Campaign Creations

Quantam wrote: 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.

bajadulce wrote: 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.

Quantam wrote:

DrumsofWar wrote: 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.

bajadulce wrote: 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.

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

mAc Chaos wrote: What does ThunderGraft do?  Compress things?

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.