posted 09-26- 06:37 PM               

K I fully support Nations becoming an online standard.

I must admit to tweaking the Yak to another country when it first came out cause I was too lazy to DL nations. LOL but its alot better having the voices and the planes properly organized.

I have a couple ideas.

#1. K this is a little wacky, but in the warez world. Sometimes to compress the game further but not lose any parts they compress the wavs, but they don't just zip,ace or rar it as par the norm, but they actually convert it to an MP3 and then they have an unpacker that converts it back to wav. I know its a loosy compression and I don't like MP3 quality for music played though my HiFi but for voices that are supposed to be coming over a ww2 radio I don't see a problem. This could really make a size difference of nations since I think the bulk of it is the wavs.

BTW something similar can be done for the wavs in any future plane packs, and on top of that There may be ways to compress and unpack the Tifs by converting them to another format and then unconverting after download but that might be going a little far.

Also you could do another version of nations that don't include the sounds. Its kinda a crappy solution but for those that have to pay for every minute online it could be usefull.

K another idea For those that are still reading.

hehe.

Why don't we add an experimental country just for some of the wacky planes and the stuff thats not quite ready for prime time>?

just to keep the alphas, betas and wacky planes out of the mix.

posted 09-26- 07:09 PM               

OK I understand the size of N2 (Nations for SDOE, Version 2) is a concern because, as I explained earlier, it will eventually become a required download before any plane pack. (unless the online standard is exclusively composed of British, US and German planes, which means we will have to remove things from the current minimal plane set-hardly an enhancement at all)

MP3s? AFAIK SDOE can only read WAVs. Unpacking a MP3 into a WAV requires special software because MP3 is not a compression format. It may not be impossible to find a freeware MP3 to WAV decoder tool, find a way to script it, and maybe even include this in the installation procedure. But this sounds like a research project to me. Good luck, Spanky, I'm waiting for your thesis

TIFFs? There are no TIFFs in N2, the big files are voices and BMPs.

Great effort has been made in order to reduce the size of the pack. Voices were degraded into worst acceptable quality, of course we made sure files were mono. (I tend to think I degraded too much sound quality for the French voices). For most squads I used pure B&W pics, therefore reducing image size because of lower color depth.

N2 without voices? I'll let the decision up to Werner. Be warned that, while the size reduction is about 60%, the download is still rather large.

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Pachy

posted 09-26- 07:16 PM               

I think you misunderstood me man.

I said use a program to convert them back to Wav after download as part of the install.

Its done with warez all the time so you could Beg steal or borrow one from them.

Now thats freeware

What i ment with the tiffs was with the regulare plane pack.

posted 09-26- 07:55 PM               

Mate, I'm not very techo minded with these sort of things, so I can't comment on its viability...

I just wanted to say thanks for the constructive feedback

Cheers,

posted 09-26- 08:43 PM               

That said... "Its done with warez all the time so you could Beg steal or borrow one from them." No thanks, I'd sooner walk in the rain than catch a ride with the mob. Not only that, but how big is big? How many of you are willing to download Plane Packs without a second thought? Nations V2 is 18 Megs, lock, stock and barrel. I like the ideas Spanky, I just think that they have come in time for the next Nations. Beta reports are coming in 100% now, and I don't want to mess with the release date, it's been pushed back a lot already.

I agree with your idea in principle, Spanky, download sizes should and can be reduced. In fact each nation is only 3-4 Megs large, about the same as some beta aircraft. I was thinking that for Nations V3, we could offer two flavours of download - All-in-data6.par like the first two times (for those who haven't used bigmunger before who who, like me, like everything neat, tidy and tucked away) and a version that is just the wavs, ppfs, etc, all zipped into the right directories, but when unzipped would be visible in the fs directories. This would be better suited to those who can par the files themselves or who just want a smaller download and don't care about cluttered directories. So, instead of messing with formats, compression, quality loss, etc. How about a 3-4 Meg download per country added for V3?

Werner

posted 09-26- 09:12 PM               

TS

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Patch It!

posted 09-26- 09:35 PM               

If it comes with an idiot-proof installer, then yes I think it should be implemented. On two conditions: 1. The Online Standard gets updated 2. Implemented for V3. It's too late in the game now for V2. I owe it to the people who've been waiting patiently since the files have been compiled and checked. It goes out the door saturday. Please understand, we're talking about some experimental stuff here, considering nothing similar has been tried on other downloads yet. Perhaps I am being stubborn, but I have to cater to more than one side.

