Are VNs too inefficient?

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Ivlivs
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Are VNs too inefficient?

#1 Post by Ivlivs »

I feel that visual novels are not popular because they are too inefficient. I find that when making a visual novel, the pictures, scripts, and code take up very little space as a whole, leaving only one culprit: the music. At about a megabyte per minute, six pieces can easily take up 30 MB or more, causing the size of the game to be greater than the length justifies. A person would not want to download and keep an 80MB file if they can only play it for 30 minutes.

Possible solutions:
1) Downsampling music. This would drastically reduce the amount of space that the music takes up, but the quality would suffer and the gain may be small.

2) Music modules (*.mod) and such. Though they are not as manipulable as *.mp3 or *.ogg files, they can be quite useful. High-quality music can be packed into a small file.

I strongly favor #2, but there are no free *.mod music sites that I know of. I would certainly need a musician if I wanted to go this path.

I think that if VNs were more efficient, they would have a better reception at least among anime and manga fans.
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Re: Are VNs too inefficient?

#2 Post by monele »

I can't remember : does Ren'Py still have mod support? ô_o...

Mm... But is the filesize really the problem with VNs? I mean... some demo of games are now over the 1gb and only play for about 30 minutes too... and I don't think it prevents people from trying them out.
Then of course, games can be 4gb, but since they come on DVDs when you buy them, people don't mind it that much. If they had to download it from the web, it might be different.

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Re: Are VNs too inefficient?

#3 Post by mikey »

Ivlivs wrote:I feel that visual novels are not popular because they are too inefficient.
For me, the problem with popularity is elsewhere - they require reading. It's not about the file size, really.

Generally you're right with the music though - it does take up the bulk of the size - same as FMVs take up a lot of space in strategy games for instance (Command & Conquer). Size does matter in a few areas, most notably in shareware distributing - papillon could probably talk better about this. A solution is low-bitrate music yes (them 6-kb MIDIs), but that often sounds really flat - using mods is a way to avoid this - typically you can make a good track that has 500 kb. But the depth is still lacking, even with high quality samples. Though I agree this kind of music (you can create it in "trackers") can be a good balance.

Though as far as popularity is concerned, I don't think downsizing games will help it. The reasons are mostly elsewhere, at least that's my feeling.

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Re: Are VNs too inefficient?

#4 Post by Alessio »

Like mikey said, size is probably not the main reason for scarce popularity. But I do agree that a 7 MB download might be more tempting than a 150 MB one if you're on a dialup connection. (Then again, in a marketing sense, 150 MB might be better than 7 MB - "bah, how good can it be if it's only 7 MB?")

But a bloated game will always give me the impression the author did not care enough to try being efficient. It's too easy to grab half a dozen mp3 files from the net and stick them in. My tips for reducing music size are:

-- Reduce the amount of music. A 1-hour VN does not require 30 minutes of music. You can make do with much less. I'd daresay a ratio of 5 minutes of music for a 60-minute VN is still acceptable if you compose smartly.

-- mod files are a good idea, but in practice require much work. A musician willing to contribute music for a VN project might not want to have to code in a tracker. Otherwise mod files have the best quality/space ratio.

-- Downsample until it hurts. You'd be surprised how many people use the tiny laptop speakers or crappy headphones. I doubt many people play their VN game via studio speakers. Note I'm a hobby musician and quality freak, but I'm also a realist. You can still offer an additional high-quality music download package for the purists.

I love discussion about package sizes. :)

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Re: Are VNs too inefficient?

#5 Post by DaFool »

Huh? :shock: NT was 6.49 megabytes and had 8 tracks:

*Nettestadt main theme
*Troll main theme
*Katja main theme
*Blumenwald main theme
*"Wavemotion"
*"Towers"
*"Feelings"
*"Njoy"

Most music is highly repeatable. Thus compose only the most fundamental pieces. I also encoded at 64 bitrate but got away with it because I toned down the volume... when muffled (as background music should be), you can't really notice the static.

