Game Audio APIs

[Malmer]

[Malmer]

[Dan East]

2. Alter the MikMod sources; take out the volume stuff.<br><br>Jacco, could you indicate more specifically what you modified? Does that affect only the master volume, or does it also remove the internal mixing capability of the mod's tracks as specified by the composer?<br><br>Dan East

[Jaybot]

wow, this is old, i completely forgot about this. actually jacco, you were talking about saving space using .mod files; so i went through the .mod files you were using in lemmings, and converting them to .xm (and removed like 17 instruments from two of the files that werent even being used) and saved about 72k, which is quite a difference when talking about saving space on a PPC. Thats almost enought room for another XM file <br><br>you can save even more using .s3m (about 96K) but s3ms aren't as flexible

[Phantom]

Hm, I didn't know xm's are smaller than .mods. I use mods because they are smaller than .wavs. That's what I meant when I said 'saving space'.<br><br>Dan: I once removed sample volume stuff to speed up the library. The reason for this is that each sample is multiplied by the channel volume. At 44.1Khz, 4 channels, that's more than 160.000 multiplies a second. I figured it would help to remove those. Later on, I put them back, since it sounded too bad. If you have your own musician however, he could take into account the lack of volume control and do good music without it. That would thus safe time, while you still keep the advantages of small music modules that can have near endless variations. That's still lots better than a 1 minute wave file.

[Hosed]

I like how Hyperspace Delivery boy did it. They used ultra low bit-rate MP3s and play them back with FMOD. 42kb I believe.

-Hosed

[Richard Temps]

[Dan East]

[Paul]

[Hosed]

[Paul]

[Hosed]

heh, didn't mean to be. May have been a little curt, but it wasn't directed at anyone in particular.

-Hosed

[brendan]

Yep, mikmod is the way to go, I've got a .mod playing back at only 11KHz, mono etc, to drop cpu load, It sounds great.....

-brendan

[Dan East]

Here are some "benchmarks" I completed with the new DEXplor plugin (it's not released to the public yet - sorry). Playing Jaybot's menu.xm from the Snails game at 11khz:

MikMod: 7% CPU Use
FMod: 6% CPU Use

(After I downloaded the FMod player I found it already displays its own CPU usage. Its value followed the value shown by DEXplor, so it appears to be accurate.)

Now for higher quality playback:
MikMod 44khz: 23% CPU Use
MikMod 22khz: 13% CPU Use

The FMod player has no configuration options, so I could not get it to play at a higher quality for comparison. If someone feels like building a simple test player that allows configuration options then I'll test it. I don't have the time to build it myself at the moment.

So the verdict; FMod performs marginally better than MikMod playing that particular xm mod. However, I bet that with some optimization, and perhaps ARM ASM work, MikMod could outperform FMod - for free.

Dan East

[Richard Temps]