Orchestrion Feedback

[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).