[Rpgingmaster]

Yes, I know it's terrible and unfinished, and yes, I know it will require a lot of work. (yes, I'm aware of the understatement)

However, assuming I wanted to begin modding it (mostly wanted to try fixing quests, busted voice files, etc), what .PAK files would I need to open and what tools would I need?

On a similiar note, how do I delete the Freed Slaves with the beige text over their heads from freed villages in G3? I have CP 1.73, and an old exploit I love where I could beat everyone up and take their crap is now gone, and it's driving me crazy because those guys keep causing me to be accused of murder even if I kill them far outside town so I can do the exploit without hassle.

Never was an issue in CP 1.6, BTW.

[WernerTWC]

Hi and §welcome to the forum!

However, assuming I wanted to begin modding it (mostly wanted to try fixing quests, busted voice files, etc), what .PAK files would I need to open and what tools would I need?

Unpack them all, doesn't hurt, can be done with this tool i.e.:
http://www.worldofgothic.de/dl/download_351.htm

On a similiar note, how do I delete the Freed Slaves with the beige text over their heads from freed villages in G3? I have CP 1.73, and an old exploit I love where I could beat everyone up and take their crap is now gone, and it's driving me crazy because those guys keep causing me to be accused of murder even if I kill them far outside town so I can do the exploit without hassle.

Not sure where to find that.

Anyway, here are infos in english:
http://forum.worldofplayers.de/forum...d.php?t=609726

Try it with google translate, here are some german tutorials:
http://forum.worldofplayers.de/forum...d.php?t=495972

[Rpgingmaster]

Thanks for the info!

I wasn't sure where to begin, and thanks to that information, I have a great starting place.

Thank you!

P.S.- I've already figured out how to unpack and repack files, and I wanted to pass along some advice on the Music.pak and Music.p00 files.

The OGG files are quite large in size, and I found out that most of them can be drastically shrunk in size (while still losing no sound quality) and repackaged with no errors.

This seems to drastically improve loading times and reduce stutter by a sizable amount.

I have not tried this with the voice files as of yet.

Hope this advice is helpful, and thanks for the welcome to the forums!

[WernerTWC]

P.S.- I've already figured out how to unpack and repack files, and I wanted to pass along some advice on the Music.pak and Music.p00 files.

The OGG files are quite large in size, and I found out that most of them can be drastically shrunk in size (while still losing no sound quality) and repackaged with no errors.

Mhh, ... sounds like a nice idea you got there! Which tool you use to shrunk them? And more important, what settings you took for the recompressed music files (like bitrate and such)?

[Larisa]

Mhh, ... sounds like a nice idea you got there! Which tool you use to shrunk them? And more important, what settings you took for the recompressed music files (like bitrate and such)?

I've looked only at 1 file from the CP package, it's variable bitrate I think since in winamp the numbers fluctuate. I've saved it with audacity with a medium quality (5, from 1 to 10) and the file is smaller (from 2.3 to 1.5MB)

Interesting idea indeed, the speech, sounds and music are ~900MB. If that can be reduced at half without noticing any difference (maybe an audiophile could hear the difference, I can't) it would be nice indeed.

With some audio software that can do batch processing... it should work.

[Rpgingmaster]

Mhh, ... sounds like a nice idea you got there! Which tool you use to shrunk them? And more important, what settings you took for the recompressed music files (like bitrate and such)?

I used Xilsoft Video Converter Ultimate for the conversion.

The OGG files were around 256kbps in size, and I shrunk them to around 128kbps with no sound quality loss. I used VBR (variable bit rate) as opposed to CBR (constant bit rate).

Gothic 3's music is orchestral, which means that the crescendos are the only major users of bit rate, whereas the rest of the song uses very little, especially in the silent pauses. Also, past 128 kbps, there is hardly any difference in the quality of the sound to the human ear, at least in my experience.

NOTE: If you have Forsaken Gods (which uses the exact same music files), you can simply copy your reduced G3 Music.PAK/P00 into that directory and achieve the same result with no errors.

Note 2: One of the complaints about that exploit I enjoyed I just discovered is not valid. It still works, but it just requires I have a certain level of reputation in a town first.

[Larisa]

I've used Mediacoder Audio Edition, it's freeware, with an even more aggressive parameter of 96kbps as medium rate. Now my music paks are 88MB compared with 182MB.

Is there a way to test the performance of this? (Loading speed/memory usage)

For the sounds/speech, I don't think it will work the same, there are many files of small size... apparently most of them are already encoded at a constant rate of 86. Maybe lowering even more...
The sounds also have some wav files in there, very small.

[Rpgingmaster]

I don't think the .wavs can be shrunk all that well, but the .ogg files should be safely lowerable to 64 kbps without quality loss.

That's the same kbps that the sound files in TES3: Morrowind are, and they sound perfectly audible.

[Larisa]

With 64, the English speech is 538 from 667.

[Tratos]

It would be quite an irony, if what people like about Gothic 3 best, the music, would be the main cause for all that performance loss which in turn led to the incidental visual quality loss.

On a more serious note, I've tried playing with music file conversion using Easy CD-DA extractor. And while your proposed technique is useful, some software does it badly and consequently leads to "snaps", "screeches" and other background noise in the newly converted files. This was usually the problem with mp3 files, so I don't know about ogg. Make sure that the software you use actually decompresses the data and then encodes it into the new format, rather than just a copy-paste function, witch the CD-DA extractor did.

[Rpgingmaster]

Kept that advice in mind, and I managed to shrink my Music.pak file down to 96kbps VBR.

Total file size is around 57 MB, and the sound quality sounds basically the same.

Also, the first time the game gets loaded into memory barely takes 20 seconds now!

