CoD discussion

[Sud]

Well, you don't really have much of an argument either; your sitting on a 3 meg map, the size of a small campaign.

A campaign that small raises my eyebrow, especially since you don't have that battle.net 4 meg map limit to work with.

I'm not too worried, though. Even if I stripped all the custom content out of my map, I will still be left with a map bigger than dota, which still doesn't fit in your size constraints. A World Ablaze is 2 megs. Tides of Blood is 1.6 megs. Good AoS maps don't come light, if you want something with a 50kb filesize, you severely limit yourself. But that's your choice. I get complements constantly about the models I've put in my map because I have very good taste.

Really, I don't know why you would have a view like that. It's almost equivalent to someone saying "I'm not going to play Ryoko TD because it's not popular like Skibi". Get 2-3 people together on a team who have the map, and the download is piddly time out of your day. Boot slow DLers.

If you look around http://maps.worldofwar.net and other sites, you'll see plenty of flames over maps that are even 1 meg. After a point, it becomes a burden.

Oh yeah, that's the site where if you try to sign up to submit a map, it's broken and won't validate you, and when you email an admin (and several more) you never receive an email back in reply. I think I'll ignore anything that site has to say.

Yepp, dota is 1.8 megs. And still never allow DL. Dota well established and can easily be downloaded from allstars as well. Being well established, others are willing to wait. 95% of them just get booted. Usually by 56K and I.

56k can attest to the fact that the download doesn't take very long at all, as he's been in a few of my games. If you're not willing to wait a couple minutes, well, I can only shrug my shoulders. I can't make a 50 kilobyte map out of this, and I can't grant it instant popularity.

You can make a winning map without excessive skins, imports, or music. Perhaps one day you'll see that, and let go of some of the extras that just don't make the game.

The imports are only about 25% of the map's size, and they enhance more than their size detracts. Even with their removal, it's still left with a map you won't play, so given the choice to have better content or worse content in a map you won't play, I guess I'll go with better content.

There are lots of valid points here.

You have made one point, or presented one anyways. The map is too big. I disagree. There are two "winning" AoS maps out right now, and they are dota and ToB. Both are around 1.6-1.8megs. I have a version of Land of Legends that I believe is very recent, it is semi-popular AND it is 3.9mb, and it is still being played on B.Net, so I would tend to disagree with you that size is the amount of a problem you make it out to be.

Really wish I could custom tailor this to your specific needs, but it's just not a reality given what you're asking for.

 

[SD_Ryoko]

Its not necessary models that kill; those are relatively small.

Its the skins that come with it.

Did you know a 128x128 skin is less than 1/4 the size of a 256x256 skin? Even less at 80% the BLP?

Did you know that because of UVW wrapping method, you can resize any skin and it still placed on the unit correctly?

And you don't even notice the detail.

Sounds too. All MP3 should be converted to 64kps. You'll never notice ingame.

(Only Conan and his imaginary freind Jimmy plays ToB)

There is so much benefit to a smaller map. No, maybe not as small as I prefere, but smaller yes.

Less DL time. Less loading time. Less everything. And yes, there are many people out there (like me) who apreciate a clean running, size optomized map. Its not neccesarily 1 persons specific need.

 

[Sargon]

Those are very good points.

 

[Sud]

Did you know that because of UVW wrapping method, you can resize any skin and it still placed on the unit correctly?

And you don't even notice the detail.

Actually yea, Conan had made that suggestion. I was musing over doing that in the next version, hopefully it won't piss off the modellers who originally made the models.

Sounds too. All MP3 should be converted to 64kps. You'll never notice ingame.

No mp3s, I'm using heavily compressed .wavs, and in the lite version, no extra sound data is present. Lite version is composed of icons and models only.

I am going to look into compressing the skins a bit though, but it's not going to have massive reduction. I could possibly compress the icon quality to maybe 50% (all of them currently sit at 75%).

 

[Sargon]

You don't have any custom sounds in the lite version? But...but...it wouldn't be CoD without the noobs going "OMFG WHOS SCREAMING MAKE HIM STOP!!!"

 

[Sud]

I know, it brought tears to my eyes to play and Stinky Steven had no farting sounds. That's why I've been hosting full version T.T

I'm sorry but Stinky Steven without farts is like beer without alcohol

 

[SD_Ryoko]

I would like to point out, your base map file, with only required components, re-mpq'd, is only 751k.

