SKYRIMLE Kill The Orchestra - By alt3rn1ty

[oqhansoloqo]

Interesting - so without your mod the USKP .ini edit (even yours, which is 2x larger than the USKP edit) may actually be too low?  This information should be brought up to them (the USKP team) - maybe they can offer some info about it.

 

EDIT: I just sent Arthmoor a message asking for some info about the .ini edit.

Edited May 31, 2015 by oqhansoloqo

[DoubleYou]

That is uncertain. We don't know how the audio system in the Skyrim engine uses the cache.

[alt3rn1ty]

For the game vanilla sounds and music, I am inclined to agree ..

 

But then what do you say is a good minimum to set to stop the cached sound fx being stuck, this is a proven fix for that problem.

 

Looking at the vanilla music files and sound fx, I would say a couple of hundred mb is a good setting, when you consider one music track can take 100mb of that cache, you need other music and sounds cached aswell.

 

Here's another vanilla music file at 90mb

 

 

 

I can get away with having a really low uMaxSizeForCachedSound= setting, with the music files all reduced to 8k each, but the rest of the community with at least the vanilla sounds and music ( I mean we dont even know if that one setting covers both sound fx and music, we assume so because it has audio in its name, and its the only setting that could affect both ). I think it needs more experimentation on determining how low to go to get rid of the problem without reducing the audio cache to near useless amounts for the vanilla files.

 

But then .. How many users has the USKP got, and has that setting caused any discernible problem for the masses for as long as they have all been using it ?

 

 

I have no real good answers, apart from I am pretty sure the setting I recommend for use with my mod is good. Without the mod I think the game is probably utilizing the hard drive a lot more to keep feeding the game with sounds and music which are not being temporarily stored in a ram cache due to lack of cache set asside.

Edited May 31, 2015 by alt3rn1ty

[Greg]

This post from Arthmoor states that the default is 256MB and this changes it 4MB, so this seems to be some evidence that this setting may be in kilobytes instead of bytes.

[alt3rn1ty]

Greg see post #27, the links in that post, thats why oqhansoloqo is trying to contact Arthmoor and see if he knows anything further technically ..

 

.. I have known Arthmoor a long time, and he usually has information or details which are dependable for every decision taken, this is why I am reluctant to say its a bad setting to recommend to everyone. But logically I think its better if you have more cache, the problem is what to set it at to stop the stuck sounds for everyone who does not use my mod.

 

The problem does not matter for me, I dont experience it. ( I have a mod ini which loads later than the USKP one with my own setting, just make your own ini with the same name as something guaranteed to load last .. Bashed Patch, 0.ini for example, and put your own settings in there )

 

 

 

 

Edit : I have another consideration on this subject - I dont think setting a cache is so important these days due to the advent of SSDs'. If the majority of Skyrim users have SSD, and dont have traditional spinning platter HDs', then all the old business of seek times and the efficiency of a hard drive, how fragmented it is etcetera do not matter, and will probably not be a consideration as a potential bottleneck, because SSD read speeds are lightning fast ..

 

.. Except if you do have a traditional HD, then more memory cache allocated would be better albeit so long as you dont set it so high that the old stuck sounds come back to haunt you.

 

My laptop has an old IDE hard drive in it, so less cache = bad for performance overall. Thats why with my mod installed, reducing the size of all music files drastically with silent 8k files, I can afford to set a lower uMaxSizeForCachedSound= setting, but I still would not set it as low as the USKP or SMPC recommends, that would mean lots more constant loading from the Hard Drive.

Edited May 31, 2015 by alt3rn1ty

[DoubleYou]

Oh, I'm not saying it's a bad setting. I believe any setting that fixes a bug good. Just I'm uncertain that is indeed how the setting should be interpreted, and if so, perhaps even more might be gained by changing other parts of the audio cache.

[alt3rn1ty]

Well if I may suggest one of your ini wiki development topics may be a more appropriate place for continued experimentation

Process Monitor and VMMap will help

[alt3rn1ty]

And reference the Volume = 0 : Does that stop TESV.exe accessing music files

 

You have to setup a filter in ProcMon which Excludes everything but Read File access to Skyrim Music and Sound FX files ( it takes a while to do that but you can save a filter setup in ProcMon, like the one I have .. )

 

 

 

All the above read file accesses were streaming up that window after the volume was set to 0

 

Skyrim shifts a lot of sound data, constantly ( just think of all the voices around you, weapons sounds, foot sounds , animals around you, all the sounds in an adjacent cell which need pre-loading etcetera on top of music being streamed and swapped in .. Those default settings really are not surprising )

 

Edit : NB - The above with ProcMon requires you to have loose music and sound fx files installed as replacers for the originals .. Otherwise all you will see is heaps of access to voice / music / sound BSAs', not individual files. I have AOS 2.5 and all my own silent music files installed, which were repeatedly accessed by TESV.exe in the above screenshot.

Edited May 31, 2015 by alt3rn1ty

[Kessno]

Perhaps I'm coming into this conversation a bit late, but I had a question regarding this mod.

