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Sound mods vs. game speed ???


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I noticed that after installing the different sound mods (7 of them) the game started to crawl----really slow. I removed all the sound mods from the z-file the game is now OK.

I played a saved QB (tiny)... with the sound mods installed the game was very sluggish and choppy. After removing the sond mod playing the same QB scenario the game was smooth and flowed nicely.

Graphics mods (ie..uniforms, vehicles and explosions, etc.) does not seem to affect the game speed.

Has anyone else have the same experience?

Thanks

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No firsthand experience with sound mods, Stingray, but my guess is that the modded files are quite a bit bigger than the originals and therefore eating more of your system memory, which would slow the game down if your specs are comparatively low (say, 1GB RAM or even less?).

Texture mods have to be the same size as the originals by definition, I believe, and therefore will make no difference...at least that would be true for uniforms, terrain and skins for vehicles, don't know about muzzle flashes and the like.

Just my uninformed two cents, though.

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Stingray,

I've had similar performance issues after installing the AKD Sound Mod. However, instead of crawling, my computer gets 'choppy'. In a game situation where the bullets and shells are filling the air, the action and the game clock will freeze for a number of seconds and pick back up after a few seconds. Once it picks back up, the game clock has advanced up to 10-15sec and must be 'rewound' to see what happened. A little annoying, but not intolerable...

2.66Ghz,1.5G RAM, 512MB Video card

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Haven't noticed issues on my end (2 gb RAM), but I'll look into making an "AKD Sound Mod Lite." Many individual file replacements are larger than stock, but I think this is inevitable with any sound mod for the game. If there is a particular problem with my sound mod, it is probably related to the many different types of sounds replaced (not just "shots") and even more so to the greater variety of variations for particular sounds (for example, there are 7 different "bullet zips" in stock, but 17 in my mod).

I'm already cleaning up the standard mod so there aren't extra files where they aren't needed or don't really contribute much to variety, but for a "lite" version I might limit the number of files to the same as stock for an even leaner option. I can probably also trim a bit of size on some files without affecting quality.

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... If there is a particular problem with my sound mod, it is probably related to the many different types of sounds replaced (not just "shots") and even more so to the greater variety of variations for particular sounds (for example, there are 7 different "bullet zips" in stock, but 17 in my mod).

Interesting point, akd...

I hadn't thought of the variations for the same type of sound effect, but this may well be worth considering in more detail...It would almost have to be that the actual sound that is played for a certain event out of the available variations is determined on the fly by a random number generation algorithm, which is something that uses quite a bit of computing power (to do well), and the calculations get more intense the more numbers there are to choose from as you have stipulated. Not to say for certain that this is the actual and only problem here, but it is my guess that randomizing from greater numbers for effects like 'bullet zips' (which occur a LOT of course) may well bring some rigs to their limits. Certainly makes more sense than my first guess, low RAM.

Random number generation is a REAL performance hog, in any case, and one of the more difficult things to balance for any application that needs to use it extensively. Like CM games for instance :)

BFC, any comments?

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