 

[Sud]

Last time I checked it, and that was a while ago, it was 1.2

 

[SD_Ryoko]

There are also a little over 20 wav files;

Vexorians optimizer currently makes wav's and mp3's BIGGER becuz of algorithm

Mp3 is also much smaller

 

[Sud]

Know of any good conversion programs offhand. The ones I tried were garbage and slaughtered the sound files, not good at all.

Easy enough to see what the sound content is, full version size - lite version size = sound data size

 

[SD_Ryoko]

dbPowerAmp music converter is very good.

I dont even see the wav files in the lite file.

64kps reduces half, but you may not like.

 

[Sud]

lite = all sound data removed

 

[Rinpun]

Last update should resolve a couple of those issues,

1. There's a hint that pops up ~5 mins into the game that tells you the locations of the extra shops.

2. I've done a good amount more triggering, adding in a few extra scenes on the map, more flora, and a whole bunch of sound ambients for watery areas

1) OH! Well sorry then, I must've been too busy getting used to the game versus sqrage since it was my first game.

2) Alright, well as long as I know you're constantly updating the map to add fancier features, I'm happy

Remember: Terrain sets the mood more than sound ever can and it's a lot cheaper to place than sound. I'm sure you know that though

 

[Cres]

IMO the sound is annoying, but it doesnt really affect anything in the game, you could take out the wierd random noises that happen but the game is great how it is.
Edit:
The fourm (COD) looks very dead lol i dont think we have had a post in 3-5 days

 

[Sud]

Ok so here's my plan.

A few models can use some shrinking to 128x128 (some can't due to the fact Miseracord is using specific parts of them and they contain delicate details).

I've asked Miseracord to check over some of his models and backout the parts of skins he doesn't use. He's got a habit of using an entire skin for a single part (ie. a face, or a weapon) and that's wasted space on the rest of the skin - just black that part out and it makes the .BLP compression much more reliable.

Use new Vexorian optimizer, which should grant an additional 100kb of optimization space over the previous version.

These actions should yield a reduction of about 500kb I'm estimating overall.

For the version with sound, transfer those over to MP3s. Don't know how much MP3 encoding can optimize the sounds, but worth a go.

 

[SD_Ryoko]

I attached that file with your MP3's in it, in an earlier post already.

 

[Sud]

thanks, a lot of messages came in all at once

 

[Sud]

Those MP3s are identical quality to the .wavs they used to be as well, so very nice.

 

[SD_Ryoko]

Wav is uncompressed while as an MP3 is three layers of compression.

Thus a song is 3mb mp3, but 90mb wav.

In a perfect world, the wav in a map would compress down.... but they do not, they grow instead. Odd indeed.

I'm not sure if Vex is still working on that part of the optomizer or what; I just remember there was a compression problem.

- Wav files in the map and Zlib or buffer size make the map bigger. To fix this get a mp3 encoder such as Lame and convert the wavs to mp3 (this unless the file has to be a wav file - likelly when replacing unit dialog sounds)

This and resizing less important skins to less than 1/4 file size should do really well. Try different optomization buffers - like I said, winmpq got your 'neccessaries' down to 751k. I got those wav filenames from the war3map.j, so I was able to extract them from the opto-map.

I apreciate the effort as well, Sud.

 

[Sud]

WAVs are raw data, pretty much hence the reason they're called wavs, and the only reduction you really get in them is to reduce the sampling rates, etc.

Sounds like a ZLib bug to me. Most zip algorithms allow reductions of WAV files, though, there's not much point trying to zip audio or graphics files because there are much better industry specific compression algorithms specifically made for those types of files.

There's about two skins that are 256x256 that I should be able to shrink down to 128x128 without any real loss. The challenge comes in that Miseracord has this habit of using skins on his models for specific features. For example, his Crusader model uses two extra skins for the face/arms and hammer of that model. One thing that can be done for that to improve compression is to draw over the unused parts of the skin with a black color, because the more groupings of the same color, the easier job the compression algorithms have reducing the filesize.

For something like a 75kb 256x256 skin, BLP compression can reduce it to 5kb if you make the entire file black (it's probably just JPG compression or something close to that).

So I'm going to harass him to do that, otherwise I'll have to do it myself.

I don't think I'm going to get it down to 750kb, but I think that maybe 1.5-2megs is a reasonable goal to shoot for, without any real loss in quality