Great developments on the VorbisPlayer. To reduce the download time of Slengo, the bitrate of all sound in the game was reduced from 44.1Khz to 16Kh. Although the quality of the sound is lower, it still sounds quite good. 1.87Mb of data was reduced to 0.99Mb.

Another advantage is that the VorbisPlayer uses less CPU at this bitrate, and performs much better. On high-end machines, people did not have much problems with performance, however on lower end machines the sound could stutter. With a lower bitrate, this problem solved for low-end machines. The VorbisPlayer was modified to allow for lower bitrates.

A new release of the VorbisPlayer has been uploaded on CodePlex:

Avios is a great game if you liked Wings of Fury during the nineties. It took 5 months to develop, but it isn’t very well appreciated. There are different aspects for improvement. One aspect is to get a better loading time experience.

Players of online games don’t like to wait very long for a game to load. I have seen different approaches for better a better game-loading experience.

1. Load everything all in one
The game exists of only one xap, which is loaded at once. At Mashooo and Silverarcade they’ve found a way to improve experience. Each game is loaded by a generic preloader, displaying the current percentage. This is very well done. The drawback is however that the game will be loaded completely, you cannot split it into parts. This approach cannot distract the player’s attention if the game is very large.

2. Partial preload
A preloader loads the basic data. The rest of the data is loaded while the game is playing. This is the scheme I’ve been using for most of my games. In my case, the preloader has a list of images and sound effects to be loaded. Any music which is played during the game, is played from the server during the game. Music files can be quite large and they’re not always played completely. So this approach has an advantage over loading it all at once.
You also have more control of what will be loaded in the preloaded, and what will be loaded during the game. Nokola’s Shock for example loads the most basic things to play the first level in the preloader and everything else during the game. Avios however loads all images and sound effects for all levels in the preloader.
An improvement for Avios could be to load everything to play the first level, while loading everything else when the first level is played. No problem for Avios. But in a different game, in such a scheme, the loading and playing of music could compete with loading other data. It could interfere with the music being played. So this needs to be tested.

3. Lower quality
It isn’t surprising that visuals in many games are very small. Smaller graphics reduce the data volume and give better loading experience. For the same reason, players experience lower sound quality for the same reason. Lower quality improves game load experience but may reduce playing experience. This balance is the choice.

4. Change the Encoding
Unfortunately, using vector graphics doesn’t increase quality, while data volume is reduced. I have been playing around with Inkscape 1), to convert bitmap images into vector graphics, exporting it in XAML. In many cases, where I replaced a bitmap image for a vectorized version, the data volume increased. If you want to preload such resources, you need to dynamically load a dll, instead of loading a list of resources on the server.

For my games, I usually use PNG’s. PNG supports alpha channel –  transparency. JPG’s do not support this. In Photoshop you can export JPG’s at low quality. One could use these low-quality JPG’s, assign a transparency color to it and process the images using WriteableBitmap, to support alpha channel. I have done a little study to this option, but I found the image-quality so very low that I decided it was not worth it.

There is also a gain for sound encoding. MP3’s are usually larger than WMA’s. So it does pay to encode for WMA. It is worth it to play around with the encoding settings. I was able to encode an original MP3 file of 1.8 MB, to a 491 KB WMA file, without significant loss of quality.

I was exploring the idea of adding a SeuJogo bumper to my games. When a game has loaded, a little movie is displayed about the manufacturer, before the titlescreen of the game being displayed. Many online games have such a movie. It helps to remember the manufacturer’s name.

For the bumper not to get irritating, it must be a short visual sequence and it may not consume too much bandwidth. There are two options. Either you create some sequence with images, while your software is in charge of moving the images around. Or you create a little movie in which you do all the displaying. It is obvious that a software movie consumes less bandwidth than a real movie, but with a real movie you can do much more.

I created a short movie for the test. The original movie size is 78 Mb, uncompressed, with a resolution of 320x240. Using Windows Media Encoder it became 214 Kb, with a resolution of 160x120. A further compression would heavily destroy the quality.

That’s what it all is about, quality versus bandwidth. The bumber is shown in the player below. Its only 8.5 seconds and has no sound. Still, for a first movie made ever, I think the result is not that bad.