UFO:Alien Invasion
Development => Sounds and Music => Topic started by: PhilRoi on May 02, 2007, 05:56:22 pm
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Alex, I am told that there is no defacto standard for sound and music files beyond defining the filestypes:
.wav
.ogg
.wavs have many flavors on sample and mixrate. can we define a standard so that submissions have greater consistancy? You are a big contibutor and I'm all set to start working on some serious sound contibutions of my own. (sound effect wise...)
What are your thoughts?
Phil
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Wav's should be mono, 16 bit, 44.1Khz seems to be the standard around here.
I'm not too certain about the loudness of the samples however - in my experience the best way to produce a sample is to use the maximum amount of headroom without clipping - but this apparently produces sounds that are too loud for some people. I've been told to make samples louder or quieter on a purely subjective basis, even if the actual samples in comparison have the same average RMS some people feel they differ in volume. Personally I'd prefer a standard RMS volume level for all sounds with the game controlling the final mix levels... But since that isn't the case, care must be taken to ensure that a given sample's volume sounds right when compared against all other samples in the game.
For the Ogg format, I use Sony's sound forge to encode a 32 bit 88.2khz wav, and I select the "CD Transparent" preset which seems to work fine- Average Bit Rate of about 96khz.
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I don't know much about sound editing, but comparing sample volume by their RMS values doesn't make much sense to me. Unless I am mistaken, a sample with a lot of loud parts will have a higher RMS value than one with the same maximum amplitude, which has more quiet parts in it. E.g. if you consider a gun which is fired at 3 second intervals, its recording will have a lower RMS value than a recording of the same gun being fired at 1 second intervals.
Or am I talking nonsense here?
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Pretty much if you have a sound that has a really loud part then fades out very quickly, its RMS will be somewhere in the middle.
What I meant to say was peak volume - but it was late and I'd had a couple of beers :?
Ignore my crapping on about that.
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it was late and I'd had a couple of beers :?
Hehe, no need to apologise for that :D
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Funny how everything makes sense when you're drunk :P
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concider .flac format as replacement for .wav and .ogg. It's a lossless compressed format, normally 33-66% size of wav.
Though it's probably a bad idea to use flac in-game, it would be good as a source format.