SKYRIMLE Kill The Orchestra - By alt3rn1ty

[aaltair]

I hadn't even considered before that music might affect performance. I'm currently trying to slim down on my mods a bit as  I have enough that I'm starting to get a tad nervous. I've currently got Epic Music Overhaul installed which is nice because I have my own music in there and the combat music set so that it only triggers for high level enemies, but it's certainly not an essential mod and i'm wondering, do you think your mod would benefit my system more than EMO?  I'm honestly not even sure if EMO adds further stress, or relieves some stress by "fixing" combat music.

[alt3rn1ty]

Sorry to say I cant help much apart from giving guesstimates .. EMO being a music mod = I dont even look at them.

 

If its just a music replacer ( ie, all the tracks are the same path and filenames as the vanilla music ), and they are in the same format as vanilla music, and of a similar size / duration to vanilla music .. Then yes my mod will benefit the performance of your machine. Vanilla music is over 3gb of data your machine has to keep juggling in the background to keep the music flowing ( fading in from one to another depending upon where you are and what is happening in the game ).

 

If the mod adds more music to the vanilla set, and / or the tracks are larger than vanilla then the mod will be adding even more data to be shunted around your machine constantly.

 

The game does not have to manage all 3gb all at once, but keeping it flowing is an extra burden on your machine, especially if you do not have a dedicated sound card ( if you have never heard of these, think NVidia Graphics card .. but for sound instead )

 

Laptops would benefit the most from my mod. The motherboards on laptops on average are less efficient at shuffling lots of data around the bus than a desktop motherboard is, and the sound processing is usually inferior to a desktop motherboard too ( even a desktop that uses just the motherboard sound processing chip instead of a dedicated sound card is bound to be better than a laptops capabilities )

 

 

And of course, you dont get to hear half the game sounds and effects with music drowning it out, or all the marvellous work for instance in the newly released AOS 2.5 :)

[aaltair]

Well, it adds A LOT more music and categories than vanilla, so I imagine it's more work for the machine than vanilla. It's probably a pretty inconsequential amount of additional work for my computer but I did try out your mod last night, played for a bit and found that you're right- it's so nice hearing the full effect of all the ambient sounds AOS adds :D

[alt3rn1ty]

:)

 

I just edited the description a bit again, previously it was a bit misleading in that it gave the impression the game loads all 3.15gb at once which makes my mod look astoundingly good in comparison ..

 

Changed to read :

"Thats 3.15 Gigabytes of data the game engine is partially loading and constantly juggling just to keep the music flowing. With my mod installed, the game only needs to juggle 2.94 Megabytes of data around

( those small 8k silent replacer files ).

Less load on your system playing the game."

[DoubleYou]

I wonder if setting the music volume to 0 wouldn't do the same thing.

[alt3rn1ty]

Nope, watch TESV.exe in Process Monitor calls for music files ( you have to filter out a huge amount of other files ), they keep on getting pulled by the game engine

 

( Mentioned that in the description )

 

Which if you think about it makes sense, the game needs all the music files it needs in the game wherever you are, for that moment when you raise the volume above 0 - If it didnt then the game would be in a bit of a flurry to get the required files "oops crap the volume just went up, just hang on a minute while I go load them all" :)

Preemptively it needs them to be loaded.

Edited May 31, 2015 by alt3rn1ty

[oqhansoloqo]

How much of a difference does this make towards possibly reducing stutter or increasing FPS?

 

I do enjoy a lot of Skyrim's original music though - it's not bad.  I just make sure to lower the volume down so that it's faint and not overbearing.  But if replacing it with the much smaller silent music files actually increases performance, then I may decide to replace most of them.  Can this mod be installed through MO and then easily uninstalled with everything reverted back to normal?  I may try this mod if it makes a difference for my performance.

[alt3rn1ty]

Difference will depend upon your machine, and how much you have going on in your installation = Way too many variables for me to give anyone a good idea

 

I do not use MO, I would rather stay with Wrye Bash and LOOT for all my file management needs

Testing NMM out is no problem because it can be easily installed / uninstalled when I am done with it.

 

I believe MO should use the same fomod scripting I have written for NMM users though.

 

Let me know how it goes

 

 

Edit : Are there actually any mods out there specifically written to be installed with MO ?, or are they all like mine, written with NMMs method, and MO does it that way too

 

I know MO has the capability to use Wrye Bash wizards, and NMM Fomod scripting, and as a preference it will use the NMM method when both scripting methods are present in an installer ( like mine has ) .. But I do not know from first hand experience how that goes.

Edited May 30, 2015 by alt3rn1ty

[oqhansoloqo]

It installed fine, but I don't think I noticed a performance increase.

[alt3rn1ty]

Glad it installs ok, performance is going to be very subjective, I know it helps my laptop.

