New Feature! OGG support!
Nathan
Member Posts: 1,007
Hey everyone, I just wanted to take a minute to inform you all of a great feature that we've added to the game for those who mod (and in general for the players as well)!
BG:EE will allow OGG Vorbis support, directly in-engine, both for SFX/Voice assets as well as in the music system! You should be able to create OGGs at any sample rate, be it 8, 11, 22.5, 44.1, 48, 96kHz or possibly higher (note: only 8 or 16 bit audio though), and the game will gracefully handle you dropping that into the engine.
For those not familiar with OGG Vorbis, it's basically like mp3 only better and open-source! Win-win situation all around. If you want a decent encoder, for windows I'm a big fan of OggdropXP - it's simple, no fuss, and has lots of great options. For every other operating system there are plenty of other options, you can check it out here: http://www.vorbis.com/
The way we had to hook into the engine (and still allow backwards compatibility!) is a little different, so let me explain:
-For SFX and Voice - create your OGG's and just rename the .ogg extension to ".wav"
-For Music - create your OGG's and rename the .ogg extension to ".acm"
The existing structure and method of implementation is unchanged, and fully backwards compatible with everything else already there.
Another item of interest as a result of this: the HQ Music mod by Erephine is now included by default with BG:EE, and better yet since we're working directly with her on a few things I've re-encoded all the original WAV rips in OGG form at decent quality. Something we'll look into is providing an additional max quality (Q10 OGG encode) download of the music assets for people that want to have the best of the best - it won't be included in the game by default for space considerations (remember: we have to cram this game onto tablets...!) but we still want to allow people the choice.
Enjoy, and if you have any questions about how this will work please just let me know!
BG:EE will allow OGG Vorbis support, directly in-engine, both for SFX/Voice assets as well as in the music system! You should be able to create OGGs at any sample rate, be it 8, 11, 22.5, 44.1, 48, 96kHz or possibly higher (note: only 8 or 16 bit audio though), and the game will gracefully handle you dropping that into the engine.
For those not familiar with OGG Vorbis, it's basically like mp3 only better and open-source! Win-win situation all around. If you want a decent encoder, for windows I'm a big fan of OggdropXP - it's simple, no fuss, and has lots of great options. For every other operating system there are plenty of other options, you can check it out here: http://www.vorbis.com/
The way we had to hook into the engine (and still allow backwards compatibility!) is a little different, so let me explain:
-For SFX and Voice - create your OGG's and just rename the .ogg extension to ".wav"
-For Music - create your OGG's and rename the .ogg extension to ".acm"
The existing structure and method of implementation is unchanged, and fully backwards compatible with everything else already there.
Another item of interest as a result of this: the HQ Music mod by Erephine is now included by default with BG:EE, and better yet since we're working directly with her on a few things I've re-encoded all the original WAV rips in OGG form at decent quality. Something we'll look into is providing an additional max quality (Q10 OGG encode) download of the music assets for people that want to have the best of the best - it won't be included in the game by default for space considerations (remember: we have to cram this game onto tablets...!) but we still want to allow people the choice.
Enjoy, and if you have any questions about how this will work please just let me know!
Post edited by CameronTofer on
54
Comments
Interestingly: since SONGLIST.2DA didn't exist in vBG1, there are a lot of unused entries within it. I've left them as-is for just-in-case-compatibility's sake, but, making this change will be good going forward (for BG2:EE).
There's the potential for great deeds and unspeaking evil.
I'm not sure what the point of having audio at different sample rate than 44khz is though.
Higher sample rates take up more disk on your hard drive. Especially back then, when BG came on five CDs, less data usage was important. The music runs at 22.01khz, 44.01khz on the soundtrack CD.
OMFG I DIDN'T READ THIS PART HORRAY!
@AndreaColombo: game wave files are compressed WAV format. They are really just ACM
http://iesdp.gibberlings3.net/file_formats/ie_formats/wavc_v1.htm
There are a few games which use uncompressed mp3s, but it's not standard. Probably helps keep sound theft down. :P
.acm is just wavc with an additional redundant header. And the music player couldn't use (originally) other than that. So now you can use:
1. uncompressed or compressed wav and also ogg for sound
2. compressed wav with acm header and also ogg for music
EDIT: Maybe the game unpacks them and dumps it in your temp folder.
EDITEDIT: I just realized that was me. :P I zip archived some game soundtracks and left them in the directory. I thought they were the only copies. My bad. xD
EDITEDITEDIT: When I said uncompressed I meant not in a zip folder, not unencoded. :P
@Smeuuh: Here's everything you could possibly want to know about sampling rates.
the TL;DR is: take half of the sampling rate, and that's the theoretical max Hz a digital audio file can reproduce (a Hz being a measurement of frequency, or pitch) without introducing aliasing, which is a type of audio artifact (mistake). Human hearing ranges from 20Hz to 20kHz in general, so, that's why hollywood plays back at 48kHz, and most high end audio has gone towards that playback rate.
If you hear about 96kHz and 192kHz - those are still useful, but, just for recording and editing for the most part.
Just another little question is her higher quality files uncompressed wave? (nothing was clear over at Spellhold Studios) Mainly asking as if its not, going from one lossy format to another... is not nice.
Erephine's mod shipped in ACM (a lossy format) but she was kind enough to send me the original uncompressed wavs - that's what I'll also be using to provide the high quality (Q10 OGG) music download.
No more questions from me.
It is possible that something could happen with Sam Hulick's excellent new music additions... blah, I can't speculate on that right now. Something maybe down the line?
@cmorgan Awwwwww yiss. OGG for the win.
Of course, with the correct codec...