Is that the whole thing? I thought it would be a long screen with JUST Dolby. That’s like two seconds and has other credits on it. I don’t understand folks’ rage over that.
GREAT game
Honestly, 5.1 surround sound is worth waiting the extra like 2 seconds of the logo. The fact that the game only has mono or stereo sound output just because he didn't want to have a logo on the screen for a few seconds is not putting user experience over marketing.
It would honestly make more sense that Nintendo told him he couldn't add it because they didn't want to pay for it and this is how he justified it to himself.
Most households have a TV with TV speakers, only capable of L/R. Why pay money and have people sit through a corporate short film for a feature most won't use?
Its two seconds for the benefit of 5.1, so the people that have it can benefit. And the people that don't can upgrade later.
Bear in mind that Kirby Air Ride came out in 2003, on a console that's only meant to be hooked up to CRTs. How many users back then do you think would've had access to this feature in the first place? Or would still be playing this game if/when they upgrade later?
It was uncommon, but not so uncommon that it didn't warrant being added to the game. Especially when Dolby was handing out licenses like candy apparently. I would imagine it was cheap to get a license, and would make some sense why Air Ride wouldn't have it. Air Ride is my favorite Kirby game, but even I recognize that Air Ride is probably one of the lowest budget Kirby games.
That sounds a bit as if you were saying: The plebs shall wait for the joy of the wealthy.
The problem people have with your argument is not the existence of 5.1 surround sound.
Nor is it that the vast majority of households can’t afford a properly tuned surround sound setup instead of haphazardly throwing speakers around which arguably creates a worse experience than stereo.
It’s that the Dolby implementation requires publishers to license it and pay for an unstoppable ad that plays before every session, while benefitting only the petit bourgeois.
Notice how you reverted so quickly to your capitalist brainwashing. May be a good inspiration to see what other ideologies have been implanted into you.
It is two seconds.
Per use.
I strongly prefer 0 seconds.
If every single software a company licensed to produce a video game required this, you would be waiting an hour to see the start menu. Don’t let any company do this or they all will.
Negative change worms it's way in through small defeats. The first DLC's were a small price for a lot of content, the first YouTube ads were only a single ad that was just a few seconds long, the first video game preorders came with amazing rewards, etc. When you allow for 2 seconds, then what's 3 seconds? What's 4, 5, 6? What's 30 seconds? What's 2 minutes? We've seen examples of this all throughout capitalism's history; to ignore them is, well, ignorant.
Not only is it just 2 seconds, but it's 2 seconds while the game is no doubt being loaded into memory while it plays anyway.
This is like whining about the Pixar animation that plays before all of their movies (for much longer than 2 seconds).
Gamecube doesn't have enough RAM to preload everything at startup like that, you have to go through the menus and pick a game mode and map to load.
Surely if it needed that startup load anyway, then Sakurai wouldn't be saying he turned the license down in order to get players in the game faster. I'm going to trust Sakurai's word here!
Sure, and the Spectrum ZX I used to use 35 years ago had even less. The GameCube is ancient history, it's not the benchmark for a reasonable amount of memory for anyone.
Edit: apologies, I forgot we were talking specifically about a GameCube game.
I would understand the complaint if it was longer, like 5 or 7 seconds long for just the Dolby logo. But its not.
Like, if seeing a logo for two seconds bothers you that much, better close your eyes when drivingriding the buswalking around town, otherwise you might see a dreaded billboard or advertisement.
Gonna just completely ignore that said 2s is otherwise unneeded so you can feel like you still have a point, hm?
Seeing an ad while walking does not require me to stop what I'm doing and wait for the ad. Putting an unstoppable ad in your pre-game logo does
Loading screens in a game take longer than two seconds and don't have the benefit of running one time before the game starts and adding surround sound support. So you would rather be greeted with a black screen as a game with less features loads instead?
Great idea.
People in this thread don't want to waste 2 seconds per use of a video game on a logo screen, but will happily waste the day discussing it.
It's a really good reminder when I'm ever in another state that things like that just... Aren't needed.
The advertising thing is a slippery slope, and it's OK for people to draw the line for how far down the slope they're willing to go higher up than you would. It's also OK that your line comfortably holds a 2-second ad.
No position here is unreasonable, and everyone should keep that in mind.
not everyone has the money to even get a decent TV, let alone 5.1 or God forbid 7.1
Kirby does not focus an people with high end playback devices. It's traditionally a kids game.
2secs Everytime you open the game can add up and be really annoying. Especially for kids, which are the core audience.
So because some people have a crappy home theater setup everyone should have a crappy experience?
Hey my setup's great, I just don't need 5.1 surround sound that bad
Without at least 5.1, why even bother playing games or watching movies?
Now you're just playing
Sound is at least as important to the experience as the picture. Go watch a scary movie with the sound muted and you’ll notice it’s not scary at all.
Playing a game or watching a movie with just 2.0 audio, or worse: using the TV’s built-in speakers, is such a diminished experience that you might as well not bother.
IMO
Watching a movie with 5.1: great
Watching a movie with 2.0: great
Don't get me wrong, I think it's cool, and I find good sound design at least as important as good visuals. It's all part of the aesthetics package. One of my fondest media memories is watching Jurassic Park at a relative's house with the sounds of the raptors coming from speakers all around. I even spent great expense setting up my own 5.1 setup.
