All Steam downloads are automatically compressed. It's also irrelevant. The point is that playback of uncompressed audio is indeed cheaper than playback of compressed audio.
Even when Titanfall 2 was released in 2016, I don't think that was meaningfully the case. Audio compression formats have been tuned heavily for efficient playback.
Games also can stack many sounds, so even if the decoding cost is negligible when playing a single sound, it'll be greater if you have 32 sounds playing at once.
I'm not sure what you mean by this. Encoding latency is only relevant when you're dealing with live audio streams - there's no delay inherent to playing back a recorded sound.
> Sounds like gunshots or footsteps are typically short files anyway, so the increased memory usage isn't that painful.
Not all sound effects are short (consider e.g. loops for ambient noise!), and the aggregate file size for uncompressed audio can be substantial across an entire game.
There absolutely is. You can decompress compressed audio files when loading so they play immediately, but if you want to keep your mp3 compressed, you get a delay. Games keep the sound effects in memory uncompressed.
> Not all sound effects are short
Long ambient background noises often aren't latency sensitive and can be streamed. For most games textures are the biggest usage of space and audio isn't that significant, but every game is different. I'm just telling you why we use uncompressed audio. If there is a particular game you know of that's wasting a lot of space on large audio files, you should notify the devs.
There is a reason both Unity and Unreal use uncompressed audio or ADPCM for sound effects.
> Titanfall accesses Microsoft's existing cloud network, with servers spooling up on demand. When there's no demand, those same servers will service Azure's existing customers. Client-side, Titanfall presents a dedicated server experience much like any other but from the developer and publisher perspective, the financials in launching an ambitious online game change radically.
Things changed _massively_ in games between 2014 and 2017 - we went from supporting borderline embedded level of platforms with enormous HW constraints, architecture differences, and running dedicated servers like the 90's, to basically supporting fixed spec PCs, and shipping always online titles running on the cloud.
[0] https://www.digitalfoundry.net/articles/digitalfoundry-2014-...
I was trying to point out that the decision to compress or not compress audio likely has nothing to do with the download size.
Titanfall wasn't on steam when it launched.
> It's also irrelevant. The point is that playback of uncompressed audio is indeed cheaper than playback of compressed audio.
The person that I replied to (not you) claimed "They said it was for performance but the theory was to make it more inconvenient for pirates to distribute."
Bullshit. This is not a problem since 2003.
And nobody forbids you to actually decompress your compressed audio when you are loading the assets from the disk.
This doesn't even pass the sniff test. The files would just be compressed for distribution and decompressed on download. Pirated games are well known for having "custom" installers.