"Poor" overall sound quality in game

[avenger]

Have somebody else noticed the sounds in game are quite limited in quality? Something like downsampling from 44,100 to 22,050 or maybe from 16bit to 8bit audio?

The sound feels sort of "flattened" and "noisier". This may be only noticeable with high-end (or righ-ish-end) hardware.

As a base of comparison, I used an over-ears Sony headset (low-end, I'd say), and also used to play on a stereo. Nothing perceivable in the sound quality on either.

But when I wear a Koss Sparkplug in-ear phones, it becomes pretty clear the low sampling quality. Both in the in-game music and the sound effects. Other games sound great, while Rebel Galaxy sounds like 22,050kHz sampling.

I don't think it gets worse in the Koss phones, it is just that the phones are more closely tied to the ears and ambient noise really suppressed by its foam.

And to tell the audio quality was bad I could compare listening to the in-game music from you tube version and also the game's OST package, in .ogg format (ogg-vorbis music format). I believe these are the exact files played while in game (that they aren't in the .pak file), although I'm not sure; but these .ogg files sound *much* better in a simple music/audio player than in the game.

In an attempt to solve the issue, I went to audio settings and found about the "full range" feature on windows 10, where we should enable the feature if we own hardware capable of dealing with frequencies as low as 20Hz (a very bass "bass"). Koss sparkplug can do 10Hz in its "low" range, so more than enough.

In fact, enabling this I could notice an improvement overall in Windows audio using the Koss phones; but when I get back to Rebel Galaxy, all audio washed down to what I'm calling 22kHz audio sampling.

By chance has anybody else noticed this issue and was able to improve or address it? I bet the raw audio effects packed within the game have much better quality than what I'm getting in game.

Again, notice this issue is only perceivable if you got high-(ish)-end sound hardware. If you use speakers, subwoofers, 7.1 or whatever settings, you are most likely not going to notice this.

[avenger]

I am pretty sure I heard Rebel Galaxy's warp drive audio effect in another, indie, game. I believe the sound FX pack is part of some kind of bundle that most likely wouldn't be recorded at that low quality specs.

[Code]

Seriously?

[Zidders 'Rockin' Bard' Roofurry]

Rebel Galaxy was a low-budget indie game made by two people using a heavily modified free indie engine. They didn't have the resources to sink a ton of money into giving it a more robust audio environment. Sounds were taken from free libraries and I imagine down sampled in order to help with performance. The resulting audio issues are why this mod exists https://steamcommunity.com/app/290300/discussions/2/343785574516712160/

[avenger]

Thanks Zidders. During my search in discussions this mod was also all I found about audio issues with Rebel Galaxy. I don't really have the audio spikes issue here with the original .pak.

Reading thru the thread you linked though, makes me believe even more the sound may be recorded in good quality. I should grab a tool to extract that .pak and check if these .ogg FX tracks are really downsampled.

If so, maybe the music is also packed in, the "music/*.ogg" directory I got in Rebel Galaxy root is not really the music used in game, as it has good quality if I listen via Windows Media Player, for instance.

If the packed sounds are all downsampled/flattened for space/performance, then an "audio quality mod" could be possible, given the free FX libraries are identifiable.

Otherwise (in case the game downgrades the .ogg files on-the-fly) there could be a setting in the "free indie engine" that could be tweaked to improve that.

Could be an interesting research. Wish I could just unpak that file and play the game with the files "open in filesystem". :)

[Zidders 'Rockin' Bard' Roofurry]

Originally posted by avenger:

Could be an interesting research. Wish I could just unpak that file and play the game with the files "open in filesystem". :)

I think you're onto something there. It would be an amazing mod and definitely one that ends up being popular with the few folks who bother checking the modding section. I know I'd appreciate & use it as I still play now and then. If you do end up making it be sure to post it in the modding section. I'll add it to the big mod list plus link it to the official RG Twitter. Pretty certain they'd happily retweet it. :)

[avenger]

I was stuck looking for the unpacker. Seems the thing has gone from the modding guide and thread's links. Unless some modder "stashed" this unpacker, or maybe I could run that github project at hhrhhr/Lua-utils-for-Rebel-Galaxy (just prepend github.com to the address)

[avenger]

Good news is, the audio samples in the PAK file are of good quality. And this is exactly where the bad news is; may need to get down to the engine driver's level to be able to fiddle with the audio mixed in the game. -if- that's possible without actually rebuilding the binaries -- or maybe an upgrade to the engine RG uses, who knows.

