Music - Lowering the upk size

[MasterOfKings]

Hey all,

I've been looking at importing music (for the menu, and in-game background). I know how to play them; but importing them is a little.. well.. why do they have to be in .wav format?

.wav format is fine for quality, but it's file size is massive. A 2 and half minute track I used for the menu, in .ogg format, it's a mere 3MB in size. When converted to .wav @ 22050Hz sample rate (the minimum recommended); it's size is 29MB! (when at 44Mhz, it's 44MB).

Now, if you're going to have only a few tracks, it's not that bad. Hell, even a large game, if it's commercial, people won't really care.

BUT, is there any possible way to get better formats to import into upk files? So, the music ones are relatively small (such as .ogg).

If not, do you think it would be a good idea?

-MoK

PS: Yes, I know that it compresses it so it uses the same amount of memory as .ogg; but the upk is still the size of the .wav.

PPS: Off-topic, but when you use Simplygon, does it actually edit the mesh (so only what you specify is loaded); or does it edit it at run-time?

[Solid Snake]

When you cook the game using the FrontEnd, it will compress all data into compressed formats. The reason why UPK's are so large during development is that all development content is stored in the UPK's so that you can extract them if you lose the original files or if things need recompression or modifications multiple times.

In the case for music, these will be compressed into Ogg as you know. During development it will be whatever size the Ogg + Wav files are. When you've cooked the game, the Ogg file will be generated from the Wav and then the Wav file is stripped away.

The same goes from textures, the original uncompressed versions all exist inside the UPK's. When the game is cooked, the textures will then be recompressed into DXT formats and then the uncompressed textures will be stripped.

For simplygon, it does modify the mesh but the reason why you can perform this multiple times is because the original mesh is stored inside the UPK files. So when you adjust the parameters, it performs these adjustments on the original mesh.

Hope that makes sense.

[MasterOfKings]

Okay, thanks for telling me.

And yes, it does make sense.

-MoK