Opus in TDM?

[kano]

Opus is a new (open) audio codec with shockingly good sound quality at low bitrates. Speech is pretty much transparent at 32kbps. Would it be worth converting the vocals and sounds in TDM to Opus to reduce the size of the game, saving some bandwidth and disk space?

 

This should only be considered if you still have the initial uncompressed sounds around, as converting one lossy format to another is generally a bad idea, since you now have two generation losses in quality.

Edited January 2, 2019 by kano

[jaxa]

Alternatively, use the same or somewhat lower bitrate for Opus if a lossy format is currently used.

 

I'm not sure that sound is taking up a significant amount of disk space though.

Edited January 2, 2019 by jaxa

[STiFU]

Our sounds folder is currently 624 MB unzipped. I guess that's fine, isn't it? I also think it's not worth the hassle, tracking down all original sound files, reconverting them to the appropriate format, changing all sound shaders etc.

[OrbWeaver]

Our sounds folder is currently 624 MB unzipped. I guess that's fine, isn't it? I also think it's not worth the hassle, tracking down all original sound files, reconverting them to the appropriate format, changing all sound shaders etc.

 

And by far the largest contributors to that 624MB are likely to be ambient or environmental sounds, not speech. Last time I looked (which was admittedly years ago), many of the OGG files were encoded at a hugely wasteful quality=10, but we didn't even have the original WAV files in order to re-export them at a more sensible bitrate.

 

Opus is great for internet telephony, where intelligibility and low-latency are more important than audio fidelity, but I can't see much reason to switch to it for TDM unless there are a simply gigantic number of voice recordings.