Tip: Cut your loading times by more than half
JamesZeppelin
Member Posts: 1,927
SO my game "protect your Nuts" came in at about 10.8mb and the level load times were insane after i added speech (main character has about 15 random sayings when you press fire)
*a large part of GS loading is preloading and converting the ogg files for gameplay so cutting these down is huge for that awful load screen
Plenty Vets already know this but here is what i found.
I had made my music and recorded my audio in garage band which natively records and saves in stereo. Since Game Salad converts to ogg and m4a i just drag them in and dont think about it.
A stereo file for those who dont know is really just two mono files.
1. SO first dragged my files into Audacity
2. used the option "convert stereo clip to mono"
3. While i was at it I quickly clipped off a few milliseconds of silent audio at the end of the clips
4. exported as as Ogg with sound Quality of 2 - Be sure to use the same name (after extensive testing quality 2 is fine for games)
5. Dragged them into GS (since they had the same name they replaced the originals making any changes unnecessary.
THE RESULT
my 10.8 MB game is now 6.3
AND.... my load times are cut down by around 80%
*a large part of GS loading is preloading and converting the ogg files for gameplay so cutting these down is huge for that awful load screen
Plenty Vets already know this but here is what i found.
I had made my music and recorded my audio in garage band which natively records and saves in stereo. Since Game Salad converts to ogg and m4a i just drag them in and dont think about it.
A stereo file for those who dont know is really just two mono files.
1. SO first dragged my files into Audacity
2. used the option "convert stereo clip to mono"
3. While i was at it I quickly clipped off a few milliseconds of silent audio at the end of the clips
4. exported as as Ogg with sound Quality of 2 - Be sure to use the same name (after extensive testing quality 2 is fine for games)
5. Dragged them into GS (since they had the same name they replaced the originals making any changes unnecessary.
THE RESULT
my 10.8 MB game is now 6.3
AND.... my load times are cut down by around 80%
Comments
One of my zombie games is very dependant on the stereo to create atmosphere with the music I made for it.
I knew my sound effects could be mono but I tossed it back and fourth about the music and finally decided that people giving me 1 star before govmg the load a chance outweighed the few who use headphones.
I think most gamers either just use iPhone to quickly kill time or makeup their mind about a game before they would ever put on headphones
maybe the solution is mono music in the lite version to make the sale and then stereo for the full
Either way personally I'm sticking to mono just for the load times bit it is certainly a matter of preferance
You guys should try it, it's a great way to kill all that time just laying in bed awake.
Does it preload ALL sound files, or just what's on the first scene?
If that's the case - or has anyone tried - to make their Initial Scene basically nothing, so that the GameSalad engine wouldn't have much to load on the start, then load everything as you move further into the game?
I'd rather have the user wait while they're inside the game, instead of starting at the GS splash screen, wondering if the application is going to load.
It was a huge differance.
I mean we are talking the diff of 4mb of audio.
I just checked out your website...
Very Cool career you've had / have
Some pretty big movies you've worked on... Although i wasn't quite sure what that star wars project was. Was that released in the states?
It still takes ages to load (as normal), but loading directly to a scene with a load of oggs is deffo much slower on that initial gs load yeah.
Perhaps you are referring to Return of the Jedi (puppeteer) & Attack of the Clones (Animator).
My web site is horribly out of date overall and needs to be blown up!
I'll soon move the fun stuff over to QuinnZone Studios web site and do a better job focusing on productions, like my GameSalad games for example..... whenever I get the first one finished ha!
I just meant "star wars, whats that?"
Mainly because I want to marry you now and that might scare you.
Hello?
QS
Dr. Sam Beckett never returned home...
Twitter: https://twitter.com/Quantum_Sheep
Web: https://quantumsheep.itch.io
In situations where you want high-quality audio, there's another option: the Apple CAF format. GameSalad will accept .caf files without converting them to .ogg.
With CAF you have a choice of codecs. At the extreme end, uncompressed Linear PCM (16-bit little-endian) gives you CD-quality sound reproduction and will load lightning-fast, but will also increase filesize.
Max is a good, free utility that can do batch conversion between sound formats.
EDIT: Please, continue.
At least buy me dinner first.
Not to my knowledge.
@JGary321,
Sounds are uncompressed before being loaded into memory, and basically the process takes longer for heavily-compressed formats like .ogg. CAF gives you options for lighter compression (or none at all with straight Linear PCM), resulting in larger filesize but faster load times.
Once your game starts there shouldn't be a difference in resource use.
It also only has 4 scenes with 12 actors max.
Biggest complaint?
Loading times.......it wouldnt be so bad if it had long loading times once but every time you restart is a bit too much imo.
Darren.
With Mozart To Infinity, I'm pushing 96 - 272 audio files in a single scene. With .ogg, I managed to get it to work only on the 3GS. Even the 3G crashed out.
Thanks to the insider tip from Cobra, I switched over to .caf without changing the code and I confirm that it now works not only with the 3G but all the way down to the 1st gen iPod Touch! How's that for great optimization?
For those that are interested, I used the command-line 'afconvert' to convert all my 272 audio files to .caf (stereo => mono, aac data). It would have been too tedious to use Audacity and even Max has some conversion limitations.