Orchestrion Feedback

[Kexiana]

I really like it when the devs take the time to explain the technical limitations and go into detail about what they did to overcome it, or why it might not be working to standard right now. Thanks for the explanation of it.

[Ecks007]

I am not a fan of how if you are facing a certain way the music lessens in sound. Maybe it's suppose to have a surround sound feel, I don't know. I only hear well out of my right ear so I notice when the sound is distinctively lowered and that happens with the Orchestrion while indoors. I don't like this at all.

I should be able to hear full audio like BGM just like I do on any map instead of having my sound quality dropped just because my character is facing a certain way. I hope this gets fixed.

[Gyson]

Greetings,

I would like to share a comment from sound director Soken regarding the orchestrion.

I appreciate the time spent on the explanation, and I'm glad to hear this was about performance rather than being an intentional "artsy" decision (i.e. giving the players an authentic radio quality experience).

But even with that explanation.. I guess I'm just not understanding why a very specific song can be played as background music for a zone, but any other piece of music can not be played as background music in its place instead. Music A in Zone-X is fine, but Music B through Z can't be done?

Because that essentially seems to be what is being said here. You can play the "housing theme" (whatever it's called) inside a house (which is just a very small zone, correct?), but you can't play any other theme in that house instead, at least not without jumping through all these crazy hoops for performance reasons. I mean, we can listen to the various mount themes, FATE themes, battle themes, or holiday event themes immediately replace and become the background music in almost any zone, but not the house because.. why exactly? What am I not getting here?

[Noxifer]

You can play the "housing theme" (whatever it's called) inside a house (which is just a very small zone, correct?), but you can't play any other theme in that house instead, at least not without jumping through all these crazy hoops for performance reasons. I mean, we can listen to the various mount themes, FATE themes, battle themes, or holiday event themes immediately replace and become the background music in almost any zone, but not the house because.. why exactly? What am I not getting here?

Probably because when they built the system, they built it with the mount music, battle music and fate music (as well as holiday music) replacements in mind, but the orchestrion was a later addition, and there was no "room" in the coding to replace music in areas where none of those systems (mount, battle, fate) were allowed. There was no room to create a new "layer" for the music, so to speak, not without breaking other bits of code and needing to recode more or less the entire engine. At least that's how I read the explanation.

On the surface, it seems like an easy switch, but having fiddled a little with the coding of various RPG maker engines, I know that things that seem easy aren't always easy ^^; Especially when you want to introduce new functions.

[Gyson]

Probably because when they built the system, they built it with the mount music, battle music and fate music (as well as holiday music) replacements in mind, but the orchestrion was a later addition, and there was no "room" in the coding to replace music in areas where none of those systems (mount, battle, fate) were allowed. There was no room to create a new "layer" for the music, so to speak, not without breaking other bits of code and needing to recode more or less the entire engine. At least that's how I read the explanation..

"..no room in the coding to replace music.." ? Please don't be offended by this, but at the risk of being blunt, I've worked as video-game developer for more years than I care to admit and your statement above makes no logical sense.

[Tuufless]

I mean, we can listen to the various mount themes, FATE themes, battle themes, or holiday event themes immediately replace and become the background music in almost any zone, but not the house because.. why exactly? What am I not getting here?

I might be wrong, but here's what it sounds like to me:

For quick playback, all audio is loaded into memory by the time you enter the map (which is what the loading screen is for). So, if you want immediate playback on the orchestration, all 47 soundtracks need to be in memory by the time the player enters the house, otherwise some waiting time will be incurred (though, probably not much) every time the player samples a new track.

From what Soken said, it looks like there isn't enough memory left (with all the other assets, especially on the PS3) to store all 47 uncompressed tracks, with quality as high as what we are used to. Hence, the sound engineering team had to compromise on quality in order to have all the tracks fit into memory.

[Gyson]

I might be wrong, but here's what it sounds like to me:

For quick playback, all audio is loaded into memory by the time you enter the map (which is what the loading screen is for). So, if you want immediate playback on the orchestration, all 47 soundtracks need to be in memory by the time the player enters the house, otherwise some waiting time will be incurred (though, probably not much) every time the player samples a new track.

