There are a few things that bother me about the way sound is handled in LoG modding:
- 3D sounds that are not 16-bit, 44100Hz cause an OpenAL error and crash the game, so it is quite annoying to be a Mac or Linux user and download a mod made by a Windows user who didn't know (or didn't care) about this issue.
- Again with OpenAL, if it runs out of memory, you also get a crash.
It would be nice if LoG2's sound system didn't crash the whole game in cases like these. For example, if you stick with OpenAL (which is quite good, don't get me wrong!), I would like it if the game caught its out of memory errors and simply printed a warning on the screen; OpenAL itself recovers fine from them to my knowledge, it just won't generate the sound source it had too little memory for. For the first issue, the mod exporter could scan the headers of all included WAV files and warn the user if any are incompatible. Or even transcode them automatically
The other thing that bothers me is not being able to use Ogg for most sounds (only background music, which is locked to its level). So far the biggest example I have seen of this being problematic is Demiosis Domain. The author wanted more control over music, and ended up making all the music into WAV sound effects. The mod is 642 MB compressed. I estimate about 190MB of its uncompressed size is taken up by this music, which would decrease to around 35MB in Ogg format with decent quality.
I also wanted to do dynamic music in my own mod, implementing what would be essentially a MOD player, but am seriously turned off by the amount of space taken up by instrument samples.
Would it be reasonable for LoG2 to support Ogg sound effects? Decoding them at runtime seems like it shouldn't increase load times that much these days. Of course memory is a concern as well as filesize; maybe my opinion on this issue is just warped by living in an area with very poor download/upload speeds.
Sound & music limitations
Sound & music limitations
Grimrock 1 dungeon
Grimrock 2 resources
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Grimrock 2 resources
I no longer answer scripting questions in private messages. Please ask in a forum topic or this Discord server.
Re: Sound & music limitations
agree on .ogg formats.
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chaoscommencer
- Posts: 119
- Joined: Sun Jan 05, 2014 7:48 pm
Re: Sound & music limitations
Good ideas. Speaking of sound limitations, being able to stop a level Ogg and start another one under certain conditions would be nice.
Working on a dungeon that displays a massive collection of assets while sorting them into convenient reusable plugin format (concept from some of leki's mods). Will contribute some of my own models as well eventually and follow that with custom dungeon.
Re: Sound & music limitations
Oog format for all, or at least option use of oog for some effects would be very nice to have. Even if it turned out to be problematic... how about have the engine support automatic conversion of oog to wav at load time; (and/or automatic wav to oog on export 
).
What would also be neat ~as a user mod for an engine that supports oog samples... is a mod player lua script.
It could be neat to have a script that hooks into the monster ai for clues on what music samples to play next, and in what order.
Seriously... LoG2 could have the potential to be the next FRUA, or BTCS if they wanted it to be. Something I'd very much like to see happen.
).What would also be neat ~as a user mod for an engine that supports oog samples... is a mod player lua script.
It could be neat to have a script that hooks into the monster ai for clues on what music samples to play next, and in what order.
Seriously... LoG2 could have the potential to be the next FRUA, or BTCS if they wanted it to be. Something I'd very much like to see happen.