ThunderGraft Now Undead

[bajadulce]

Sweet!  Nice to see developers continue to polish their work.  Thundergraft is a great plugin, but those logged .txt files were like spinach on your teeth when you're trying to impress your date. 

Also, relating to a similar plugin,  maybe you can persuade SFlare to fix her Playlist plugin as well?  It too is a powerful plugin on the lines of TGraft, but also leaves a nasty error message on game,s exit.  Not a logged txt file, but a memory one.

~peace from a long time MPQDraft fan.

[Krazy]

Ooooookay, that was... enlightening.

Just had a look through Will of Atai, with regard to sound size.
Total size: 338 megs
Estimate of the amount of that that's music/sounds: 330 megs
Average sound compression: 73.5%
Estimated total uncompressed music/sounds: 1.24 gigs
Estimated total duplicate large sound files: 240 megs

Out of unique sound files (duplicates removed):
Mono sounds (44 khz and below): 5.8 megs
Stereo music at 44 khz: 528 megs
Stereo music at 96 khz: 159 megs (399 megs including duplicates)
Stereo sounds at 96 khz: 352 megs

Okay, so, what do all these numbers mean? Well, the jist of it is that this is a spectacularly space-inefficient mod. Almost all of the sounds in this thing are stereo, 44 khz and above. This is way beyond what SC can handle. SC outputs sound at 22 khz, and anything above that gets downmixed as the sounds play. Downmixing all these sounds ahead of time could reduce the uncompressed size by 647 megs (827 megs if you count duplicates), about 1/4 of that size compressed with WAV compression (meaning a download size reduction of about 171 and 219 megs, respectively).

Second, sound effects are generally only mono, and take up (unsurprisingly) half as much space that way. Yet in this mod about 98% of non-music sounds are stereo. This in itself could reduce uncompressed size by 176 megs (47 megs when compressed).

Combining both of these would reduce the overall uncompressed size (including duplicates) by 872 megs, 231 megs when compressed (download size); if duplicates were removed, that would reduce the size an additional 60 megs (16 megs compressed). All things combined, this would bring the download size down from 338 megs to 91 megs; ThunderGraft could then reduce it to roughly 39 megs.

Yes please.

Should I just use the download link in your first post or do I need additional files?  I never used thundergraft before and don't know the extent of what it can/cannot do. 

And yeah, this was my first real foray into the world of using sound consistently with maps.  I also don't know what the best .wav converter is for downgrading stereo to mono etc.  I tried using two different shitty free programs and both somehow ended up making files bigger.  Don't ask me how or why that is even possible, because it makes 0 sense to me.

My background is in screwing around in multiplayer maps, where sound is generally discouraged, so this is all waaaay new to me.

[Quantam]

Also, relating to a similar plugin,  maybe you can persuade SFlare to fix her Playlist plugin as well?  It too is a powerful plugin on the lines of TGraft, but also leaves a nasty error message on game,s exit.  Not a logged txt file, but a memory one.

I've been prodding SF to fix a different bug in the playlist plugin that I came across working on ThunderGraft, as well. It looks like it isn't compatible with Data Execution Prevention, which I have on by default. So I haven't had a chance to see the error message on exit

[IskatuMesk]

The playlist plugin also doesn't work with Firegraft, but I told her about that and she said she already knows about it.

[Taeradun]

Silly Query: Wasn't there some way to force a .scx to read sound directly from the StarDat.mpq file instead of having to extract it then add it to the .scx in order to save space?

Yes. Though I don't recall exactly how.

lol, thinking way back to the old stardraft days now, i remember some popup box thingy when you opened staredit that I think might've been to change the "path" it saves the wav to (ie. instead of staredit/lol.wav save it as sounds/terran/marine/tmadth00.wav or whatever) so you could do the old 'delete but not save' trick to remove the wav from the SCX's MPQ archive but keep it in the scenario.chk strings table

but I'm guessing custom editors like SCMDraft these days allow an easier way of doing it

[ShadowFlare]

Also, relating to a similar plugin,  maybe you can persuade SFlare to fix her Playlist plugin as well?  It too is a powerful plugin on the lines of TGraft, but also leaves a nasty error message on game,s exit.  Not a logged txt file, but a memory one.