[DoubleYou]

The uiMaxAudioCacheSize tweak seems fine and all, but I wonder why you don't change its buddy (uiInitialCacheSize) as well? It seems like there might be a problem if the maximum audio cache size is smaller than the initial cache size (which by default is half the value of uiMaxAudioCacheSize).

 

Also, I highly doubt that value is in kilobytes, and believe it is more likely in bytes. That means you're lowering it from 256 kB to 8 kB, which is still a valid tweak.

[alt3rn1ty]

 

The uiMaxAudioCacheSize tweak seems fine and all, but I wonder why you don't change its buddy (uiInitialCacheSize) as well? It seems like there might be a problem if the maximum audio cache size is smaller than the initial cache size (which by default is half the value of uiMaxAudioCacheSize).

 

Also, I highly doubt that value is in kilobytes, and believe it is more likely in bytes. That means you're lowering it from 256 kB to 8 kB, which is still a valid tweak.

 

uiMaxAudioCacheSize + uiInitialCacheSize

 

( ui stands for User Interface ? )

 

I dont know what those do, the setting I use is the same as USKP uses in its Unofficial Skyrim Patch.ini

( Thats a "Mod Defined" INI as noted here INI Files )

 

uMaxSizeForCachedSound=8192

 

I thought I was being generous compaired to the USKP setting which has this setting at 4096

 

 

But regardless of you mentioning a completely different setting .. If its confirmed somewhere that the setting myself and the USKP are using should also be raised because its not in Megabytes, but assuming it needs an amount in Kilobytes, or Bytes, could you let us all know ?. I am assuming I am recommending 8 meg with my setting.

 

Source Post = https://www.afkmods.com/index.php?/topic/3132-skyrim-useful-ini-settings/&do=findComment&comment=151096

 

Also mentioned using just 512 ( half a meg ? ) by RolloLG in this post = https://forums.nexusmods.com/index.php?/topic/778240-uskp-addon/page-63&do=findComment&comment=10946786

( Thats the sticky post for SMPC )

Edited May 31, 2015 by alt3rn1ty

[DoubleYou]

Sorry, I was mixed up. You see, the settings that control the audio cache in Skyrim.ini in the [Audio] section with their defaults are the following:

 

[Audio]
bEnableAudioCache=1
uMaxSizeForCachedSound=262144
uiInitialCacheSize=1048576
uiMaxAudioCacheSize=2097152

 

The u-prefix means the same as the ui-prefix: both are unsigned integer values (positive whole numbers 0 or higher). Prefixes are further discussed in the Skyrim Configuration Settings Guide.

 

If uMaxSizeForCachedSound is 256 mB, then uiInitialCacheSize would be 1 gB and uiMaxAudioCacheSize would be 2 gB. That's doesn't sound reasonable. If the starting cache for sound was 1 gB, we would all certainly know that by now. It must be in bytes, which makes much more sense and fits in with the other size settings known (e.g., iMinMemoryPageSize, iMaxMemoryPageSize, and iPreloadSizeLimit). Then it would be 256 kB, 1 mB, and 2 mB respectively.

 

I wonder what disabling the audio cache would do...

Edited May 31, 2015 by DoubleYou

[alt3rn1ty]

So that would mean I am recommending everyone use just 8k ? ( thats smaller than just one of my silent 1.1 second duration music files )

USKP is setting 4k automatically for the whole community ..

And SMPC is telling everyone to set 512 bytes as a cache for the games music and sound

 

So the whole community has this setting set to a value ( any of the above ) which would be more appropriate on a ZX Spectrum, Commodore 64 or maybe even a BBC micro ?

 

I cant believe the assumption of "Then it would be 256 kB, 1 mB, and 2 mB respectively" purely because of the games original music file sizes and sound FX sizes, a lot of which need to be cached initially ..

 

 

 

In the above screen, just one of the games vanilla music files is 23mb. A lot of them range 20mb up to and above 100mb each in some cases, so how does 256kb + 1mb + 2mb work as a cache for the vanilla files if your assumption is correct ?, you cant even get that one vanilla file I highlighted in a cache that size.

 

 

The only reason I think 8meg ( 8192 ) is a good value is when my mod is installed, chopping all the music files down to 8k 1.1 second silent files, to be cached along with the games sound fx files, which similarly do not need a huge buffer.

 

I can well believe the games initial settings are indeed 256meg, 1gb, and 2gb respectively. Maybe a bit excessive, and probably is cause for some sounds getting stuck in a big cache and repeated when they should have been flushed ( The original reason for USKP and SMPC recommendations ), but they are not so excessive to be unreasonable for this game.

[DoubleYou]

You may be correct, and experimentation would need to be done in any case. I'm throwing it out there. If we recommend setting the one value so low, it might be wise to adjust the other values accordingly.