official Titanfall

[spaceelf]

Biggest complaint I have so far: The matchmaking is truly horrendous. Either I'm on a massively overpowered team or I'm the only high rank on a horrible team; same with the opposition, obviously.

In campaign mode it does seem that way.  Does it do the same in the other mode?

 

I still enjoyed it...was the best player on an absolutely horrible team :laugh:

[Louisifer]

I've seen a few players with G 2 and G 4 badges lately, how do you get them?

[xendrome]

I've seen a few players with G 2 and G 4 badges lately, how do you get them?

 

It's a badge/method for people who have no lives and just play the game 24/7... look up Titanfall "Regeneration"

[Louisifer]

Gen 2 seems doable but after that I'll just wait till I start getting bored to do the weapon specific challenges :P

[ajua]

I was out of town when it launched. I return tomorrow and plan to install it as soon as I get home.

 

I hope it is as good and fun as many reviewers and players says. That huge install size is crazy, specially for audio.

 

My main SSD has 100 GB free waiting for Titanfall but I won't be able to install many others if this trend continues.

[xendrome]

I hope it is as good and fun as many reviewers and players says. That huge install size is crazy, specially for audio.

 

 

I'm wondering why it's thought that the audio is the large part of the files.. Since large files in the VPK folder aren't specifically labeled as audio by their names/extensions.. etc

[SMELTN]

I was just looking that up myself

 

[Anthony Tosie Veteran]

It's a badge/method for people who have no lives and just play the game 24/7... look up Titanfall "Regeneration"

:blink: You rank up much faster in Titanfall than other games.

[+Red King Subscriber²]

a CPU isn't designed to handle the decompression, encoding, mixing, adding effects, layering and encoding of 64-128 audio threads. so yes, in fact yoru CPU could potentially have an issue. try running 64 simultaneous winrar extractions, continuously of small files

This was solved in games a very long time by introducing loading screens and background loading threads.

[HawkMan]

This was solved in games a very long time by introducing loading screens and background loading threads.

 

Errr...

 

How does loading screen solve audio stream decoding and encoding...

 

the issue isn't loading the audio from the disk. If you where to load every little audio file that appears in a battle, You'd need a lot more memory than you currently have. You're talking every different gunshot, scream, sound effect stone crunching under boots, ejected mag, bucket falling over and son on that appear in the scene. 

 

Audio is loaded as needed, not pre loaded. there's way to much audio that can and do happen in a scene to pre load it all. 

[spaceelf]

Errr...

 

How does loading screen solve audio stream decoding and encoding...

 

the issue isn't loading the audio from the disk. If you where to load every little audio file that appears in a battle, You'd need a lot more memory than you currently have. You're talking every different gunshot, scream, sound effect stone crunching under boots, ejected mag, bucket falling over and son on that appear in the scene. 

 

Audio is loaded as needed, not pre loaded. there's way to much audio that can and do happen in a scene to pre load it all. 

I think you worded that poorly.  Of course it's preloaded, it's just not decoded in advance unless you don't have much in the way of audio to begin with.

[GotBored]

a CPU isn't designed to handle the decompression, encoding, mixing, adding effects, layering and encoding of 64-128 audio threads. so yes, in fact yoru CPU could potentially have an issue. try running 64 simultaneous winrar extractions, continuously of small files 

 

I'm just curious as to when you think the game will play 64-128 audio threads simultaneously?

 

Respawn have said they used uncompressed audio so Titanfall could play without performance issues on older CPU's. (Minimum Specs indicate Intel Core 2 Duo which is a 7 year old processor)

[PGHammer]

Nah it'd be relevant if they actually did to help old PC play the games.

 

Come on don't tell me you believe this ****** excuse?

 

PC with cpu old enough to "need" this wont likely have the gpu to run the game or might even not have enough space to install it. We are talking about PC that are as old as 7 or even 10 years here. Not all of those old PC have 1TB HD inside them. My PC is 4 years old and it was mid range when i bought it and my pc doesn't need such trick to run Titanfall.

 

Either they are lazy, they want to use this as a form of drm or they want to make the pc version not as interesting (the game is sponsored by MS so we can't rule out the 3rd option).

And why wouldn't (or couldn't) such a PC have a 1 TB HDD?

 

My PC goes back to Vista, and HAS a 1 TB HDD - and it's not even the only HDD.

