In Progress Art of Fighting: Trouble In Southtown 3.0.4

[O Ilusionista]

@Toranks I took a quick look and I already can see some issues.
For example, take a look at this:



You have an .ogg file - kagashin2.ogg - which weights 42mb.
Plus, its not a music file - its a 5 min long video file.
Why?

Second, your music folder weights almost 430mb. Why?


Again, I have nothing against you nor do I want to offend you. But looking at it, it seems lazy to me.
If you're interested, I can try to optimize this somehow.

 

[Toranks]

I've never seen game size as a problem, as I've always enjoyed fast connections and large hard drives. Even though my computer is quite modest.
If it's really that important, it doesn't cost me much to convert all the gifs into png or webm, and search exhaustively for more obsolete files (I searched at the time and managed to reduce more than 100 mb but that was all).
The question is will that conversion reduce the size enough? I'm not sure about it, it's not something I can calculate by eye.

Keep one thing in mind, I continued the game with the express permission of Jon Silva, who even refers people who ask him about the game to my YouTube channel to consult me. I always got along well with him and I don't have any problems with him or anyone here. But the feedback I got 2 years ago didn't mention the large size, but the long durations, slow combats, conversations with sentences that lasted too long and couldn't be skipped, unnecessarily long road stages, all that without counting the excessive bugs. Of course I'm willing to listen to suggestions from people like DC who have helped me a lot over the years here, the only thing I wanted to say is that perhaps you were criticizing the game in version 1.6 and not 3.0. He hasn't had time to test the new version, actually, It has been published for two days.

Another thing I have to mention is that there is a third version "Art Of Fighting EX" based on an old version of mine (I think 2.1-2.3)

 

[O Ilusionista]

I've never seen game size as a problem, as I've always enjoyed fast connections and large hard drives.

I was expecting this type of reply, really.
Resources are like money: just because you have a lot doesn't mean you need to spend it all.

What you may not understand is that, for those with a little more experience, they can judge a game by its size. Because we know how much a game weighs.

And if we see something so heavy without a good reason, we suspect that there was a certain laziness during the process. And this makes us extend this thought to the entire game.

it doesn't cost me much to convert all the gifs into png or webm

The game is so huge and waste so much resource that you won't benefit of converting .gif to .png. It will a very little optmization.

Of course I'm willing to listen to suggestions from people like DC who have helped me a lot over the years here, the only thing I wanted to say is that perhaps you were criticizing the game in version 1.6

That is good to know. And I am testing the version 3.0 - I've downloaded it few minutes before writing this.

Again, if you are intersted, I can try giving you a hand here.

 

[Toranks]

LOL, sorry about kagashin2.ogg that was my mistake. I forgot to delete the video with the converter.I'll take a look at the rest, but my audio and video skills are very basic, I'm more of a coder. The other music files are the original, and yes, his size is almost 400 mb.

This weekend I will do a general review of strange sizes with WinDirState, the program I use. Thanks for the feedback.

I will never feel offended by people who help and collaborate, it seems like a basic principle to me. So you can help whatever you want. These years I have asked many questions here and your own games have helped me learn to code things. (Especially the Marvel one)

 

[O Ilusionista]

Let me show you another example: the music file "begin2.ogg" (which is Queen's I want to break free).

The file alone weights 10mb (10.820kb). Inspecting the file, I saw this:
]

32bit ogg file is a waste of space, really. You won't have any benefit with a 32bit file unless you are listening this track on a very good speaker on a studio.

I just saved the file in the right bit size and compressed it, and now its 2.9mb:


This is a big save for just one file. I strongly suggest you to use this method to compress your .ogg files. I use "quality 1" to convert mine.
Basically, you have to save all your .ogg files as .wav 44100khz 16bit and them drop this .wav intot he converter (use the shortcut so you can set the quality to 1):

oggenc2.exe -q1

I would do this for you, but there are 237 files there...are you sure you are using that amount of music files on your game?
CMT has a tool for checking this. Stats has one too (althought not so reliable)

This weekend I will do a general review of strange sizes with WinDirState, the program I use.

Try those two, they are quite good:
TreeSize Find Space Hogs with TreeSize Free | JAM Software
Space Sniffer SpaceSniffer download

Thanks buddy. We are here to help

 

[DCurrent]

CMT has a tool for checking this.

Where is this? I looked but didn't see it. Found the tool that checks for missing files, but nothing about orphaned files.

