenes GTA will have around 500MB
Worth
You wanna know why [latest AAA release] is over 100GB? Uncompressed audio and textures.
Nice JKM3 shirt
How much of it would be audio if it were created via tracker?
You'd lower disk and memory space, but you might end up increasing the CPU load. I imagine it depends on the complexity of the music.
My mentor is amazing at computing music in python with libraries. I planned to learn. wtf my ac just turned on lol
Titanfall 1 was like ten gigabytes and because real-time audio decompression algorithms hurt performance on older cpus the game had like 30-40 gigs of uncompressed audio
Guess that’s why retro music in games all sound kinda similar. Cuz it was compressed to hell and back to fit in a 500 kb file even if the game itself is fucking ET on the Atari
Is this why on the original playstation copy of final fantasy 7 my game would crash during the Diamond Weapon cutscene?
I just realized DICE has a huge music and sound department.
And the latest Battlefield games took a lot of space. Does that mean that the huge majority of that was sound and music?
@@Tarik360 It's hard to say if it was the majority. Sound is often at least a very big portion of the games memory load and overall size. But textures, especially high quality ones, can take up a lot more space.
If a game is able to reuse textures a lot, but includes a lot of unique music, sounds and voice acting, audio can definitely become the majority.
@@frogvibesgames thats pretty interesting. Thank you for the quick response
That kinda shows how optimized the game is as well
Wish I knew what he was talking about about😢
I should've joined the army
Combine a gaming pc and a Yamaha dgx670b. Then game devs only need midi and we could pick our own sounds for the games. Not a realistic idea, clearly, but a fun one.
I'd LOVE to see a video where someone tried this.
I'd LOVE to see a video where someone tried this.
If anyone wonders why Baulder's Gate 3 is as big as it is, this is why.
Thor using 32bit 96k Wav files haha
Can you tell me what audio compression you use (if any)? Are they WAV, or some other kind of lossless or lossless compression. MP3? Just wondering because I'm in school for audio engineering right now
He uses gamemaker which compresses files with ogg vorbis, which unreal and unity also use. Bigger studios may use engines that have some other proprietary compression. I wouldn't expect many using uncompressed wav files for stuff like music though, as the file size would get enormous fast (see: titanfall 2). If you're talking about 'unimported' audio not yet in game, it'd always be .wav though. MP3 is an old format that doesn't compress very well (compared to newer formats like ogg's successor Opus) and also has license fees/restrictions, and while .flac (a lossless compression format) may sometimes be used it also would take more time to decompress. If you're working in wav you'll be fine, I wouldn't expect any workflow not to start with a lossless uncompressed format that then gets converted into whatever the final software needs.
@@GrandHighGamer everything is typically started in WAV but it's enormous in file size. So compressed audio makes sense. MP3 isn't ideal either because of the artifacts that are created during compression. FLAC makes sense because it's a higher resolution compression, so I assumed FLAC. But OGG also creates artifacts I thought 🤔
@@George-q6y3g OGG is very common because it's not riddled with licensing BS like MP3 is, and it is quite comparable, if not slightly better than MP3 in terms of quality per bitrate (but it is definitely not lossless :)).
@user-cq5eh9zt8p Mate every Web radio ever is broadcasted using ogg these days. Sure the early days of the format were not shiny but modern ogg is mighty fine.
@@sig4311that's broadcasting, I'm talking about data compression which is different
Processing audio also puts more strain on your brain; the computer everyone has from birth.
Remember everyone, the demo may be free but you have to pay for the demo if you want audio 🙂
I'm always blown away at how sloppy game developers are allowed to be in the modern era. So many games are massive in file size and run very inefficiently.
And on the SNES, somehow Chrono Trigger exists on that little cartridge.
Maybe its time for a new audio format
computers with integrated graphics from 10 years ago? So my computer?
Maybe, just MAYBE you should use tracker files like xm?
Was gonna suggest this. Can't get lower filesize audio than this unless you resort to pure midi
Is this why games require 70+GB of download space ??
i didn't expect this game to have lesbian caracal, bara lion and emo sheep
if ur audio is taking the majority of the space in ur game, there is probably an optimisation issue
.