 

Mom's PC goes back to XP, and it has a 500 GB HDD (in fact, the one I upgraded from).

 

The HDD excuse is exactly that - an excuse.

 

The only difference since the advent of SATA (among the various SATA standards) has been transfer rates - all the SATA standards are otherwise cross-compatible with each other physically.  (No - you won't have a SATA-III drive operating at those transfer rates over a SATA-II interface; however, that transfer-rate bottleneck is the only issue you'll have.)

 

Then there is nVIdia's GTX 750 Ti - which is compatible with every PCI Express x16 slot going all the way back (as far as chipsets go) to Intel G31, AKA Bear Lake - as long as the motherboard's BIOS can deal with it (and, except for some odd early UEFI/EFI implementations, it should, even at PCI Express 1.1 transfer rates), it will still work - and it (in most cases) uses only bus power.  In other words, LESS power draw, and a smaller memory bus, than my GTX 550Ti.

 

What is the real issue that you have?

[LaP]

 

What is the real issue that you have?

 

None.

 

I'm just speechless some people believe you need uncompressed audio to support older pc.

 

The % of machines this could make a difference is so small it's not even worth talking about. For one the machine needs a powerful enough gpu and enough ram. For 2 the same machine needs such an old cpu that it can't play the game with compressed audio but can play it with uncompressed audio.

 

Finally for it to be worth talking about you need to assume the person owning this machine play games and might be interested in Titanfall. Since Titanfall has average gfx at best and is using uncompressed audio while other games are not it means the person owning this machine can't play any other recent games and will probably not know he can play Titanfall with it.

[ajua]

I'm wondering why it's thought that the audio is the large part of the files.. Since large files in the VPK folder aren't specifically labeled as audio by their names/extensions.. etc

That's all I've read. Tomorrow will install it and find out what those files are.

[spaceelf]

I'm just speechless some people believe you need uncompressed audio to support older pc.

I will always trust the devs more than random people on forums, that's all I can say.  I know enough about audio to know it's the first thing to be completely ignored by most devs because there're 'more important' things to spend resources on.

 

Plus the game might play well on my brothers Llano laptop where a bunch of other recent games haven't been too stellar.

 

It would be nice if TrueAudio makes an impression on the industry and brings back proper hardware audio support.  I don't really have high hopes, to be honest.

http://www.maximumpc.com/everything_you_wanted_know_about_amd%E2%80%99s_new_trueaudio_technology_2013

 

AMD: Oh gosh, there?s plenty for a CPU to do. There?s so much to do that today?s PC gaming audio engines are capped to 8-10 percent (at best) of the average CPU?s performance budget just so the more ?important? bits like AI, physics or game simulations are able to function unhindered. More often than not, the CPU is so busy that audio engineers only have access to an uncertain amount of ?leftover? CPU resources, rather than a fixed target. That encourages very conservative audio production, of course, which we hope to alleviate with AMD TrueAudio.

[Boz]

It's a badge/method for people who have no lives and just play the game 24/7... look up Titanfall "Regeneration"

 

I play about an hour or two a day when I get a chance from running my own company and dealing with a ton of stuff and I'm Generation 2 now closing in on 3rd. Not sure why that makes me a person without life?

[McKay]

Biggest complaint I have so far: The matchmaking is truly horrendous. Either I'm on a massively overpowered team or I'm the only high rank on a horrible team; same with the opposition, obviously.

 

I can't win a single game as the IMC in campaign. I did the Militia campaign first in a single sitting, we decimated the IMC in every match by close to 100 points each game. Got the achievement for winning every level of the campaign. Now I've done the IMC campaign, I lost every single match. I've even gone back and redone missions, but lost at repeated attempts, it's so weird.

[PGHammer]

I will always trust the devs more than random people on forums, that's all I can say.  I know enough about audio to know it's the first thing to be completely ignored by most devs because there're 'more important' things to spend resources on.

 

Plus the game might play well on my brothers Llano laptop where a bunch of other recent games haven't been too stellar.

 

It would be nice if TrueAudio makes an impression on the industry and brings back proper hardware audio support.  I don't really have high hopes, to be honest.

http://www.maximumpc.com/everything_you_wanted_know_about_amd%E2%80%99s_new_trueaudio_technology_2013

And I have yet more cold water to throw on all those beating up on the reason for the big file size.

