Mod/XM Removal

[PyTom]

Does anyone still use Mod or XM as sound formats? I'm considering removing them from Ren'Py, as part of a rewrite of the sound and video playback code, which is getting to be hopelesslly obsolete, as witnessed by the many threads complaining about video formats. There's also some reports of video crashing, which I haven't been able to repeat.

I believe that the rewrite would make playback of other sound formats a lot more reliable, but it would be difficult to integrate mod and xm into this framework.

Technical note: My current idea is to use ffmpeg as our playback library. This gives us a very good decoder for a large number of formats, at the cost of not supporting mod or xm.

[Wintermoon]

I use XM (and IT), but I don't actually have any active Ren'Py projects, so I'm not sure if my opinion counts.

[PyTom]

I'll put it this way: Would a lack of Mod/XM support put you off of Ren'Py, or would you grudgingly accept it, and move on to using OGG?

I don't like this, since now that MIDI is gone, this is our only "small" music format. But it's something that I might want to sacrifice, if it means better support for the more popular formats. I mean, even in games where the author was really concerned with file size (The Netteststadt Troll) use ogg rather than xm.

[Asceai]

My question is; will this new system (or does the current system already) have support for advanced looping (start/end markers at least) for other music file formats? e.g. by supporting .ogg.sli like some visual novel engines do, or something else embedded in the game itself.

Because currently only the module formats support this sort of thing.

[Samu-kun]

I don't really care whether ren'py supports mod or XM, but I'm interested in whether dropping support would improve performance with renpy.movie_start_displayable.

[PyTom]

Asceai>>> We currently support such loops by allowing the user to queue up multiple files. So dropping MOD/XM wouldn't really change the current support for this, and might enable it at some time in the future. (Not sure when.)

Samu-kun>>> I'd hope so, but I wouldn't know until I actually write the code.

[Wintermoon]

I'll put it this way: Would a lack of Mod/XM support put you off of Ren'Py, or would you grudgingly accept it, and move on to using OGG?

In my particular case, I might actually choose the third option of hacking XM/IT support back into Ren'Py for any larger project.

[jack_norton]

One of the main reason for using XM/MOD is to save space, but nowadays even a full quality OGG of 5 minutes takes 3-4 megabytes, and with broadband etc I think this isn't a problem anymore. So I wouldn't mind at all.

[Spiky Caterpillar]

While I'd like to use tracker-format music at some point in the future, I don't have any concrete plans to do so anytime soon. In practice, ogg is probably Good Enough for me.

While I don't know how practical this is, if major rewrites of the sound code are being looked at, reducing the latency between renpy.sound.play() and the actual sound playback would be nice.

[EwanG]

Guess I wouldn't be too bothered by losing XM/MOD support considering I had to look up what those even were...

[sake-bento]

I use OGG, so this wouldn't really change anything for me.

[Watercolorheart]

Hmm, maybe I should convert those mp3 and wavs ... of course, it's hard to be concerned about size issues when bundling animation files with Shadows In Noise ...

[Jo'ogn]

I use ogg only. (Using mp3 in commercial projects implies license fees.)

XM/MOD could be converted into ogg. They might be bigger and less flexible in case one makes extensive usage of MODs capabilities... I guess as many samples in MODs are 8kHz anyway you could use a pretty low bitrate.

Using queued 'music segment lists' does work well enough for me.

[yummy]

Hmm, maybe I should convert those mp3 and wavs ... of course, it's hard to be concerned about size issues when bundling animation files with Shadows In Noise ...

If your files are very short sounds you might consider leaving them in wav because the audio mixer would have to precode you file thus resulting in more resources being used when it could be read on the fly instead (thanks dear SDL documentation!).

I recommend ogg vorbis to every game maker I know because of the license issue but also because it's supported by the current library Ren'Py uses (SDL).

Back to OP, I never used XM nor MOD. I didn't even consider creating one for starters.
So removing this feature wouldn't change anything to me.

Maybe the right question would have been: "Did anyone ever use XM/MOD for his/her game?" XD

[WinKi]

Please do not remove MOD/S3M/XM/IT audio support!

Speaking about the sizes, not every user have a large internet-connection. Personally, I NEVER downloading MP3\OGG renders because of their size, because of their crappy sound quality AND because I cannot manipulate with them as easy as with module & MIDI music (Who said the MIDI's gone?! Download YAMAHA SYXG-50 SoftSynthesizer Driver or buy YAMAHA's PCI Sound Card and hear the difference! >_<).

Speaking about the sizes again, can 64 Kilobyte OGG contain 3 minutes of music and sound good? No way it will! But module music can, even at 4096 bytes (sine chiptunes)!

P.S. Actually, I've requested module\tracker music support for both POnScripter and ONSlaught. ONSlaught is now supporting it.