Titanfall's Massive PC Install Explained

Project_Nightmare said:
35 GB of uncompressed audio? That game must have an insane FLAC library!

But I am going to call bull on this.
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That right there is insanity.

I don't even want to do the math where a 80 minute CD is 700MB. How much audio is there in a multiplayer shooter?
 
I was installing this last night and thinking, "What the holy fuck?" 49 GB download for a goddamned port. Fuck it, I paid already - heres hoping that there's a good game under this steamy pile of shit EA just dumped onto my hard drive.
 
This is just another example of how Origin is massively inferior to Steam. 48GB? That's just unreasonable and they have the gall to make up excuses. And seriously, what computer has a GPU powerful enough to run this and a CPU too slow to decode MP3s (commonly used sounds cached on level load, stream the music). I'm a programmer and I really can't see any real reason to do this.

P.S. Uncompressed audio (44Khz stereo) is a bit under 10MB/m so this would mean they have more than 59 hours of audio here.
 
Quix said:
This is just another example of how Origin is massively inferior to Steam. 48GB? That's just unreasonable and they have the gall to make up excuses. And seriously, what computer has a GPU powerful enough to run this and a CPU too slow to decode MP3s (commonly used sounds cached on level load, stream the music). I'm a programmer and I really can't see any real reason to do this.

P.S. Uncompressed audio (44Khz stereo) is a bit under 10MB/m so this would mean they have more than 59 hours of audio here.
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How is this an Origin problem? And Steam is no better. It is also DRM.
 
I've never thought that the saying.... audio is 70% of the visual experience... to ring so "true"!

and Megalith win's the thread with his post @ 16 ! pure gold son... pure gold!! roflmao
 
You'd think the tradeoff of uncompressed audio is that it would use significantly more RAM or reads on the HD.
 
Quix said:
P.S. Uncompressed audio (44Khz stereo) is a bit under 10MB/m so this would mean they have more than 59 hours of audio here.
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if it's actually in stereo. I doubt that, though, seems like it'd be multichannel.
 
Well at Respawn they never heard about lossy compression :) . What is this nonsense I played Titanfall in the beta and hardly anything to suggest that it will suddenly cripple your 2 core machine by doing decompression in the middle of a multiplayer game ?

That leaves the tutorial mode and the voices there are so needed to be uncompressed?

What I'm hearing is that game developers really see compression as a problem while there so many stages of how to compress files for optimal extraction speed and were not talking about new technology were talking about stuff that was incorporated into stuff like LZH

And that was several decades ago ;)

and yes some features in multiplayer do well with uncompressed but that is hardly a reason to have it all uncompressed.
 
mope54 said:
if it's actually in stereo. I doubt that, though, seems like it'd be multichannel.
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It wouldn't be stored stereo or multichannel for audio effects. They would be single tracks and then played back positionally when needed. For example, "Play Gunshot X 80% in the left speaker and 20% in the right since the shot came from mostly left of the players current position" style of thing. You wouldn't pre-record it as stereo just to double your data stored with no benefit . . . unless of course your goal is to waste as much space as possible. Maybe it's music tracks that are stored in 6 channel (5.1) uncompressed at 192Khz 24-bit for some reason? Even then I think it's only 2.75MB/s or so, which is a little over 215 minutes for 35GB.

Also, for those thinking it's a anti-pirating scheme . . . I don't think it would work out so well, since uncompressed audio compresses like marshmallows in a car crusher if you package it up. Maybe it's all encrypted in some way so that it doesn't compress? Again, you wouldn't really do that unless your goal was to waste space.

What they could have done is include the compressed audio and then also included a free "DLC" uncompressed audio pack, or the ability in the game to pre-uncompress the audio in the install process or in the options menu, and also download the audio for language packs that you want to use. Of course, knowing EA the audio pack would be a $24.99 add on . . .
 
Just what i need, an online only multiplayer game that has an install of almost 50gigs, and its from EA...
no thanks.
 
Advil said:
Actually compressed vs uncompressed can make a massive difference in PC games. In many games you have upwards of 30 sounds playing at once. Not having all the dynamic range crushed into the same space can do wonders for sound.

Star Citizen is considering using either loss less compress or uncompressed audio. They though they'd be the first... maybe not.
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Yeah, I noticed the dynamic range was VERY good on my rig (Xense + ATH-m50), which is a nice benefit.

