Unreal Tournament 2003, Now With More Ogg

Alizarin Erythrosin writes "Unreality is running an article today about a hands on preview of Unreal Tournament 2003. An interesting bit was on page 2, saying that Ogg Vorbis is being used to compress the audio for the game." A nice screenshot demonstrates some of the eye-candy.

Comments

I have a silly question

[interstellar_donkey]

Why would you want to have any sort of audio compression taking up CPU cycles in a game that is so processesor depedent?

These sort of games seem to work by pushing computers to their limits, so it just seems odd that they would include something that takes power away from graphics/engine, espically when it's really not needed. (standard CD audio can be read off a disk with next to no CPU usage)

Am I way off base here? If so, let me know why.

Re:I have a silly question

[gclef]

My first thought: Better to use the CPU than rely on disk I/O.

Let's face it: if you don't compress the audio file, you're going to be relying on disk I/O to get the file out. That's going to suck in a fast-paced game. If you can minimize the disk I/O, you stand a good chance of speeding up the game.

Re:I have a silly question

[RelliK]

Why would you want to have any sort of audio compression taking up CPU cycles in a game that is so processesor depedent?

1. Any recent FPS is not CPU-limited. It is video card-limited. (Except for really low resolution, color depth, and detail, but nobody plays that any more).

2. On modern CPUs, MP3s take about 1% - 3% load to play. I expect ogg to be similar.

In short, CPU usage is a non-issue.

Re:I have a silly question

[ryanvm]

Why would you want to have any sort of audio compression taking up CPU cycles in a game that is so processesor depedent?

For one reason - on 3D games the video card is usually the bottleneck.

standard CD audio can be read off a disk with next to no CPU usage

Right, but at 10MB/min for CD audio it takes up A LOT of space that could be used for textures, models, levels, etc. A half hour of music would waste half the space on a CD.

Re:Operation Flashpoint...

[tshak]

Operation Flashpoint... Also uses Ogg Vorbis - except you never saw that as a headline on slashdot.org

Ya, funny how one of the most popular games, based on the most popular FPS game engine, get's mentioned but a far less popular, niche-market targetted game doesn't get mentioned.

Consumers use MP3 because it has integer decoders

[yerricde]

Perhaps this will encourage the semi-tech crowd (the casual gamer type mostly) to use Ogg, and it may filter down in to the main populous who mainly uses mp3 right now.

People still use MP3 because there are pocket-sized MP3 players, and there are pocket-sized MP3 players because efficient MP3 decoder software that uses fixed-point (integer) arithmetic is widely available. The reference Vorbis decoder still uses floating-point arithmetic, which common ARM microprocessors cannot do in real time.

Re:Assult?

[Pxtl]

That's a shame... sounds like those gametypes all use the same maps - 2 bases with 1 "point" at each end, with a point int the middle for the ball to spawn. Boomball is a popular UT mod already - I'm a diehard player of that one - nice that a 3rd party mod is being incorporated into the game, although I prefer it in black flag mode, in which the ball is a graphically a more traditional flag - same gameplay though.

Assault was one of my fave parts of UT - its how I got my brother, who swore he'd never get into mouseaiming into UT. Coop AS was awesome, especially playing sniper on Overlord.

The problem with AS was a tendancy for overcomplex objectives. If they'd just made the maps have big red numbers saying "shoot me" and you have to shoot each number in order, then it all would be fine. Maybe include TFC style signs on where everything is. Instead you had to have already played the map to know the objectives - not good for newbies. DOM was similar, it was impossible to find the map points, and you never knew which name referred to which point.