World of Warcraft Patches Beta
Posted by Dice on 12 July 2004 - 14:28 · 5 comments & 2544 views
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Dice
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DiceContact: via forum PM
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#1 Posted by zephiK on 12 Jul 2004 - 14:41
- cool!
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#2 Posted by i like chips on 12 Jul 2004 - 15:06
- When's this game coming out anyway? :/
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#3 Posted by andyboy2k2 on 12 Jul 2004 - 15:35
- Pretty old news. And they don't have a definate date for when it's coming out. But they're almost sure it'll be done by this year. Some people say as soon as august. But more likely near christmas.
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#4 Posted by Zelpus on 12 Jul 2004 - 17:59
- Im guessing by christmas they still have 3-5 phases of beta to come out.
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#5 Posted by cowwithoutbrain on 12 Jul 2004 - 19:14
- wow, a game in beta gets a patch!
In more detail:
1) Adoption of AoTuV tunings
The AoTuV encoder substantially improves the basic tunings of the 1.0.1 encoder for 32,44.1 and 48 kbps input samples. This 1.1 release merges the AoTuV tunings into the mainline Xiph codebase along with other tuning tweaks. The AoTuV tunings are unchanged from the AoTuV encoder with the following exceptions:
a) bugfix to AoTuV code section 'M1'; after discussion with Aoyumi, we agree that the second tuning case both triggered relatively seldomly and did not produce the intended results when it did trigger.
2) New bitrate management codeThe predominating first case ('partial masking') is now used for all samples. This should address some minor pure tone instability issues in the AoTuV encoder.
b) Changes to book construction, training, and on-the-fly adjustment to allow the AoTuV tunings to work properly with bitrate management.
c) AoTuV introduced quality ranges down to -2; the 1.1 Xiph libvorbisenc implements the same modes but maps them down to -1 as in previous Xiph releases. The bitrate of quality -1 in 1.1 is similar to quality -1 in 1.0.1 but the quality of the output is improved.
After use case analysis, I concluded that the 'sliding window' approach to bitrate bounding and management in previous encoders was not usefully more featureful than the more standard 'bit reservoir' approach used in the rest of the industry. In addition, the bit reservoir approach uses substantially less memory in the encoder. For these reasons, the 1.1 libvorbisenc moves to implementing bitrate bounding and management by using a bit reservoir.
The bit reservoir is also conceptually easier to understand; the encoder has a fixed bucket size for 'slop space' in encoding. When a frame is smaller than the desired rate, the unused bits go into the reservoir so that they may be used by future frames. When a frame is larger than target bitrate, it draws 'banked' bits out of the
reservoir. Encoding is managed so that the reservoir never goes negative or fills beyond a fixed limit.
The 1.1 libvorbisenc allows setting the fixed reservoir size (in bits, defaulting to two seconds worth of requested bitrate) and 'hoarding' behavior (whether the encoder tends to keep the bit reservoir more full or more empty) as well as the other encoding heuristics available through the API of 1.0.1.
3) Bugfixes
See SVN for a more details; I'll collect a list for the full release.
There are vorbisenc API additions to handle the new bit reservoir configuration; I will describe those in more detail tomorrow. The binary API is undisturbed; deprecated calls are are all mapped to the new infrastructure. I *believe* oggenc is already updated to the new API.