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0 pointsmrkrabo8y ago0 comments

It will boggle your mind then to know that most games still have their sounds in .wav files, even the music sometimes.

It's very rare for a game to have its music compressed, unless the hardware can decode it on the fly (think wma on the xbox, or adpcm on the ps)

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stordoff8y ago· 1 in thread

It's a balancing act thought - shipping audio as WAVs trades performance for disc usage, which can also be an issue (e.g. Titanfall shipping with 35GB of uncompressed audio, which is a pain to download).

Also, I know a fair number of games that use Vorbis for music, so not sure I would say it's very rare.

mrkraboOP8y ago

It is common for music to be compressed, that's true. But sfx, almost always you'll see wavs for those. I don't think cpu usage is a concern anymore, I believe it's about latency. That's why music is compressed. It doesn't matter if music takes 10 ms to start playing, but 10 ms of latency for a pistol shot sound is not acceptable.

digi_owl8y ago

Dunno. I was surprised a few years back when i discovered that one of the Unreal games used OGG compression for its music.

This because a friend didn't know about the format but wanted to play them.

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