Question about Streaming music and sound online through XBL.

[thundermonkey]

Now I'm not entirely sure, but would it be possible for an episodic game to feature streaming music and sound over XBL to keep the main filesize smaller to allow for faster downloads?

You download the game, and as you play the music and voices are streamed.

Would that be possible? I've been trying to think of a way of getting episodic games down from their outrageously high file sizes.

 

[Nicked]

With high enough bandwidth of course its possible. Not terribly feasible I'd imagine.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

MP3's are pretty small. Saving 100 MBs seems neither here nor there to me. For something like Oblivion's copius speech I'd guess the lag on streamed audio would make it ineffective, plus the cost of servers would make the price of separate streamed audio something the devs wouldn't want to bear if they could avoid it. And what if you don't have Live!, like something like 90% of users (do we have figures for how many XB360 have internet connections?). Many reasons not to stream audio.

 

[aaaaa00]

I could see it being do-able for an MMORPG or some other game where you have a monthly fee to pay for the servers, and the user pretty much has to have broadband to play in the first place.

Cutscenes might be practical to stream, if you're willing to put up with 700k lo-res cutscenes.

Still, not quite practical yet I think.

 

[scooby_dooby]

MP3's are pretty small. Saving 100 MBs seems neither here nor there to me. For something like Oblivion's copius speech I'd guess the lag on streamed audio would make it ineffective, plus the cost of servers would make the price of separate streamed audio something the devs wouldn't want to bear if they could avoid it. And what if you don't have Live!, like something like 90% of users (do we have figures for how many XB360 have internet connections?). Many reasons not to stream audio.

audio makes up a solid 1/3 of almost every current gen game I have ever looked at, sometimes more but rarely less.

I don't see why they would do this though, or why there's any concern about the size of the download, even if it's 3-4GB it's a 1time download, and you can simply start it before you leave for work, or before you goto bed.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

Where do you have access to file sizes in games? Are these just discs you've looked at on PC? An hour of audio can be compressed to 50 Mb at good quality, much less at acceptable quality, so a third of a game's content, perhaps a gig, is either an extreme amount of audio (20 hours) or it's uncompressed as a stram-from-disc audio track.

Regardless, XB360 will have compressed audio as it has hardware WMA decompression. There's no reason to believe PS3 won't use compression either. So anyone supplying audio for games on download would be unlikely to be including several hundred megabytes of audio files. All Nintendo's downloadable content will be 1980's games so no worries there

 

[scooby_dooby]

Well....I FTP into my XBOX

 

[thundermonkey]

I was talking more about a truly episodic game. Singular stories, crammed into "episodes" of a game series, with an overarching storyline. The episodes costing $5-$10 for two and a half hours of gameplay and story. All finished before the release of the first "episode". Each episode is released weekly. Put it on XBL Arcade.

What I was asking was would it be feasible to stream cinematic audio as the audio intensive game I'm trying to create, needs to have a fairly small filesize. That way if the people want to play an episode, it won't take hours upon hours to dl.

 

[scooby_dooby]

Just for context, i picked 4 newer xbox games at random, here's sound/size ratios:

BIA EIB - .809/3.24 (659 files) 25%
FarCry - .679 / 2.51 (14 files) 27%
Hulk - .579 / 2.28 (2 files) 25%
Physchonauts - 1.78 / 3.8 (172 files) 47%

 

[Shifty Geezer]

What format are those?

 

[London Geezer]

Just for context, i picked 4 newer xbox games at random, here's sound/size ratios:

BIA EIB - .809/3.24 (659 files) 25%
FarCry - .679 / 2.51 (14 files) 27%
Hulk - .579 / 2.28 (2 files) 25%
Physchonauts - 1.78 / 3.8 (172 files) 47%

Why does it say 14 files and 2 files for Farcry and Hulk? That's a bit strange, can't be the number of sound effects, obviously...

 

[scooby_dooby]

Most of em are in random formats, like each game uses it's own format, it's probably mp3 but you can't tell by the file extension.

With the case of the hulk, it just has everything inside of 2 big files, alot of games do this, like store everything in huge DAT files. Other games wlike BIA just leave all the files seperate and you end up with hundreds.

It's really surprising how many sound files go into a game, also I think alot of people forget there's often multiple languages on disc as well.

In the case of far cry, IIRC, it had 3 or 4 files in the main sound folder, then 5 language folders, with 2 files for each language.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

Most of em are in random formats, like each game uses it's own format, it's probably mp3 but you can't tell by the file extension.

It's really surprising how many sound files go into a game, also I think alot of people forget there's often multiple languages on disc as well.

Good point, and one I didn't think of! How's that going to work with Oblivion? Will they have regional games, or just subtitle the audio?

How many different languages feature on NA release games? Do they include French and Spanish (French Canadians and Hispanics being the main contingent of non-English speakers AFAIK)? I always thought one of the reasons for the EU to come last in game releases was regionalisation. I guess this would show up on PAL XB games having larger audio files.