 

I notice that you mention the music files take up ~3GB behind the scenes, except this is after you re-encode all of the XWM files into WAV files (which also drastically increases the bitrate/filesize). The actual extracted size of the music folder from the Sounds.BSA file is around ~92MB, which is a lot smaller than 3GB. Skyrim itself is working with the XWM files and only shuffling around 1-2Mb music tracks from what I can see, they aren't very big at all and shouldn't add any noticeable performance cost. Is the engine doing something different that I didn't catch?

Edited June 3, 2015 by Kessno

[Octopuss]

I don't think you would notice any performance improvements with this mod unless you run Skyrim on such ancient PC which could barely handle Windows and with a disk from 2002 or something.

[alt3rn1ty]

I have been carefully wording the description so that it is not misleading, please re-read the orange highlighted / emboldened / underlined parts of the description below.

 

If the description is still misleading - Please advise as to how better it could be worded, so that you are no longer confused

 

 

======Technical======

 

This mod installs loose sound files in xwm format, with the same path and filename as the original files contained in the games sounds BSA, when the game engine finds loose files like these it uses them instead of the originals ( the same way Texture replacers work, also works on Sound or Music files - Reference topic BSAs and You. I Used xWMAEncode for the conversion processes, and used Audacity to manipulate the sound files.

The sounds are perfectly silenced, mono 44.1khz, duration 1.1 second, and then reconverted back into

xwm format with the files original name.

I think this helps the game performance slightly ( YMMV machine specs ).

 

Even with the volume turned down for music, the original music files are still being loaded and processed ( Have a look at images on this mods Nexus page, I did a screenshot there using ProcMon to determine this is the case ).

 

With small empty sound files its a little less loading / processing the game has to cope with.

Here are the stats on all the games original music files in one folder converted to wavs ..

 

 

 

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

( my small 8k silent replacer files ).

Less load on your system playing the game.

[alt3rn1ty]

I don't think you would notice any performance improvements with this mod unless you run Skyrim on such ancient PC which could barely handle Windows and with a disk from 2002 or something.

I own such a laptop, which is minimum specification for the skyrim game, sporting an IDE HD

The mod does help my machine slightly, as does my Vanilla Reduced Textures.

 

But this mods purpose is not about performance, is it ?

 

 

@ Kessno

 

Read the description again, I have just chopped that technical section out completely.

 

The performance aspect is only really a bi-product feature for old machines like mine so I thought I would mention it for others with such machines. Its obviously becoming a focal point for people wanting to squeeze more out of their machines to compensate for other problems ..

The mod is not going to benefit people with machines that can do quantum physics, have SSDs, and do the next milleniums weather forecasts on just one of its cores.

 

 

The mod :

 

Silences music you choose ( not all music .. whereas the games volume setting silences everything )

 

It allows you to still have for example Tavern music

 

It stops the tell tale bad creature is nearby alarm which the change in music warns you about

 

It allows you to hear more of the games sound fx, and other mod sound fx like AOS for example.

 

 

Those are the mods features, the purpose of the mod. Thats what you are using it for yes ?

Edited June 3, 2015 by alt3rn1ty

[Shadriss]

 

@ Kessno

 

Read the description again, I have just chopped that technical section out completely.

 

The performance aspect is only really a bi-product feature for old machines like mine so I thought I would mention it for others with such machines. Its obviously becoming a focal point for people wanting to squeeze more out of their machines to compensate for other problems ..

The mod is not going to benefit people with machines that can do quantum physics, have SSDs, and do the next milleniums weather forecasts on just one of its cores.

I think you missed Kessno's actual question, Alt. What you are doing and why makes perfect sense - it's the numbers and how Skyrim processes the audio he is trying to figure out.

 

Specifically: The XWM files that Skyrim is (presumably) using to play the music are compressed files... especially as compared to the WAV files you coverted them into. His question was how Skyrim handles those XWMs... IE, is Skyrim uncompressing them at some level to play them, such that the 2-3 MB files are now much larger than previously, and thus now constitute a 3GB file size?

 

This seems unlikely to me - you have referenced a few times that the system is moving around (at various times, I get that) 3GB of data. That number APPEARS to be based on the WAV files you converted them into, and not on the XWM file sizes they started in. If Skyrim is reading XWM files, and not uncompressing them on the fly, then the proper comparison should be from the original XWM file sizes to the new 'silent' xwm file sizes.

 

I'll look into the mod itself soon - the idea of the music not being there is an odd one to me, but I'm willing to give it a shot. Like you said - why cover up neat ambient sounds? Please, please, please don't read this as an attack - myself (and presumably Kessno) are curious about the technical side of this here, and not in any way questioning the value of the mod.

[alt3rn1ty]

Oh right well in that case yes the way I understand that is the xwma encoding has to be decoded to play them, which decompresses them and takes up RAM as it does so before the files are played in the original wav format

 

 

Its a bit like the Highly compressed BSA versus loose files calculations Ethatron did, it costs less in time to load and decode a much smaller file, than it does just to load a bigger file with less compression.

So long as your decoder is extremely efficient, which xwma is.

 

Compressing those xwma files further ( inside a BSA for example ) can actually make the game engine fail to load them ( depends on how much compression is used in making the BSA ), so decompression timing is critical for xmwa files to be played correctly

[Shadriss]

WOuld you happen to have a reference for that? It seems very counter-intuitive. It's not that I don't belive it, it's just very wierd sounding.