What's the overhead of a sound mod?

[DocClox]

I've been thinking about sound overhauls.

 

I don't use them myself. The vanilla sounds never struck me as particularly lacking, and so I've never really looked at any sound mods. That said, I can imagine how a good soundscape could really boost immersion. So I'm considering testing some of them.

 

My only concern is that I don't want to greatly add to the workload imposed by my heavily laden MO profiles. With textures and scripts I have a reasonable idea of the likely consequences of loading a new mod. With sounds I don't really know what to expect. Will large sound files hammer performance like large texture files do? Or are generally low-overhead?

 

I'll probably create a test profile when I get home tonight and see what happens. Still, I'm interested to know what others here see as the pros and cons of sound overhauls.

[phryxolydian]

In my XP, sound overhauls are much, much less demanding on your system than textures/meshes and my specs are amongst the lowest here at the forums so take my word for it. And believe me, you've no idea what you're in for! Unless you're one of those people that don't really pay attention to your aural environment well, I can't really relate to you as I am a musician..

 

As for overhauls, well, if you go for Sounds of Skyrim dungeons will never be the same. Never! You'll love all the eagles screams while you're out traveling the tundra with The Wilds. Civilization was the one I didn't really cared too much for tbh, but you can always hide sounds you don't like. The problem with SoS is that it only adds sounds over Vanilla and for an overall enhancement of reverb, footsteps, spell sounds, etc, AoS is really your best bet. I still miss SoS but you can't have everything and AoS has more scope overall.

 

You may notice that sometimes sounds will play slightly delayed, though. This is much more noticeable with smaller mods such as IHSS, so don't worry about it.

[DocClox]

Well, that sounds like a clear and ringing endorsement :)

 

I'll have to play with this when I get home tonight.

[Kuldebar]

What phryxolydian said, pretty low overhead. The only problems would be the older overhaul packages, some of those introduced some problems like CTD's, etc.

 

AOS 2+ is really well done, upgrades a huge amount audio with quality replacements and other tweaks, it can be supplemented with ISW if you like the sounds it provides.

[lazygecko]

On a whole you shouldn't need to worry about a performance hit as much as textures and the likes. But you should be aware that digital sounds do swallow a lot of memory resources just like bitmap images do. The kinds of sounds you should be most mindful of are ambient sounds and music, since these tend to be the longest in length and that's going to be the most significant factor in how large the file is. The most demanding type of sound mod I could imagine would be music mods that are in .wav format, since they are extremly large compared to the compressed .xwm format normally used. So that could end up being the factor that pushes your memory usage over the edge.

 

Sounds mirror textures in a lot of ways since you have to watch out for the same kinds of pitfalls a texture artist (or modeler) can make, where a lack of proper optimization can skyrocket the size with little to no visual gain from it. Silence trimming, stereo-to-mono downmixing, bit depth and sample rate optimization are all things that need to be accounted for when finalizing sounds for ingame use. I don't really take joy in ragging on other people's work, but Better Animal Footsteps is a textbook example of how not to do things because all the common mistakes are in there. 22-32khz sounds have been saved in 44.1khz sample rate, bit depth was upped from 16 to 32 bit, there is tons of lingering silence after the sounds have finished playing, mono sounds have been saved in stereo (some of the sounds are in stereo with some kind of reverb added, but that is moot when it ends up being processed through a mono output model that sound has been assigned with in the CK). These are all things that needlessly add to the filesize and make them eat up way more memory than they could be. Going from 22-44.1khz will double the size, as will doubling the bit depth, as will going from mono to stereo, and then there's the silence adding to the length while simultaneously factoring in all the previous things. This is the equivalent of taking a 512px texture, simply upscaling it to 4k, and then adding an all-white alpha layer on top of it for good measure.

 

These are the things you need to keep in mind for sound. That's also why I consider ambient and music mods to be the most at risk of being RAM hogs given their usually long lengths. Sounds of Skyrim seems to take these things into account for the most part.

[Octopuss]

Interesting read.

So are you saying we should avoid mods like JDR soundtrack compilation? It's kind of nice, but it consists of several 30-40MB wav files. What would you say the memory hit of such mod is?

[lazygecko]

Well, I cannot say anything with 100% absolute certainty since I don't know the innards of how Skyrim handles music playback and I'm not a very techy person. It could be that Skyrim streams the music and doesn't store the whole file at once in memory. I'm not sure.

 

I'll say that I think it's a shame generally in the modding community that the same care and expertise isn't given to sound that we have for visuals... Like the DDS optimizer tool. I've actually decided to do rounds on inspecting popular Skyrim mods that use custom sounds and see if they have the kinds of redundancies I mentioned earlier. Then I do my best to optimize the sounds, PM the mod authors and offer them to use the optimized versions in a future update. I just hope that the authors are still active and are willing to update their mods if they haven't in a while. I actually managed to cut the total size of the SkyTEST Realistic Animals & Predators sounds in half with no loss in quality and sent them to the author.

 

If this kind of optimization could be implemented on all mods that use custom sounds, it would free up memory for everyone.

 

Edit: I got around to checking the sounds from Pets of Skyrim and this is probably the single worst case yet... There are breathing loop sound for cats. It's an almost 5 minute long wave file, with an average of 30 seconds of silence between each noise. Having only these in practice very minor and negligible sounds loaded in your game is going to take up 13.5mb.I cannot stress enough how important it is to pay attention to these things...

Edited June 13, 2014 by lazygecko