Gravitus - 8bit-wars comp entry

[Morpheus]

The main reason for its size is the music, even though they are chip tunes, they are mp3s, which stored as Wavs in the data file.

true ... one of the main reasons why I had to compress my audio to hell and back in order keep the overall size down, doing so can also enhance/improve loading times in some case's.

I did try to compress them more but they started to loose some of the crispness. To me 140mb isn't really a lot of space, even considering I am running on a SSD drive. Some games written in other packages are half this size for a "Hello World" app, so I'm not going to moan that much about that. The music actually works out at 96.1 mb, the graphics are 1.2 mb. The rest is made up of code and the back end engine.

I've made a Hello World app, just out of curiosity and that comes out a 2.1 mb. So the engine looks like its pretty efficient at what it's doing.

[Xerra]

I was curious about file sizes after I read this so I had a look at my game to see what kind of size it was.

The Mac zip file is 30mb - around 43mb when uncompressed.
Of this there's around 10mb of music, around 600k of graphics stuff outside of logos and around 700k in sound effects.

Probably not too bad as my game only had two music tracks and four levels of tiles that only scrolled up the screen whereas Gravitus had 12 or so which were all multi-directional scrolling.

So Gamemaker 2 has a bit of stuff behind the scenes which you can't really work around but it's music that takes up far more file space than anything else.

What's actually embarrassing is me finding a piece of music in my assets folder that I'd intended to use for the InvadeAload section of my game and forgot to actually put it in....

As for downloading a 130mb game being an issue for modem users. Seriously, Derron? Sure, maybe there are some out there somewhere but I doubt any of us lot really need to worry about the file size. Unless your broadband is metered - which is doubtful.

[Derron]

As for downloading a 130mb game being an issue for modem users. Seriously, Derron?

Nope ;-)

But: for TVTower I know of a user who pays for the traffic and is glad to get update packs only containing changed stuff (not a binary patch but better than nothing). Now as Adam made me aware Mac OS believes in the "update complete app-package or nothing" approach. Bah - it is like throwing away a set of screw drivers once one broke.


Music wise we could have saved a lot - if we did like Adam and used synthesizers or at least some kind of "mod/s3m/..." tracker music thing.

bye
Ron

[Qube]

I did try to compress them more but they started to loose some of the crispness.

320kbps OGG for the win \o/ - I found that works very well to compress and keep the crispness and texture across all ranges. Did you leave your music in WAV format?

But: for TVTower I know of a user who pays for the traffic and is glad to get update packs only containing changed stuff

Are your update packs incremental or can someone install version 1.0 and then download the latest update without having to do loads of "build up to it" micro updates?. I like updates to include everything needed regardless if I'm updating to 1.01 or 1.99.

if we did like Adam and used synthesizers or at least some kind of "mod/s3m/..." tracker music thing.

Yeah, Adam can provide us all a synth plugin + tracker app - The problem with modern mod type trackers is that one sample of high quality can be bigger than a full OGG'd music composition.

[Derron]

Updates are based on last full release.
Devpatches might base on previous devpatches (they are upped more frequently).
Most saved space is as I can skip the music files.


@mod trackers
Did not know that. Always thought such a file contains the used samples + instructions on how to play them.


Bye
Ron

[Qube]

@mod trackers
Did not know that. Always thought such a file contains the used samples + instructions on how to play them.

They do but these days a high 16bit rate sample of say a violin can exceed the file size of a full piece of OGG music. The older 8 bit mono samples were much smaller in file size.

[Derron]

Yes ... and which one would you use for a retro-style music? the 16bit violin sample - or the 8bit mono thing the authors of that time used on their ...amiga or so ?

bye
Ron

[Qube]

Yes ... and which one would you use for a retro-style music? the 16bit violin sample - or the 8bit mono thing the authors of that time used on their ...amiga or so ?

bye
Ron

Thought you were talking in general about lowering game music filesize down and not specific to retro.

[Derron]

Ahh no ... of course I talked about the retro thing.

If you were to use modern samples you might think about compressing them in a cool way: replacing samples in a .mod file with your HQ samples you provide only once or so (means you have 5 tracks with your violin but only one sample of it is needed). Ok, no one in their right mind would do that.
To save on disc space you could of course just stream your audio from the internet :-)


bye
Ron

[Morpheus]

Ahh no ... of course I talked about the retro thing.

If you were to use modern samples you might think about compressing them in a cool way: replacing samples in a .mod file with your HQ samples you provide only once or so (means you have 5 tracks with your violin but only one sample of it is needed). Ok, no one in their right mind would do that.
To save on disc space you could of course just stream your audio from the internet :-)

But then you are back to your earlier argument; what if you are on a modem 
or paying for downloads, this would infect be worse if you're steaming them?   

If I wanted my game to be fully c64 compliant I could have used a .sid file, but then I would also have to find a Sid player for my engine. Also I have no means to make them and I have no idea what is out there is free from copyright. So I chose to use awesome music for the game that sounds like it was from the era, intact the guy that makes the music uses c64,spectrums,GBAs and others to make his tunes, so its pretty authentic sounding.

So what is the actual point of this thread? Are you trying to say that my game is too big to be a retro game? 

Cheers,

Aaron

[iWasAdam]

it really depends on what you call a "high quality" sample.
The reality is most 'clean - nice' sounding ones are only high because the source method of sampling them in the first place was aiming for a very high quality.

What you really need is access to original 80's samples (which were very high quality) and very small. and then use the available tools to make them sound better. E.G. mono sample has stereo applied to make it sound larger.

If you are looking at basic synth sounds, then you are looking at about 512bytes of data for an oscillator (sin wave, square wave, etc). Wave table sounds will be (on average) 64 or 128 times the size. but this is still approx 16k or 32k!

Most high quality 80's samples come in at around 32k - 128k per sample. most drum sounds don't have any extra fidelity above 64k, they might be better sampled and maybe have reverb added, but they wont sound that much different for the extra k's used.

amiga .iff are generally around 20k for drum and other samples 16k-32k

If we look at the most respected sample library in the world - The Fairlight IIx. You are looking at 16k per sample! and the entire soundtrack of the 80's was built on those sounds...

Fairlight Series III single samples ranged from 64k - 300k

Synclavier (the other 80's workhorse), had a much higher bitrate and much bigger samples (usually stereo and very long with high fidelity) approx 1M per sample.

But As Derron suggests. If you start with a good sample, you can then resample it to a lower bitrate (this will lower its size keep fidelity reasonably close - if not identical). And you could reuse the samples in different ways to give you more 'sounds'

I've just been through a few game folders on my machine and in general you are looking at 21k-300k per sample with an average of 78k. These would all be 16bit CD quality. any more is just a waste

[Derron]

But then you are back to your earlier argument; what if you are on a modem 
or paying for downloads, this would infect be worse if you're steaming them?   

[...]

So what is the actual point of this thread? Are you trying to say that my game is too big to be a retro game? 

Yes, internet streaming would be contrary to save bandwidth. Was just for the purpose of having a low filesize.


Your game is not too big ...at least you gave the reason (audio) and this is a valid point. I just thought it is a good chance to have a little chat about the topic "audio file size".


bye
Ron

[3DzForMe]

.So what is the actual point of this thread? Are you trying to say that my game is too big to be a retro game? 
   

Nope, not too big, merely observations