VNs are as efficient as can be. In fact I am starting to think that Film is the most inefficient... when you can get the audio/visual experience in VN, just less motion. That's the problem when there are lots of free music available and people just like to stuff their games with them. I bet you that the amount of soundtrack in the average VN is infinitely more than the soundtrack in the average entire anime series (notice the tunes they reuse often) -- that is just plain wrong. If people really want a diverse soundtrack, I suggest they just turn off the music in the VN they are playing and play their own music CDs in the background.

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Re: Are VNs too inefficient?

#6 Post by Ivlivs »

I would say that considering our circumstances, downsampled *.ogg music would be best, and sownsampled *.mp3's would be a close second. MOD sounds great but just isn't practical for us.
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Re: Are VNs too inefficient?

#7 Post by DaFool »

Ever since my computer speakers died, I had my system set up to my Sony 5.1.

96 kb/s is already very decent quality (Alessio has managed to convinced me thus with his renderings). Of course this means that you would have to start from a full-quality wav render.

The issue I have is the matter of setting precedence... I have an upcoming game which is 1/3 the wordcount of the last one, but I couldn't make its filesize 1/3 of 6.49-6.79mb. Renpy code takes up a consistent ~3mb or so (I have to check again). It's the same issue why many commercial gamemakers have a hard time charging less than five or ten dollars or automakers have a hard time charging less than twelve thousand dollars -- there's a rock bottom feasibility limit.

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Re: Are VNs too inefficient?

#8 Post by Jake »

Ivlivs wrote:MOD sounds great but just isn't practical for us.
Why? I mean, even taking 'Mod music' to encompass all the various non-'Mod' tracker music, it can still be entirely encompassed in a single file and play the same on any machine (unlike MIDI) and typically has smaller filesizes than equivalent-quality MP3/OGG music...

The drawbacks of tracker music are that it takes more effort (both in coding terms and CPU terms) to play the music back (still a relatively trivial problem solved in generic libraries years ago) and that you have to stick with a set of samples, so it's harder (and filesizes get bulkier) to include lyrics and the like... but most VNs don't use music with lyrics anyway, they use repeatable instrumental background-music tracks. I'd have thought tracker music would be fine, presuming you have some. There certainly /used/ to be large quantities of the stuff floating around that people could (and would) use for this kind of thing...
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Re: Are VNs too inefficient?

#9 Post by Tayruh »

The problem I have with a lot of visual novels (whether fanmade or not) are the ones that don't allow autoread of text. For instance, I heard that the amount of text in Tsukihime was supposed to be as much or greater than Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Rings or something.. that's a lot of freakin text. If I had to tap the table everytime I finished reading a sentence in a book, I wouldn't read books either. Autoread is your friend.

Thankfully with Tsukihime, I just disassembled the .dat file and added the autoread code right into the 0.txt file.. so much better. Does Renpy come with autoread out of the box?

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Re: Are VNs too inefficient?

#10 Post by papillon »

From what I can tell Renpy handles graphics differently than the system I'm using. My music is my biggest bulk even stored as ogg (I currently have an option to unpack the sounds to wav at install time, which will make the game run faster, but suddenly blows the sound folder up to 200MB) - HOWEVER, I have a full length game with puzzles and it's half the size of a lot of the short renpy games that have been coming out.

The exe - 3.3 MB.
The sound folder - about 20 MB in ogg format.
The external scripts - about a meg
The external graphics - about 13MB? Doubles during play because of the way I'm doing encryption.

Since I don't use RenPy I don't know exactly where the bulk comes from but it seems like even the SMALL games are really huge in it, and I'm sure I've seen 80 or 100MB downloads for not-that-long games. I suspect it's not the music that's the problem.

As for whether or not it's a problem - there are different thresholds of download size, supposedly, and at each step you're likely to lose a few customers who aren't willing to wait for the download. Goes something like - 5MB, 20MB, 50MB, 100MB, 1gb. (This is for free demos, not for purchased games.) The bigger it is, the more certainty someone needs to have that they will get good playtime out of it and that they will enjoy it. Who wants to spend hours downloading something that you only get to play for thirty minutes?

