Does music contribute to the RAM limit?

from Sins Forums

Title says it all. Fairly simple question. If music contributes to the game's memory (which it shouldn't), then I can't add any music. If it doesn't, then I can add a very large selection of music that is race-specific. Maybe 60 tracks a race or so seems reasonable, 20 battle, 20 peace, 10 upbeat/sad - if I ever figure out what exactly the emotion values correlate to, anyways.

Would like to know before I go through my TB archive of music and start building my soundtrack. :)

 

Also, if this works out, I might release a stand-alone music mod.

modding
7,255 views 6 replies
Reply #1 from Sins Forums Top

The memory will hold about 4 different tracks at a time in memory. You can use the dev.exe to see this. It is for the seemless transfer of music while changing position in the galaxy from troubled spots to quiet spots to battle spots etc.

It does not really matter how many tracks you have to pick from but the size of the tracks will matter. For example, you have 4 320kb/sec mp3 tracks playing in game will average about 20mb in memory or 4 128 kb/sec tracks will average about 12 mb in memory usage. The higher quality music will use more memory or very long tracks will use more memory than shorter ones.

Reply #2 from Sins Forums Top

Ah, I didn't know the game supported 320kbps even. Alright, all that makes perfect sense. Thanks, bro!

Time to begin arranging my colossal soundtrack. Oh yes.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tShnpRA1WCY

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Reply #3 from Sins Forums Top

i have tested all types of sound files and so far no problems with WAVs, MP3s and OGGs of different quality. I do like mp3 better for the music, it's easier to play outside the game and easier IDE tag editing.

I also removed all the shared music and gave each race a list of 20 or so mp3 tracks specific to each race.

Reply #4 from Sins Forums Top

I don't think most people would have issues playing ogg files. At least, I'd hope not. I'll probably just leave them as mp3 though. Some of them are already ogg files, but I'll probably end up converting them anyways just to save on space.

I was figuring I'd have to batch convert everything down to 128kbps but now I don't need to do that. Excellent.

Between the music and my insane amount of custom SFX and voice acting I'll be doing this will end up being pretty big. I'm a little concerned about the entry limits for the SFX files. Luckily I can just remove all of the vanilla stuff when I get to it and cannibalize all 2,000 SFX entries, which I'm sure I'll need every single one of.

I'm not a graphics artist, but sound engineering and voice acting are my playgrounds.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TT0LI8A4E10

Reply #5 from Sins Forums Top

128kb/sec oggs are almost exact to 128kb/sec mp3. I think the only difference is ogg is an open source free codec but I cant get media player to get an ogg codec. I can play oggs with winamp or media player classic and I suspect vlc player will play oggs as well.

enum { MAX_SOUNDDATA = 2000 };
enum { MAX_SOUNDIDS_PER_TYPE = 6 };

static const int MAXNUMALTERNATES = 4; //sound alternates

Not bad voice acting at all. Can you do me a few Klingon and Borg?

Remember that voice and other effects must be mono or 1 channel or SoaSE will play the over 1 speaker only.

http://soase.weebly.com/sound.html

Reply #6 from Sins Forums Top

Yeah, I ran into the channel problem early into my implementation of sounds. Easy to fix. I believe I fixed some of those for that strek mod itself, actually. I remember working on several of the sounds for the project and cleaning a lot of stuff, including Borg voices that had some nature of static in them that I fixed.

 

I can't really take requests for voices (at least not ones that expect to be timely) because of the immense amount of work I need to do all over the place including regular casting/commentating of games like Starcraft 2. If you really need voices, and am willing to wait, send me a PM with specific information. Borg would be easy, Klingon probably wouldn't be much different than my Anahn voices (See Episode 0). But anything is "easy" so long as my depression isn't suffocating me, which it has been for the last several months.