New Heavenly Sword Info (screens included)

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Sounds like they're just wasting space because of Blu Ray then.
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Well, I guess if it's going to be on BR anyway, it's not really "wasting" space. In the case of uncompressed audio there's nothing that can be done, is there?
 
That's ignoring of course the additional bandwidth and time wasted getting it off the media and mixed into the game. Not that we should care about such things as gamers. Developers on the other hand might feel differently.
 
Rockster said:
That's ignoring of course the additional bandwidth and time wasted getting it off the media and mixed into the game. Not that we should care about such things as gamers. Developers on the other hand might feel differently.
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Waste blu-ray bandwidth? 7.1 uncompressed PCM audio is less than 700kB/s. Plus, what else is the game going to be streaming at the same time? The primary concern should only be disc space, of which there's plenty. Although I feel uncompressed audio is a poor use of disc space, at the same time, it's quite immaterial in this case.
 
Not to spark endless debate, but that's an extremely narrow view of things. One would hope that new level and model data, dialog, textures, etc. would also be seamlessly streamed from the optical media to a combination of main memory and/or hard disk cache. And depending on the number of simultaneous channels in the audio engine, dozens to hundreds of audio samples are being read, manipulated, and mixed into the music score as well, which could consume significant bandwidth and maintain an unnecessarily large memory footprint if uncompressed. Game audio over the last couple generations has transformed from synthesized sounds overlaid onto static CD background music, to fully dynamic environments of ambient sounds, sampled effects and speech, and orchestral scores all of which blend and morph to match the players in-game situations, and shouldn't be compared to a pre-canned multi-channel movie audio track.
 
Rockster said:
Not to spark endless debate, but that's an extremely narrow view of things. One would hope that new level and model data, dialog, textures, etc. would also be seamlessly streamed from the optical media to a combination of main memory and/or hard disk cache. And depending on the number of simultaneous channels in the audio engine, dozens to hundreds of audio samples are being read, manipulated, and mixed into the music score as well, which could consume significant bandwidth and maintain an unnecessarily large memory footprint if uncompressed. Game audio over the last couple generations has transformed from synthesized sounds overlaid onto static CD background music, to fully dynamic environments of ambient sounds, sampled effects and speech, and orchestral scores all of which blend and morph to match the players in-game situations, and shouldn't be compared to a pre-canned multi-channel movie audio track.
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I am assuming that the "10 GB" spec refers to cut-scene audio, where environmental mixing, working set size, etc., are not relevant. Interactive sound effects are a whole different ballgame...
 
Uncompressed audio has a downside tho: it eats up more bandwidth. So you don't always just waste space to store stuff uncompressed, because it lengthens load times and saps bandwidth you might have when doing multiplexed streaming.
 
Rockster said:
Not to spark endless debate, but that's an extremely narrow view of things. One would hope that new level and model data, dialog, textures, etc. would also be seamlessly streamed from the optical media to a combination of main memory and/or hard disk cache. And depending on the number of simultaneous channels in the audio engine, dozens to hundreds of audio samples are being read, manipulated, and mixed into the music score as well, which could consume significant bandwidth and maintain an unnecessarily large memory footprint if uncompressed. Game audio over the last couple generations has transformed from synthesized sounds overlaid onto static CD background music, to fully dynamic environments of ambient sounds, sampled effects and speech, and orchestral scores all of which blend and morph to match the players in-game situations, and shouldn't be compared to a pre-canned multi-channel movie audio track.
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What's streamed in realtime and has the bandwidth to do so was most likely a design-choice made much earlier in development of this title. If the sound files are uncompressed, then the matter of fact would probably be that the bandwidth is there to support it and was worth it in the teams eyes over the other features you mentioned above.

Besides, compressing data (regardless of which kind) doesn't come at a free cost. It not only costs time to compress the data, but also performance and resources. I would have to assume the bandwidth cost in this particular case was less an issue than perhaps the performance/resources that would other wise be needed.
 
Speaking of the bandwidth and loading time, will the retail product support HDD installation like other games?
 
DemoCoder said:
Uncompressed audio has a downside tho: it eats up more bandwidth. So you don't always just waste space to store stuff uncompressed, because it lengthens load times and saps bandwidth you might have when doing multiplexed streaming.
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Depends I suppose on if the BluRay player has an independent audio channel it can stream and playback without affecting anything else. So at least for certain background audio, it could work without penalty, especially if it has a hardware mixer with the Audio you generate yourself.

I don't know if it really works this way, I'm just guessing.
 
Rangers said:
10GB of audio?

Sounds like they're just wasting space because of Blu Ray then..
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The game seems to be dubbed/translated to 13+ languages, my native included, so that should greatly increase the amount of gigs needed.

If I remember it correctly DeanoC said they where using a SPU dedicated to MP3 and audio-mixing. I doubt they are using uncompressed audio on this title.

phat said:
7.1 uncompressed PCM audio is less than 700kB/s
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Sure that's not per channel? ;)
 
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