[Korianous]

So it wasn't just the Genome Engine's memory management after all ? If it's cut loading times to that extent, I'll be very impressed.

[Larisa]

I've done some tests and the results aren't impressive at all.
Compressed all 6 files of speech, music and sound. The difference is 266MB less.

With a chronometer... measured from when you press accept the "without AB" until the screen goes black for the intro video.
G3 max details 60 seconds first run, 42 seconds the 2nd, 3rd and 4th run. Changed the music files, got the same results. Restart.
G3 low details (except resource cache: optimal) 50 seconds first run, 29 seconds 2nd, 3rd and 4th. Changed back the old files. Restart. Same results.
No difference on my system on starting new game.

[WernerTWC]

I've done some tests and the results aren't impressive at all.

Dito.

Compressed all 6 files of speech, music and sound. The difference is 266MB less.

I just recompressed music and speech, difference here: 455MB less.

I've got a faster first run.
From doubleclick g3.exe till menu (intro vids deactivated) from around 20 s down to 12s.
From pressing loading game (i just ran out of Ardea, saved there) till game, from around 70s down to 45s.

But this is only for the first loading, reloading a savegame is always 37s for me.

And this benefit i got only when i deleted the *pak and *p00 from the game/patch and replaced it with my repacked *pak. -> When I used my repacked *pak as p01 there was no benefit. (maybe you wanna test that, too?!)

[Rpgingmaster]

Overall, how is game performance in general?

I know I was the first guy to suggest this, but I was wondering if this in general is effective at decreasing stuttering and loading pauses, which is mostly what I wanted to eliminate from my game as much as possible.

I have to admit I'm a bit of a performance nut, and I was hoping that this suggestion might be effective in some regard.

P.S.- It is nice to know that first load up is quicker. Also, now that I think about it, has anyone tried Alt-Tabbing onto the desktop and checking to see if less memory is being used?

[Larisa]

I just recompressed music and speech, difference here: 455MB less.

Hmm... with what settings? I've kept music at 96kbps and sound/speech at 64. The rest (channels, 48000 hertz or whatever that is I've kept the original setting). And also important, do you hear the difference?

From doubleclick g3.exe till menu (intro vids deactivated) from around 20 s down to 12s.

So the game also loads sound data at that point... didn't knew that.

reloading a savegame is always 37s for me.

I guess the data remains in memory so parts of it are not loaded again.


I don't know how the game treats the audio part... it allocates a portion of memory and loads the files it needs to that portion? Is that portion dynamic or fixed? Or it loads a predefined number of sound files and gives them the memory they need?
For example with music, lets say the attack music is needed a lot, then you load the music file for that region and time of day. Maybe also 2-3 files from close zones. And after this, you only load/unload a music file when you reach a different zone/time. The only major loading/unloading of more files I guess occurs on teleport.

P.S.- It is nice to know that first load up is quicker. Also, now that I think about it, has anyone tried Alt-Tabbing onto the desktop and checking to see if less memory is being used?

The game also shows some kinda very technical statistics about memory by pressing Ctrl + S (only with testmode enabled)

[RobinHood 13.]

I think the difference between 128kbps vs 320kbps is quite large.
If you try to guess which is which, it may sound very similar, but if you close your eyes, and rather think of how the music feels, you will find that the 320kbps gives a very different experience.
It's not easy to separate everywhere, and ofcourse it also depends on your sound card and speakers which may make it harder to separate.

Test this: 320 vs 128
Did you guess correct?
I could, but it's not that easy to separate such a small timestep, and also one dominated by the singer. When there's alot of different sound sources, it's much easier to separate.
Example, Mew - Comforting sounds
When you get to about 2 mins, you really feel quality isn't good enough. Dunno what quality that is, but I've had both 128kpbs and 320kbps file versions of those songs, and the difference is very significant.

I've taken other tests that I couldn't separate (guessed wrong), but again it's hard to separate small time intervals, and in many songs, most of the song has a minor difference, but again many or most has moments where quality matters (like sound with many sound sources (instruments), like Mew), so you could say 128kbps has good quality througout most of the song, but will fail at more demanding parts.

If you save 100MB of music from uploading to the game upon loading, that will probably not make a major difference. That goes almost instantly (less than 1 sec) on the slower harddrives. Anyone tried G3 installed on a SSD with really fast read speed? The time to actual read the data from the disk, should then be reduced to near zero in comparison, so if you compare on same computer, but game installed on a normal disk, you can give a rough estimate on the time reading from disk takes.
Atleast I think so.

[Rpgingmaster]

Maybe it's just my computer, but after some testing, I've come to the following conclusions:

1. The sounds and music shrink fine and sound pretty much the same.

2. The speech files sounded quite off, so I replaced them with their originals and noticed little change in performance, so I'd keep the speech files unmodified.

3. The biggest benefits I've noticed after several playthrougths are decreased loadup times, some decrease in stutter (still present, but far less so than normal during cell loads), and quicker reloads than normal

In conclusion, I would safely recommend shrinking the music to 96 kbps and the sound effects to 64 kbps without quality loss. This should only be done to the OGG files though.

That aside, I've found no other benefits that can be derived from using this idea to increase performance.

[Tratos]

Even if no further improvement can be squeezed out if this idea, it's still something and I think it actually deserves to be linked in the Index thread.

[WernerTWC]

Hmm... with what settings? I've kept music at 96kbps and sound/speech at 64. The rest (channels, 48000 hertz or whatever that is I've kept the original setting). And also important, do you hear the difference?

I've set it to "Ogg Vorbis 22050 Hz; Mono; Quality - 1.00 ;" (was just for testing, anyway), ... i think for the speech it could be OK, for the music that "hard" compression could be a bit too much.