Also, for clarity, the INSTALL is ~50GB, the download is less, since the audio comes over compressed and gets decompressed during the install process. Which takes about 10-15 minutes on my OCd 2600k. ~34,900 audio tracks (most REALLY small, obviously).
 
gamerk2 said:
Yeah, I noticed the dynamic range was VERY good on my rig (Xense + ATH-m50), which is a nice benefit.

Also, for clarity, the INSTALL is ~50GB, the download is less, since the audio comes over compressed and gets decompressed during the install process. Which takes about 10-15 minutes on my OCd 2600k. ~34,900 audio tracks (most REALLY small, obviously).
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I noticed this as well, but there is still no reasonable explanation for PC users to be forced to install audio for a dozen different languages.
 
Okay, I was already turned off of titanfall when all of the gameplay mostly looks like a MW skin with mechwarrior robots (may not be a fair comparison, but that's what it looked like to me). But holy crap, 48GB install.

I bet the only reason they didn't get away with this for the console version was because they knew that console owners would revolt if a single game consumed over 10% of the usable space on their local storage...
 
What fickle bunch man. It seems PC gamers bitch for sake of bitching.

If it was console only you would have pc gamers bitching about how the game isn't on PC.

They release the game on PC and now they bitch because its a big install.

People will always find something to bitch about.
 
I noticed the install was 50gb and I didn't know why. Good thing there's this thread to fill me in. On a separate note, the music is mediocre and not something 35gb worth.
 
Does this mean someone can make a blank wave file for this compressed file and have zero sound with a functional game?
 
qbanb8582 said:
What fickle bunch man. It seems PC gamers bitch for sake of bitching.

If it was console only you would have pc gamers bitching about how the game isn't on PC.

They release the game on PC and now they bitch because its a big install.

People will always find something to bitch about.
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Maybe. Or maybe it's just a ridiculous thing for them to do? I mean lets compare Max Payne 3 or GTA 5. Tell me more work was done on Titanfall compared to those bleeding edge titles that justifies twice the size.
 
Quix said:
P.S. Uncompressed audio (44Khz stereo) is a bit under 10MB/m so this would mean they have more than 59 hours of audio here.
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Scale that to 32-bit and a 192Khz sample rate- and it's roughly 90 MB/stereo minute. Just under 7 hours of audio in 35GB. I can't think of any sound reason (pun intended) to use files that big, let alone 16-bit 44.1 Khz PCM for any video game.

My wavering interest in Titanfall has been quashed a bit.
 
This is an interesting subject. The install size is huge because they use uncompressed audio. The uncompressed audio is for PCs with weak CPUs. The Xbox 360 has an audio decoder that eliminates this problem. Now we're cooking with gas.

Back in the early 2000's, nearly every sound chip has audio decoding capability. Sound Blaster Live, Nvidia Nforce, and etc. But as PC's got faster CPU's, and Vista removed hardware sound acceleration support in Direct Sound, hardware acceleration was phased out. There are some sound cards that do this through OpenAL, but only Creative as far as I know.

Today modern CPU's are more then fast enough to do whatever Titanfall needs for sound. If it isn't, then we may need to go back to hardware accelerated sound cards again. I doubt it, so something seems fishy about this. Also, couldn't Titanfall's installer detect what hardware your PC has and then decided weather or not to install that massive load of unnecessary sound files?
 
Ashbringer said:
This is an interesting subject. The install size is huge because they use uncompressed audio. The uncompressed audio is for PCs with weak CPUs. The Xbox 360 has an audio decoder that eliminates this problem. Now we're cooking with gas.

Back in the early 2000's, nearly every sound chip has audio decoding capability. Sound Blaster Live, Nvidia Nforce, and etc. But as PC's got faster CPU's, and Vista removed hardware sound acceleration support in Direct Sound, hardware acceleration was phased out. There are some sound cards that do this through OpenAL, but only Creative as far as I know.

Today modern CPU's are more then fast enough to do whatever Titanfall needs for sound. If it isn't, then we may need to go back to hardware accelerated sound cards again. I doubt it, so something seems fishy about this. Also, couldn't Titanfall's installer detect what hardware your PC has and then decided weather or not to install that massive load of unnecessary sound files?
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OpenAL is mostly proprietary now, but there are viable alternatives such as FMOD that support hardware decoding. The point is there is no logical reason why they couldn't implement audio decoding at the hardware level.
 
