Why am I bringing this up? Well, to successfully fit a score into a 4k or 8k production, the composer has to think of the entropy of this music. Think of it this way. Suppose for the 8k we played a single note, A-4, for the entire production. This is easy to compress, all that needs to be recorded is one note playing for the duration.
But suppose we played a different note, using a different instrument, for different lengths, at different volumes, for every possible combination until the demo was finished. There's no way to simplify that, you have to record these combinations somewhere, when they played and all of the other characteristics. There's no way to simplify things.
Another example, now suppose instead of a single note, we played the same note over and over again at a regular interval.
A-4
...
A-4
...
A-4
...
A-4
...
What about this?
A-4
A-4
...
...
...
A-4
...
A-4
A-4
...
...
A-4
What does this mean for Second Reality? With 23 parts, about 60 different instruments, and two different composers, the entropy is wildly high.
For fun, I took just the note data from Skaven's introduction, removed all of the effects and compressed the Song.xml file that Renoise produces (inside of the .xrns file) and compressed it with 7zip set to "Ultra". It compressed down to 8,148 bytes. Yikes! This is without the instruments, the player code, the Purple Motion sections and any of the visuals.
No comments:
Post a Comment