Slick Forums

What file size do you think is ideal for music in Java games? I'm making a few 2D Java games that will be distributed over the internet as applets. I find that the majority of my file size is taken up by my music files. In particular, one project has 3 songs that amount to about 3MB in total . I'm using the ogg format and I've already turned down the quality to an almost unbearable level. I'm not willing to switch over to MIDI music, but do you guys have any other suggestions to keep my game from taking too long to load? Is this really not a concern anymore with today's download speeds?

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Current Testing Machine:
Windows 7 x64, 4GB RAM DDR3, 3.3ghz AMD Athlon II X3 455, AMD Radeon HD 6800 series.

Midi on Java sucks anyway (Altough I would LOVE to it working. Imagine a zelda like game where music changes based on the position and so on), so don't care about 3 MB if you stream the ogg's. The problem is if you load the into memory which will take some time. If you to it on start up I guess no one cares

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Current Projects:
Mr. Hat I
Vegan Vs. Zombies
Projects:
RadicalFish Engine - Build on top of Slick2D, Ideas, Bugs? Open an Issue ticket!

I honestly completely disregard file sizes, although I have thought a lot about implementing a way to play midi files in java. I also think it would be pretty cool to have a system for that in place.

Someone just needs to do some JNI/JNA/BIRDJ magic imho Otherwise we could also make a format for Slick which hase different channels and a converter which merges different ogg's to the format. But that would mean we need someone really could at sounds programming and compression.

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Current Projects:
Mr. Hat I
Vegan Vs. Zombies
Projects:
RadicalFish Engine - Build on top of Slick2D, Ideas, Bugs? Open an Issue ticket!

My game contains like 40MB OGG music... as long as you don't load all of it into the memory at once it does not really matter.

Originally we used MIDI to play the music but the quality of the java soundbanks isn't that impressive... And OGG streaming works perfectly fine.

Nitram

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http://illarion.org

I suppose if you needed a more versatile sound library you can add the 3D Sound System to your project. This would be the same sound system that Minecraft uses. In my opinion I don't really need anything other than OGG and WAV support. So Slick's implementation is more than enough.



Wow. If that's the case I'm not going to worry too much then. I was just comparing my Java game size to what some people claim the average Flash game size is (between 1MB and 5MB) and became a bit jealous. OGG streaming is the way to go! Thanks for the feedback.

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Current Testing Machine:
Windows 7 x64, 4GB RAM DDR3, 3.3ghz AMD Athlon II X3 455, AMD Radeon HD 6800 series.

Yes, I already downloaded that system but had no chance to try it yet I#M not even sure if it can do channel. It might be a nice wrapper around the java MIDI API but it stills sounds bad. We now convert our midis to ogg's using timidity. There is no channel support that way but well... I don't want to do crazy stuff on my first game.

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Current Projects:
Mr. Hat I
Vegan Vs. Zombies
Projects:
RadicalFish Engine - Build on top of Slick2D, Ideas, Bugs? Open an Issue ticket!

I worked already with pauls 3D sound system. Its awesome. Easy to use, fast, really flexible. Plays MIDI, OGG, WAV and Speex. And its able to use LWJGLs OpenAL implementation for playback.
Actually a good replacement for Slicks default sound implementation.

Nitram

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http://illarion.org