Fyodoru said:
Are we really complaining about lossless audio?
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No, we're complaining about a 48GB install size for one platform and a 16GB install size for the other. Interesting that Respawn says nothing about the use of higher-resolution textures and other elements not included with the xBone release, which would make more sense, actually.
 
Reminds me of the old Creative Labs driver packs that came in at say 75MB. 2MB of drivers and 73MB of useless audio test files.
 
WTF, 35 gigs. Even if I believed every sample was a 7.1ch sample rather than the engine doing multi channel mix down, 35GB is like 4.05 hours of 24/192 audio in 7.1ch.

Assuming it is remotely sane, and each sample is mono and the engine mixes audi down to be positional, that's over 60 hours of 24/192, and well over 100 hours of CD quality 16/44.1 audio. For 15 levels.

This thing they have said.. it is not the truth. Not entirely anyway. I'm with the anti torrenting strategy crowd.
 
Correct me if I'm wrong on any of these...

  1. 35GB of uncompressed audio is equivalent to over 58 CDs (where each CD is about an hour of audio). There's 58+ hours of audio in this game?
  2. This is a multiplayer only game, it's not like they've got a single player campaign with lots of cutscenes and D-list actors overemoting, yes? Just how many different explosions and door opening/closing sounds and "ow - the Titan stepped on my head!" expostulations did they want to have in the game before they had to loop?
  3. They don't give you the option of "I have a PC built within the last 5 years, let me download the version with compressed audio (or English only, if that's part of the problem)"? Is that an Origin digital download limitation of some sort? Hey guys - different versions would accomplish the same thing...
  4. Isn't this thing built on the frigging Source engine? The same one I can play TF2 or Counterstrike or umpty jillion other Source Engine based games at like a jillion FPS in "crapload" by "not quite so much crapload but still quite a lot" pixel resolution?

Wow.
 
klingonscum said:
Correct me if I'm wrong on any of these...

  1. 35GB of uncompressed audio is equivalent to over 58 CDs (where each CD is about an hour of audio). There's 58+ hours of audio in this game?
  2. This is a multiplayer only game, it's not like they've got a single player campaign with lots of cutscenes and D-list actors overemoting, yes? Just how many different explosions and door opening/closing sounds and "ow - the Titan stepped on my head!" expostulations did they want to have in the game before they had to loop?
  3. They don't give you the option of "I have a PC built within the last 5 years, let me download the version with compressed audio (or English only, if that's part of the problem)"? Is that an Origin digital download limitation of some sort? Hey guys - different versions would accomplish the same thing...
  4. Isn't this thing built on the frigging Source engine? The same one I can play TF2 or Counterstrike or umpty jillion other Source Engine based games at like a jillion FPS in "crapload" by "not quite so much crapload but still quite a lot" pixel resolution?
Wow.
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#3 is the problem. They're forcing you to install the audio for like a dozen different languages, even after it asks the language you want to use. If I choose "English US" from the drop down they provide, then they should only install the English audio.
 
If I buy this game and waste all that time downloading it with a bandwidth cap also, this uncompressed audio should be so amazing I can hear enemy pilot's shit their pants when my mech squashes them.
 
What does compressed audio have to do with anything. Audio is not even remotely hard to decode for any PC. I have never heard of a game choking on audio. Even if it did what the heck would be wrong with MP3 compression. Seriously any PC can easily play MP3s since 1998.

There is something not being told here that is all.

Oh and if low end computers are the motivation then how does a 45GB game that might be going on a 64 or 128 GB SSD in a laptop jive with that argument?
 
PC gamers are there own worst enemy, and I would like to echo that PC gamers just like to bitch.
100 GBs of Mods for Skyrim ... not a problem, a 48 GB install for Titanfall leads to rage.
 
Draax said:
PC gamers are there own worst enemy, and I would like to echo that PC gamers just like to bitch.
100 GBs of Mods for Skyrim ... not a problem, a 48 GB install for Titanfall leads to rage.
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Even the high res texture mods for Skyrim are a few GB and they are an optional install. Not 48GB. Your hyperbole is wrong.
 
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