From what Soken said, it looks like there isn't enough memory left (with all the other assets, especially on the PS3) to store all 47 uncompressed tracks, with quality as high as what we are used to. Hence, the sound engineering team had to compromise on quality in order to have all the tracks fit into memory.

I assumed something similar. But when you consider the level of design and activity happening in any given outdoor zone versus whatever happens to be going on in your humble home or inn room.. I am really struggling to understand the memory issue. At the very least the system should be more dynamic, as some of these music themes are quite short and have a smaller footprint than others (or some (smaller) houses simply have less going on inside of them than other larger ones do). And are the developers just unwilling to provide better audio quality for players that have more memory available on their systems?

I also understand that the goal is to get these songs to begin playing quickly, hence lowering the quality. Two things with that: 1) I'm quite curious to know how long it takes to swap in a new piece of music when it's kept at its default quality. 2) I'm not convinced that (given the choice between a small pause in the music to hear a song at its default quality versus destroying the audio quality for faster loading times) players would choose speed over quality. At least let it be a player controlled slider option (e.g. "Quality < ==== > Speed" ). Players who can't stand to hear a few seconds of silence whenever they switch music tracks can opt for the faster loading, lower quality music instead.

Having said that, that the quality of the audio is being reduced is only part of the problem. A lot of these songs are simply too darn quiet (and not just because the quality has been thrown out the window), a problem they don't seem to suffer from when being played as background music. I shouldn't have to adjust my sound settings every time I switch songs. And, of course, the directional aspect (which he went into).

[SavingPrincess]

This screams PS3 limitation.

By my calculations (assuming we're sticking with the OGG format used in game), with 47 Orchestrion rolls out there, to load every one into memory on entering the house/inn/zone, you're looking at about 235MB, which is basically nothing by PC/PS4 standards... however, the PS3 has 256MB of system ram...

... I know they wanted to have "each track load quickly" (on PS3), but the best experience for everyone would be have the previews (10~ish seconds of each scroll) load in at reduced quality, and then when you chose the track you (PS3 users) might have to wait 5-10 more seconds for it to play at normal BGM quality (PC/PS4 users would likely be instant, this whole "issue" is most likely about platform parity).

[Tuufless]

I assumed something similar. But when you consider the level of design and activity happening in any given outdoor zone versus whatever happens to be going on in your humble home or inn room.. I am really struggling to understand the memory issue. At the very least the system should be more dynamic, as some of these music themes are quite short and have a smaller footprint than others (or some (smaller) houses simply have less going on inside of them than other larger ones do). And are the developers just unwilling to provide better audio quality for players that have more memory available on their systems?

Looking at some BGM soundbanks I'm working with at the moment, a single track would take up about 50-60MB (uncompressed), so 47 of these would be about 2GB, well beyond the PS3's 256MB of system RAM.

Edit: I just noticed SavingPrincess made a much more realistic size estimate of 235MB, but the point still stands- you're not fitting textures, model data, etc, in 21MB.

Of course, compression would reduce its footprint by a sizeable amount, but to fit all that plus other assets would require one heckuva compression algorithm.

Another (likely) thing is that way back when v2.0 was in preproduction and memory budgets were being planned out, they probably didn't anticipate needing that large an audio budget. Fast forward to today, you're not changing budget allocations, so that's what Soken has to work with.

[Noxifer]

"..no room in the coding to replace music.." ? Please don't be offended by this, but at the risk of being blunt, I've worked as video-game developer for more years than I care to admit and your statement above makes no logical sense.

From what Soken said, it looks like there isn't enough memory left

Yeah, sorry for clumsy phrasing, but that's pretty much what I meant ^^;
(Not to mention that sometimes you find you've programmed yourself into a corner, and that to change one bit of coding you realize you'll have to change all the bits of coding referencing to that particular bit of coding, and it turns into a much bigger project than you wanted/expected.)