Feature Request Thread

[leolam]

I doubt it takes that much more work and matters that much for performance. The reason dumping is slow (afaik) is because it happens on the same thread as the GPU thread. When it is threaded, the performance hit should be much lower. And personally I'd prefer the lossless option rather than having to deal with huge files for no reason.

[mbc07]

(07-15-2016, 03:19 PM)Kurausukun Wrote: It would be much faster, that's the benefit.

Unless you're using a big SSD or dumping to a separate disk, the huge disk I/O of an uncompressed dump would actually cause frequent stalls (especially at higher resolutions) and so the performance improvement of dumping uncompressed would pretty much be negated.

(07-15-2016, 03:19 PM)Kurausukun Wrote: What I'm complaining about is the fact that compressing at the same time as dumping takes a lot more work than just dumping. 

I doubt. If you search for FFV1, you'll find it's "particularly popular for its performance regarding speed and size, compared to other lossless preservation codecs". And even if you can't dump in real-time, that won't affect the output file at all, it'll play without hiccups...

[Kurausukun]

I do happen to have a separate disk to dump to. But if you're saying that it's not as big a benefit as I think it is, or the benefits are only useful for a very small number of users, then I understand. I also understand that the speed of the frame dumps is irrelevant for playback, I just hate waiting.

[leolam]

Unlikely to happen, because it doesn't even exist in 5.0 anymore.

[shaneos]

Yes. I DESPERATELY want [load audio] added. And SOON. Why haven't we sorted this out earlier!

Maybe this is how we could do it:

- Whenever a sound file is loaded, it is dumped into the Dump/Audio/GAMEID folder as a 16-bit WAV file, at whatever sample rate is appropriate.
- We would need a way of file-naming to avoid duplicates etc... In other words, the naming scheme would be just like the custom textures, except for audio.
- You can put custom audio files in Load/Audio/GAMEID in the WAV format.
- There is an option in settings to enable custom audio AND/OR an option to enable custom audio for each individual game.

We could attempt support for DSP, AIFF, MP3, ALAC, FLAC, M4A, OGG, WMA, etc... but WAV is probably the easiest to play back.

However, I do know that loop points are unique to DSP, so I think DSP support would be essential.

Dumping files as DSP does work sometimes in Dolphin, but not all audio files will be dumped at the moment. I think resorting to WAV would be a great solution.

Some of the music in Metroid Prime 2 is great and I'd love to hear it in Metroid Prime 1, like the Torvus Bog music (especially the underwater version).

I don't know how easy all of this would be to implement, but if it at least appeared in a beta version I'd be thrilled! It's currently a pain to deal with all of the proprietary audio formats used in games, we all need to conform to one common, universal format like WAV.


Has someone started a similar thread about custom cutscenes? .thp files are a bit... mediocre if you're trying to put your own cutscenes in. Dump Cutscenes as MP4 anyone?

[TehGuy]

(08-06-2016, 09:28 AM)shaneos Wrote: Why haven't we sorted this out earlier!

I have some guesses and the correct answer may be one or more of them

1. if it were an easy task it would've been done already

2. Regardless of #1, no one cared enough to dedicate the time required to implement it

3. it's all well and good to say "we just need to do this, this, this" but it matters not if no one has any idea how to turn it into code that plays nice with the existing codebase (might be possible if one's able to pull the filename for what needs to be loaded and then be able to interrupt normal loading to load an external file with the same name (which I guess is what happens with textures but IDK, I haven't seen the code))

since it's been, what, 5 years since this thread started I just don't think it's going to happen unless you wanna have a go at it.

[Aleron Ives]

Even though seamless custom audio is impossible, it would be great if Dolphin would let you specify files to replace within the ISO through the game INI system, e.g. when the game tries to load file x, load path/to/file/y instead. At least this way you could replace a game's audio if you supplied new files in the same format (as well as replace any other file in the ISO without having to build a new one, which would save a lot of time during testing), and if it were only exposed in the game INI, then regular users wouldn't be as likely to break things by trying to load invalid files through the GUI.

[JMC47]

I don't know if it's the simple: how about how games loop audio, or what about games that wait for specific audio events?

It just doesn't work that easily; there are hundreds of reasons why it won't work.

[djneo]

Yeah, please make this work somehow
Would be so awesome!

[Helios]

@djneo

https://github.com/dolphin-emu/dolphin/pull/4136

Took me long enough, but here you go. textures toggle.