For what I could find by extracting the whole data.pak, the music is really not in; so it is the greater quality one in the `Music\` folder, unpacked.

- Good we have high quality assets in the PAK file
- Good if there's a setting a tiny mod would be required to enable better sound quality
- Bad as there may just not be a setting that could be set, as probably audio engine is "decided" even before the .pak is loaded.

(I have forked and tried to translate the instructions from hhrhhr/Lua-utils-for-Rebel-Galaxy in avengerx/Lua-utisl-for-Rebel-Galaxy; also did a tiny set of minor updates in the batch scripts)

[avenger]

...and I'm a little out of options here. It seems pretty obvious in the game the 3D engine is the Ogre. But this leads to this page, while querying sound settings: https://www.ogre3d.org/about

In other words, something else is used to mix in the sounds and I'm clueless as for what it is. So far I dug thru the files I could expand from the pak, no luck identifying which sound engine or anything about code audio settings. Seems it would take a little more than modding to get into these audio issues, unfortunately.

[avenger]

...another note just for future reference, it does use FMOD (http://wiki.ogre3d.org/FMOD+SoundManager) according to the output to the console window when run with -winconsole. Still no clues how to tweak it. Just fiddling around randomly.

[Darphnix]

Just two quick things:

When you are talking about “high-ish-end” hardware, do you talk about the Koss Sparkplug for 20 bucks?
Those have a spectrum of 10Hz to 20kHz. The music has 44.1kHz => Everything above 40kHz is lost on those in ears all the time. This might be more noticeable as these in ears might have a higher noise cancelation than your sony headset.

The music is available in multiple versions for certain applications inside the game. E.g. “Badman” has the normal version an “inst” and “light” version. The light version is a little washed-out variation for the main menu as far as I can tell i.e. altered background version of the original song. Although all of them are in 44.1kHz

[avenger]

Yes, for the "high-ish-end" I talk about the koss sparkplugs, 10Hz to 20kHz; that's pretty good a range, don't you think? I'm not the audiophile type but it is really noticeable how the thing is "washed out" in-game if you open the samples elsewhere, either music, sound FX and voice recordings.

Once I found about that FMOD sound manager I could easily find several threads in their website about people complaining how it "downscales" the audio quality of samples. The "downgrade" is then explained by the use of several features of the framework, noticeable the "3D panning"; this is the one thing I'm most inclined to believe is the reason of the loss of quality in Rebel Galaxy, and I couldn't find any points among the ".dat" files that suggested any variable that would be fed to the FMOD module. The parameters are most likely hardcoded in rebel galaxy binaries, unfortunately. :(

The quality difference between the different music versions of the same tune is not as noticeable as the in-and-out-of game (with sparkplug phones at least). It sounds so bad I prefer to play the game wearing the 'on-ear' phones instead.

About your mention of the 40-44kHz range you claim the phones are unable to handle, maybe this helps you understand part of the problem: https://dsp.stackexchange.com/questions/38131/if-humans-can-only-hear-up-to-20-khz-frequency-sound-why-is-music-audio-sampled

The usually difficult part in sound are the low frequencies, the "bass", in which 10Hz is pretty decent, I think; as for "treble", I'm not sure how problematic it is other than the loss inherent from the transistor-driven audio systems. But that one is outside the speakers' portfolio, it lies in the amplificator ("stereo") table.