DC

 

[William999]

My friend, as a fan, I want to say that the hitting feeling and throwing action are great (so cool). I give him 6 . One more is my admiration for you and my love for the game!
Then add some more female optional characters. Such as Chunli (KOF version)
,B.Jenet……
In addition, the game memory is really large, more than 1G...it is still necessary to optimize it, thank you friend!

 

[Whackadoo]

I second what the veterans said, optimizing the size of your wonderful mod is sound advice.

1- you can safely bet much more people will download your mod,
2- OpenBOR games are generally lighter than MUGEN files, some gamers will immediatly notice this,
3- so many gamers are running out of disk space these days. When they see a large file they run away screaming.

 

[NED]

I have to admit the size of this project have always been a problem as well.
Sure there are tons of content, stages, musics etc. But I'm sure it can be optimized by many ways.
But I'm very glad this project still have some updates.
Sometimes, I really feel like adding some character in it... But the coding of this mod is a massive work I think at least for me.

EDIT : glad you guys started thinking about ways to fix it a bit.

 

[Toranks]

For now I have reduced it to 900 mb (compressed) by converting some animated gifs to webm in addition to the sound.
But I will continue investigating If I can reduce something more.

Where is this? I looked but didn't see it. Found the tool that checks for missing files, but nothing about orphaned files.

DC

I haven't found that utility either in ChronocrashModdersTools.

NOTE:
The fact that I can't use remix.ogg instead of remix.bor (we talk about it on the chat) is a known problem, so as for that file, I can't do anything. But it's not one of the biggest either.

 

[O Ilusionista]

Where is this? I looked but didn't see it. Found the tool that checks for missing files, but nothing about orphaned files.

maybe I am mixing the tools? I remember there was another tool for that (but It didn't checked for scripts)

on Stats, its here:

(it doesn't checks for script use either, so he will need to use a tool like Notepad++ and use "search in files".
This will help to get rid of all unused content.

For example, there are 50 .bmp files spread in many folders (result of Rotsprite). And those files aren't being used for anything.
Use Notepadd++ "Search in files" (ctrl+shift+F) and put .txt on filters. This will help you to see if any entity is using those files.
or leave the filter alone so you can find all the usage in any type of file.

converting some animated gifs to webm

In some cases, it will work, in some will give you a bigger size file. It's a case by case subject (same for .gif and .png)

Some more tips about sound/music:
- you don't need stereo sound effects in most cases. Unless your sound file has some stereo panning effect, this will just make the file bigger
- I use my sound files in 22khz 16bit. You can increase it to 441khz if you want to. 8bit gives a smaller file size, but adds a lot of noise. Some old ports doesn't like 16bit sound files (wii, If I can remember right), but I doubt this game would run on it anyway
- You have to convert all the .ogg files to .wav and use OGGENC to convert it back to .ogg. No other tool can compress that much as that tool.

The fact that I can't use remix.ogg instead of remix.bor (we talk about it on the chat) is a known problem, so as for that file, I can't do anything. But it's not one of the biggest either.

Strange, because this were already fixed many years ago. I remember I had this issue back in 4420 I think, but this doesn't happens anymore in later builds as 6314 and 6330. Your build looks to be newer (7123).

edit: according to Stats, there are more than 5000 files not in use


But the tool doesn't checks for script usage, so proceed with caution

 

[Toranks]

LOL Thanks. I had never used this tool because it seemed to get stuck/crash and I didn't know what exactly it was for. I'm talking about years ago. I gave it a try again, waited a while while I take a snack, and it finally worked.

 

[lanyer]

It is not recommended to convert ogg to wav and then use oggenc to compress it into ogg again, unless there will be a huge size benifit in doing so. Because ogg itself is a lossy compression format, the sound quality is lost every time it is converted. So it is best to go directly from the lossless source (ost cd, wav flac...)to the desired ogg specifications. In this way, the sound quality is only lost once and is basically close to high fidelity.

 

[O Ilusionista]

I had never used this tool because it seemed to get stuck/crash and I didn't know what exactly it was for

Because your game has more than 54k files. It takes a while to check that much files.

It is not recommended to convert ogg to wav and then use oggenc to compress it into ogg again, unless there will be a huge size benifit in doing so. Because ogg itself is a lossy compression format, the sound quality is lost every time it is converted. So it is best to go directly from the lossless source (ost cd, wav flac...)to the desired ogg specifications. In this way, the sound quality is only lost once and is basically close to high fidelity.

I have to disagree, for two reasons:
- The size reduction will be good, reducing the overall game size and making it to load faster and run smoother (depending on the system specs)
- There is, of course, a certain loss of quality when converting from a format that already has a loss, such as .ogg. But as a former sound engineer, I tell you that it will be practically imperceptible: most of the songs are used as background, while there are several sound effects superimposed on them.

