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[joeyspacerocks]

Hi - has anyone here used audio 'sprite sheets' for games?

I.e. cramming all your sound effects into a single audio file and playing fragments of it?

The concept popped into my head last night and a bit of googling around shows that it is a thing - e.g. https://github.com/rsadwick/audio-sprite

I'm trying to think of any specific pro's and con's, beyond just having less moving parts when loading assets in etc.

[EDIT] apologies if this should be in the technical sub rather than creative audio ...

[medieval]

I guess it can be useful. I imagine it's tedious to have a folder full of sound files for each action that a player performs; having it in one file instead and dividing the parts in the programming through an array would seem more practical.

However, isn't it true that this type of an approach tends to get problematic? Even with no present signal in the audio file at the point where the 'cut' begins, clipping might be an issue. That's not something I know all that much about though.

[mscottweber]

I was pondering this from a hypothetical stance not too long ago when Wwise became free for indie devs up to 200 sound assets.  If you just REALLY needed that 201st sound, It would be really easy to string multiple sounds together in one file and set up different start/stop points.

Other than that, I can't really see why someone would do that.  I mean, MAYBE one large file would be a bit smaller than the collective size of the individual sound files?

Its an interesting thought, though, definitely!

[Lauchsuppe]

Posting this in technical might yield more interesting results. Afaik there's not too many people here who also deal with the technical side of audio.


I don't see any advantage over having separate files; instead of accessing individual assets you would be accessing predetermined cues - so there's not much difference on the programming side. However, if all sounds are saved in a single file, it will be a huge pain in the ass to make individual amendments later in the process. Not only would you have to open this huge soundfile in your daw everytime but also would you have to reassign the cues after each alteration.

But if there's actually people following this approach, I'd be interested to hear what advantages it has to offer.

[medieval]

^

[joeyspacerocks]

Thanks for the feedback chaps.

The examples I've seen in use seem to be mainly in HTML5 games where I guess it's more efficient to download a single big file rather than lots of little ones (i.e. exactly the reasoning behind CSS sprites).

Certainly can't see any real benefits for packaged games.