You are talking about using it with FireGraft, right?  As far as that, I think I've sort of figured out what is going on between it and the playlist plugin.  FireGraft appears to be doing something nasty to the memory my plugin has allocated internally.  It might be freeing my plugin's memory on its own before my plugin even gets a chance to do it.  I don't know what could be causing that to happen, but it is pretty much something out of my control.  I could provide a workaround, I suppose; but I don't really want to "fix" something that isn't actually broken.  This is a FireGraft bug, not a bug in my plugin.

I've been prodding SF to fix a different bug in the playlist plugin that I came across working on ThunderGraft, as well. It looks like it isn't compatible with Data Execution Prevention, which I have on by default. So I haven't had a chance to see the error message on exit

The playlist plugin also doesn't work with Firegraft, but I told her about that and she said she already knows about it.

Both of these bugs/issues should be fixed simply by compiling it with the most recent version of my patching code (though the plugin will need some very slight modifications to be able to use it).  I'll compile a new one soon and upload it.

[mAc Chaos]

What does ThunderGraft do?  Compress things?

[Quantam]

What does ThunderGraft do?  Compress things?

To quote what I just added to the opening post:

For those who aren't familiar with it, ThunderGraft allows Diablo through Diablo II (including Starcraft and Warcraft II BNE) to use modern audio compression algorithms (those games only natively support uncompressed WAVs and WAVs compressed with a lossy 4:1 compression that noticably affects audio quality). MP3, Ogg Vorbis, and FLAC are all supported, as well as the other recent ones (the only common one it doesn't support is MP4). Save for FLAC (which is lossless), these allow for superior quality and less than 1/2 the file size compared to compressed WAVs, or about 1/4 the file size for the same quality.

[Taeradun]

lol I vaguely remember at one point you maybe talking about MOD/S3M/etc support??

nobody's really used those formats since even before StarCraft came out, and I'm not likely to be doing anything new with StarCraft anyway, but just out of curiosity, are those files are supported?

[Quantam]

Well this is huh. While I was right that Diablo-Diablo II do indeed set the primary audio buffer to 22 khz (which should limit all audio played), some playing around with the spectrum graph indicates it's still playing sounds above 22 khz (there is no cutoff at 11 khz for higher sampling rate sounds).

I wonder if this is some particular behavior of my sound card - the card simply ignores the primary buffer format when doing hardware mixing, or some such.

EDIT: Oh, and yes it does support module formats such as XM. Though I haven't played around with it. These allow, among other things, infinite looping, which I think would break the various games that expect ending points. I don't know if it'd work okay with non-looping modules.

[ShadowFlare]

It is also possible for it to not allow infinite looping, depending on the implementation.  For example, the implementation used for the Winamp plugin does not, as far as I know.

[ShadowFlare]

I said that updating the patching code used in the playlist plugin would fix the Data Execution Prevention issue and the issue that Mesk had reported to me, but it also appears to have fixed the issue bajadulce mentioned above.  I still don't quite understand what kind of weird interactions were going on between the two programs. lol

The updated version is now on my site.  It fixes all of the issues mentioned in this thread.

[IskatuMesk]

Awesome. Now I just need DoA to update FG to support windows 7.

[ShadowFlare]

If you mean the patcher, there is an alternative you could try out until a working version is available.  Did you know that SCMLoader can be used as a FireGraft patch loader?  You can use either the SCModLoader program, or if you need any MPQDraft plugins, load the MPQ in MPQDraft and add SCMLoader.qdp along with the other plugins.  If you use it with MPQDraft or want 1.16.1 support, there are features you will want that are in a build that I haven't released yet (but probably will soon).

[IskatuMesk]

Interesting. I'll have to see if camtasia wants to work and I'll give it a try sometime. I want to make a full montage of all of AO's units.