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Re: Are VNs too inefficient?

#11 Post by PyTom »

Answering some questions:

Ren'Py stopped supporting straight-up midi a few releases ago, because it caused problems with the mac.

We support a large number of mod formats. Definitely mod and xm are supported, and if anyone cares I can try to dig out the full list.

Ren'Py supports auto-read mode, although we call it auto-forward mode. It's controlled by a slider on the preferences screen.

Zipped, Ren'Py contributes 2.7 megs to the size of a game. I think that the zipped size is the most relevant one, since that's what controls how long a game takes to download. That's pretty much a constant that's added to any game.

I don't know why some small games are so large... it depends a lot on the game. For "Time's Tear", the disk space usage was due to a combination of the images (61 megs compressed) and the soundtrack, which was 250 kbps quality.

A problem is people using png (or worse, bmp) images for backgrounds, which can lead to an increase in disk space for little reason compared to the more appropriate jpeg format, even with the jpeg quality slider set fairly high. Recompressing the backgrounds into jpg format shaved ~37 megs off the size of TT.

That being said, I think game size is one of the variables game-makers need to balance. Unlike a more traditional game, where the same graphics can be used repeatedly to represent different things (does minion 1001 look all that different then minion 1002?), VNs require a somewhat large number of large graphics to effectively storytell. Witness the fairly large size of commercial games--- generally, at least 2 CDs, with Ever 17 rising to the 4 CD mark.
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Re: Are VNs too inefficient?

#12 Post by papillon »

VNs require a somewhat large number of large graphics to effectively storytell. Witness the fairly large size of commercial games--- generally, at least 2 CDs, with Ever 17 rising to the 4 CD mark.
However, the commercial games have full voice acting, which is enormous, plus sometimes moviefiles, and there are rumors in the market that they *intentionally inflate* gamesize in order to discourage piracy - it certainly makes life a hassle for people trying to upload games 1MB at a time.

If people can use jpgs in renpy but aren't, that probably is affecting filesize a lot, yeah. :)

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Re: Are VNs too inefficient?

#13 Post by PyTom »

Right now, jpgs are supported for solid images, but of course, some people still use pngs or bmps.

As an experiment, I did the following:

- I wrote a program that takes an image, splits it into alpha and color components, and then compresses them separately as jpegs (with 90% quality).
- I applied that program to an image of Alicia from Time's Tear.
- I then wrote a program that reversed the transformation.
- And applied that program to the two split images.

I'm attaching the results, as they sit on my disk.

Looking at this, I was able to reduce a 160kb image to about 53kb with minimal loss of quality.

If you load the two png images into an image editor, you'll see some differences as you flip back and forth, but I'm not sure anyone could tell me one was "better".

The results seem consistent for all the character art in Time's Tear. I still need to experiment with other games, but I'm strongly considering shipping this as part of Ren'Py. (Perhaps with an external tool that actually does the image conversions.)
original image
original image
base jpg image
base jpg image
mask jpg image
mask jpg image
ca_alicia_smile.png.mask.jpg (9.67 KiB) Viewed 2000 times
result image (this only exists in memory)
result image (this only exists in memory)
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Re: Are VNs too inefficient?

#14 Post by DaFool »

I am really interested in this program. Right now rather than do compositing techniques (too much hassle when there are so many sprites this time around), I just save them as jpegs since they don't need to be transparent. So something which should have taken 38 kilobytes are just 20 kilobytes. I'm wondering if I feed that 38 kb image into your program, if the remaining alpha jpeg and color jpeg components would total less than 20 kilobytes. If you like I'll send you a sprite sample when I get home.

I think I might need to refilter the backgrounds, hopeful to reach 5mb limit.

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Re: Are VNs too inefficient?

#15 Post by monele »

Many commercial VNs don't seem to care about file size as they put things in mpeg, bmp and wav... It's always baffled me ^^;

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