You would need a number of things to realize a significant loss:
- music playing alone
- through a good speaker or headphone
- you are young (yes, we lose the ability to hear certain frequencies as we age, and this is one of the points that ogg works on).

In short, I understand that it will be beneficial.

 

[Toranks]

Following your recommendations in general:

1st method of ogg>wav 16 bits>ogg with oggenc2.exe -q1 > 100 mb saved

2º method Xmedia Recode directly to convert all ogg to an standard of Vorbis, Mono, 22Khz, Constant quality q2 (96kbps) > +200 mb saved!

With both I listen to the sound via optic fiber then bluetooth to a very high quality headphones, and I notice it practically the same. That said, I'm not very young xD
So far I have managed to clean and compress it up to 805 mb in zip (848 uncompressed)

 

[O Ilusionista]

1st method of ogg>wav 16 bits>ogg with oggenc2.exe -q1 > 100 mb gained

2º method Xmedia Recode directly to convert all ogg to an standard of Vorbis, Mono, 22Khz, Constant quality q2 (96kbps) > +200 mb!

You mean you saved 100mb, not gained, right?

So far I have managed to clean and compress it up to 805 mb in zip (848 uncompressed)

Good! Keep it going

 

[NED]

Fast feedback of something I noticed.
-Some limbs layers have wrong palette displayed. (I remember this kind of layer use a specific script to load the right remap used by the character... etc.)
I noticed it in the playable character based on Angel.

-Also, sometimes the movelist don't want to show anymore at "random" moments. The character do the taunt but nothing happens.
It seems like there is some conflict not allowing it.
(Just like in stage intro moment because there is already something to display with title of the stage etc.)

 

[LookingFor]

The problem I have is that when I battle Mr. Big on top of the truck, the truck's sprite appears to move outside of the screen. And after defeating Mr Big on the now-invisible truck, the scene with Takuma seems to go on forever.

Edit: I downloaded the current version of everything (game and Openbor) from GitHub on December 10 at around 11 p.m. (CET), which is about 10 hours ago.

Edit 2: I re-downloaded everything an hour ago, but the problem still exists. On the plus side, I have become better at fighting Mr. Big.

 

[Toranks]

Fast feedback of something I noticed.
-Some limbs layers have wrong palette displayed. (I remember this kind of layer use a specific script to load the right remap used by the character... etc.)
I noticed it in the playable character based on Angel.

I've played with her a lot lately, testing the bed, which had a lot of bugs carried over from the first version, and I haven't seen anything strange about her many palettes. Even the green-skinned one looks good at all times. Can you send a screenshot and version of Openbor?

-Also, sometimes the movelist don't want to show anymore at "random" moments. The character do the taunt but nothing happens.
It seems like there is some conflict not allowing it.
(Just like in stage intro moment because there is already something to display with title of the stage etc.)

I think you mean that you are using true taunt, a new action explained in the game manual (in the main menu).
This is done by holding down the button to view the movelist instead of briefly pressing it.

The problem I have is that when I battle Mr. Big on top of the truck, the truck's sprite appears to move outside of the screen. And after defeating Mr Big on the now-invisible truck, the scene with Takuma seems to go on forever.

I remember that error well from an old version of mine. I'm surprised it happened again. What version of Openbor are you using? And about the game?
I just checked it and it hasn't happened at least since 2.5, which was the last stable one I released until the final 3.0

Edit: If you refer about the last one, download the game again. There was a strange bug I discovered in the version I released the first 24 hours (theoretically it only affected AI), but I don't know if it's related.

 

[NED]

I've played with her a lot lately, testing the bed, which had a lot of bugs carried over from the first version, and I haven't seen anything strange about her many palettes. Even the green-skinned one looks good at all times. Can you send a screenshot and version of Openbor?


I think you mean that you are using true taunt, a new action explained in the game manual (in the main menu).
This is done by holding down the button to view the movelist instead of briefly pressing it.


I remember that error well from an old version of mine. I'm surprised it happened again. What version of Openbor are you using? And about the game?
I just checked it and it hasn't happened at least since 2.5, which was the last stable one I released until the final 3.0

Edit: If you refer about the last one, download the game again. There was a strange bug I discovered in the version I released the first 24 hours (theoretically it only affected AI), but I don't know if it's related.

Thanks for the explanation about taunt!
Great mechanics BTW !!

I'll check for this Angel color bug.