 

Consider that the game's system requirements go all the way down to XP Professional x64 Edition.  That means not only DX9c, but it's also the first x64 desktop Windows (as well as the ONLY x64 desktop Windows that Microsoft actually gave away).

 

To put that in perspective, that is lower (except for the x64 requirement) than the requirements for Crysis 2 or BF3 or Call of Duty Modern Warfare (the last CoD from the original Infinity Ward).

 

That doubtless DID force compromises in terms of how far you could compress anything, especially audio - how well does DX9c support audio compression, for example?

 

If you have hardware that exceeds those requirements, that ALSO means that there is less of a problem getting smooth performance - why is that necessarily a bad thing?

[Luc2k]

I will always trust the devs more than random people on forums, that's all I can say.  I know enough about audio to know it's the first thing to be completely ignored by most devs because there're 'more important' things to spend resources on.

Except these devs were part of Infinity Ward and they left because they weren't paid, not creative differences. As far as Respawn/IW is concerned, I'll consider any statement they make a blatant lie unless there's undeniable proof.

 

For the people wondering where the ~34GB figure for audio files comes from, just pay attention to the installer because it opens a different progress bar at one point that says decompressing audio (or something like it). That progress bar is shown in MB.

 

That doubtless DID force compromises in terms of how far you could compress anything, especially audio - how well does DX9c support audio compression, for example?

Just look at the thousands of games released for DX9 and how they handle compression or the hundreds? of Source games and mods. They were lazy at best.

[PGHammer]

None.

 

I'm just speechless some people believe you need uncompressed audio to support older pc.

 

The % of machines this could make a difference is so small it's not even worth talking about. For one the machine needs a powerful enough gpu and enough ram. For 2 the same machine needs such an old cpu that it can't play the game with compressed audio but can play it with uncompressed audio.

 

Finally for it to be worth talking about you need to assume the person owning this machine play games and might be interested in Titanfall. Since Titanfall has average gfx at best and is using uncompressed audio while other games are not it means the person owning this machine can't play any other recent games and will probably not know he can play Titanfall with it.

And the very fact that he can isn't worth anything?

 

The fact that you don't need a system that is extremely pricey to get solid game performance is not worth anything?

 

The fact that you can play it on portable PCs (such as notebooks) isn't worth anything?  (What was the last shooter - of any sort - that could be played with decent performance on a non-high-end notebook?)

 

If you are going to grow the PC gaming market, the most obvious way to do that is to develop games that more PCs can play - that is, in fact, the approach that Crytek took with Crysis 2 - which wasn't exactly a slow seller.

 

Titanfall, however, went even lower than Crysis 2 (outside of the x64 requirement) - all the way down to XP Pro x64.

 

That means that not only can older hardware play the game, that also means that newer hardware doesn't need to struggle as much.

 

Finally, that means you can pretty much simply install and play - with very little fiddlage needed.  Why is that such a bad thing?

[McKay]

Good lord you've gone on so long you could have a dedicated audio discussion thread :rofl: . Please don't get this thread shot down too, threads drop likes flies in the gaming sub-forum the moment they remotely deviate from the title. 

[PGHammer]

Good lord you've gone on so long you could have a dedicated audio discussion thread :rofl: . Please don't get this thread shot down too, threads drop likes flies in the gaming sub-forum the moment they remotely deviate from the title. 

I'm simply trying to get to the real reason behind the grumbling - nothing more or less.  I utterly despise ANYONE trying to blow smoke up my posterior.

[spaceelf]

You can use XAudio 2 with directx 9, that really doesn't have much to do with anything.  The latest XAudio 2 apparently doesn't even support compressed audio unless you count tech created in the 70s.

[PGHammer]

You can use XAudio 2 with directx 9, that really doesn't have much to do with anything.  The latest XAudio 2 apparently doesn't even support compressed audio unless you count tech created in the 70s.

Which is precisely why I asked about it.

 

Supporting DX11-only has gotten game-developers a crapton of pushback - and that's just in PC-exclusives.  (Naturally, it's a non-starter in multiplatform as well.)

 

Here (Titanfall) is that rarity of multiplatform game that apparently was aimed at PC first - not consoles.  (The last multiplatform game I know of that did that was Forsaken.)

 

Basically, Respawn actually did what the PC gaming fanatics have asked for in a multiplatform game - make PC the preferred platform.