Werner

posted 09-26- 09:46 PM               

That makes 55 megs and I'm sure all the new planes and addons will add on a fair amount to that.

TS

posted 09-26- 10:30 PM               

I think this idea could be extended to cover the other downloads you mentionned as well, perhaps even the Plane Pack. Doing so will require lots of time however. I guess, like all things sdoe, it depends if there is enough of a will to do it.

Werner

(edit on) Oh yeah, and what about those mega-sized terrain downloads? Wouldn't those be candidates for this process?
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Visit Abbeville Field Today!

posted 09-26- 10:36 PM               

Actually WM, I was just thinking aloud and getting some feedback. I didn't mean use that method with this release of nations.

I just ment it as something to think about for future releases. Specialy when they start getting REALLY BIG.

posted 09-26- 10:51 PM               

Heck yeah ! That would be fine having terrains included in the plane packs.. dogfighting over those FPS friendly pacific and tundra terrains would rock!

TS

posted 09-26- 11:00 PM               

Tailslide- Hmm... the possibilities! This is why I love sdoe so much! All the room for innovation...

Werner

posted 09-27- 03:29 AM               

I think I understood you very well.

Since your post implies you did not read my reply to you, let's say it again:

I do not know if it is possible, and if it is it will be very difficult, to include a MP3 decoder and its execution in the automatic installation procedure. The size of the decoder itself (that will have to be downloaded with the files, right?) may be greater than space saved by WAV to MP3 encoding.

posted 09-27- 10:14 AM               

Well i definitivly support the Nations V2 as an online standard before the next plane pack
because i think we have to do this in regard of all that hard work(taken on free time by builders,tweakers and skinners for our pleasure!)

BTW i loved till the beginning this CD idea,it should be possible to create a "CDbase" in each country thanks to ADSL or Cable and then, spread this product at low cost in your country ?!

NationsV2-OnlinStandard!NationsV2-OnlinStandard!NationsV2-OnlinStandard!NationsV2-OnlinStandard!NationsV2-OnlinStandard!NationsV2-OnlinStandard!NationsV2-OnlinStandard!NationsV2-On linStandard!NationsV2-OnlinStandard!NationsV2-OnlinStandard! ;-)

posted 09-27- 05:21 PM               

Patchy I'm going to guess that you have never downloaded a warez version of a game.

They convert the wavs to MP3 and back to save space.

If it didn't work they wouldn't do it.

Its that simple. I don't know how to do it right now But it may be possible for me to find out sometime in the future.

No need to get pissed BTW.

posted 09-27- 06:00 PM               

Its easy to make a little batch file to go through and compress/decompress the sounds in all the subdirectories. Maybe Spanky can find us a batch file tho its even easier not having to write one

TS

posted 09-27- 10:44 PM               

There was another file, mp3unpak.exe, which unfortunately I do not still have. I've been trying to find it on the net, with no success.

Also all the bitmaps were converted to JPEG
Not sure if there's much advantage to that, zip compression usually de-bloats bitmaps pretty good. As far as converting the TIFFs, I'm not sure a degradation in image quality wouldn't occur. But Kingpin had a batch file called dejpeg.bat, which I believe ran alchemy.exe to convert the JPEGs back to bitmaps.

Still looking for mp3unpak... this could be a bane to the Nations guys

posted 09-27- 11:58 PM               

Exactly Reaper.

The only problem is we need the software they use to pack it too.

Yeah I'm not sure about the JPG thing but the MP3 thing could be good.

posted 09-28- 12:50 AM               

TS

posted 09-28- 01:35 PM            

There is no reason this technique couldn't be used for graphics as well, all that would be needed is to identify a suitable command-line JPG decoder.

Using MP3 will result in a 10 times reduction in size with little loss in quality. Using JPGs instead of BMPs will have similar results, especially for photographic images.

posted 09-28- 06:16 PM            

The BMP files seem to be a better area of experimentation. I found a free command line JPEG to BMP decoder. Compressing a 194k BMP to JPEG results in an 8K file that looks almost identical. That's 24 times! Smaller BMP files are reduced less... A 38K file was reduced to 7.5K.

posted 09-28- 07:23 PM               

Great stuff Lothar.

posted 09-28- 09:06 PM            

Spanky, the JPEG encoder and decoder were reference utilities released by the JPEG Group. They can be found at:
ftp://ftp.simtel.net/pub/simtelnet/msdos/graphics/jpeg6b32.zip