[George] Data allowance for sound/music

[SpongeJr]

As I continue to work on and experiment with Transcendence sounds and music, I'm starting to see just how much space is needed.

If you were going to expand on Transcendence sounds... say, having unique sounds for each different weapon a la' my Variety Sounds mod... how much space for the files would you be willing to allocate? In other words, how much would you be willing to increase the Transcendence download size in return for more sound (or music) variety?

Rule of thumb is that CD-quality audio is ~10 MB per minute. Transcendence sounds are monophonic (put on a stereo soundstage while playing), so this can be halved to ~5 MB per minute. Thus, 60 one-second sound effects at 44.1 KHz, 16-bit, mono would add 5 MB (uncompressed) to the download. My Variety Sounds mod has about half a megabyte of sound effects already, which isn't much, but I expect that to at least quadruple in size before I'm done.

Also, what sound formats are supported, or are expected? I know 44.1/16 works. Anything less than that is uncivilized. Can I do 48 KHz/32-bit? Is it safe?

How much will performance be impacted by having, say, 40 different weapon sounds instead of half a dozen? Is it negligible?

[george moromisato]

I actually want to move in the opposite direction: move things out of core and put them into expansions. There are some things to work out, but in general I would like to add ways to defer download of sounds (and other assets). For example, the core download might have sounds for a handful of key weapons; the remainder would get downloaded as an extension in the background. There is some work that needs to be done at the engine to do that (mostly to allow for easier overriding).

I'm planning to do something similar for music: download individual tracks in the background.

2-4 MB of sounds is totally reasonable for an expansion. The Corporate Command expansion, for example, is 4 MB. Wolfy's The Stars Beyond is ten times larger.

As for formats, the engine currently uses the built-in Windows functions for playback, so anything base Windows can handle will work. Unfortunately, this will depend on the version. Windows XP might not support everything.

[SpongeJr]

Alright... so I'll just focus on making sounds I like and not worry about sizes, and worry about how they'd get delivered to the player later when that stuff is implemented. Cool!

I'm planning to do something similar for music: download individual tracks in the background.

That sounds awesome! About music... If I can get my composing environment set up, I plan on trying to write a few pieces soon for various themes or parts of Transcendence. And another project I'm working on is a guitar cover of the OLD Transcendence theme (TranscendenceMarch.mp3 from ~1.08b and earlier). I've been keeping that project secret 'til now.

The names of some of the freighters generated leads me to believe you like guitars, George. I'll let you know if I get anywhere.