But I've been chasing this dragon for too long. Audiovisual fidelity doesn't move the needle for me anymore (pardon the metaphor overload). I no longer feel the need to have my media reach out and immerse me - if it's good, I can do the work and use my imagination to get lost in the fantasy
Imagine consuming media with speakers rather than high-end OEMs to shut out all outside sound. Might as well just read books in a crowded café.
Imagine not being able to feel explosions in your gut because you have a pair of tiny speakers strapped to your head instead of a big long-throw woofer moving air.
Sorry I'll be explicit: I'm making fun of how pretentious you sound and can't take anything you say here seriously. I actually agree that a monster sound system can greatly enhance a movie or game experience, but the difference depends on the specific media. I saw Fury Road three times in the theater because I knew my home system would never match the experience. Something like Star Trek TNG or My Cousin Vinny or, as the topic of this post, Kirby's Air Ride hinges far less on the audio quality to deliver the intended content. Gatekeeping enjoyment behind speakers makes you a colossal ass.
From the pareto principle it can be said that if the cost for adding a feature for the little percentage of users is quite high, it is not worth it.
Except the 2 are not causally related. One can have 5.1 without the logo or, even worst, the waiting time.
Yepp. Surround sound is not tied to Dolby.
If it was money thing, couldn't he just say "I needed as much coin as I could scrape up to get Sora from Disney" like he basically said with the last wave of DLC characters?
Maybe it's my nostalgia glasses, but this is something I actually believe coming from Sakurai. The man almost hates useless ads as much as Lemmy users.
Nah, not for me anyway
Not sure why you're getting downvoted. This is a significant enough feature that a couple seconds is really not a big deal. There are likely time-wasters just as long, if not longer, elsewhere in the game and they do not contribute a much richer audio experience. While I'd love to minimize time wasting as much as possible, this is something that appears once on boot-up while I'm sure there are other time-wasters that appear multiple times while you're playing the game. If they're even a fraction of a second, they will quickly add up more than this logo's time.
Donald Knuth has a great quote on this: "The real problem is that programmers have spent far too much time worrying about efficiency in the wrong places and at the wrong times; premature optimization is the root of all evil (or at least most of it) in programming."
Two issues though. Sakurai was taking about how he likes the ability to jump from game to game at an arcade and jump straight into the game. But a lot of console games had you go through intros, menus, tutorials, etc. And he didn't like that, hence why he was saying he'd rather not have an extra logo screen to click through
The second issue was that the game in question was a GameCube game. It only outputs in stereo. Surround sound wasnt a common thing in games at the time. It would have been the old school Dolby Surround/Pro Logic II encoding. Most gaming setups didn't have surround sound receivers or sound bars yet. Also, it's a Kirby game. The target audience wouldn't have cared
The arcade experience is fundamentally different from the console experience. Arcade games are generally crafted to eat quarters and kick players off as soon as possible without making them feel ripped off. Jumping in and out of games is common at arcades. While it's nice to save that couple of seconds on a console game, it's not something that adds up a lot unless you're jumping between games a few minutes at a time, which again, is more like an arcade and doesn't make as much sense in a console gaming context because you generally have a better idea of what games you own and want to play.
As for the second issue, if it was a feature that wasn't worthwhile and that nobody cared about, then why was he considering it in the first place? There are many technical details in games that exist that casual players don't pay attention to, but subconsciously would enjoy. Surround sound adds quite a bit to a racing game, considering that the entire game is about racing against other characters that are positioned all around you.
The perception of delay is a lot larger for a single initial delay than a lot of smaller delays within the game. It's very noticable if a game takes 20 seconds to get past the intro screens, while it is barely noticeable if a quarter of a second of delay is added to the loading between each level, even if it adds up to a lot more than the initial loading screen.
Considering that the use of 5.1 surround would be a very rare case for the target aidience, I find the choice of dropping it to be excellent to enhance the experience.
Perception plays a huge role, that's true, but I guess we're just going to have to agree to disagree since it's ultimately subjective.
Because Lemmy hates everything that isn't FOSS. The more time I spend here, the more I see that it is no better than Reddit.
Nope. It's just an unnecessary label which provides no additional features, i.e. no benefits. You can have Dolby sound without the Dolby label.
The title states "Masahiro Sakurai refused to add Dolby Surround to a Kirby game because players had to sit through the logo" presumably because you actually cannot have Dolby sound without the logo. Yes, technically you could, but it's likely part of the license agreement and so him refusing to display the logo as outlined by the license means he couldn't use Dolby sound in the game (or would get sued if he went ahead and did it anyway).
Don't like it? Write your own equivalent and selfhost it using my favorite distro. /s
Exactly. This place sucks just as bad as Reddit, and the only reason I don't go back to Reddit is out of principle.
They're so pointless too. What are they even expecting forcing them in our faces to accomplish? You either care about audio or you don't. Seeing your logo isn't going to change that
Marketing. If people think Dolby is good, they will prefer products with Dolby compatibility, and Dolby makes money from that licensing.
Except most people don't give a shit about Dolby. Even audophiles mostly don't care about them as a company or the fact that they're involved beyond the games ability to support high end output devices. Put that garbage on the box or in the credits at the end of the game where it belongs
Most people that say they give a shit about surround sound don't have it set up correctly anyway lol
They're lucky if the speakers are even in the right place....let alone tuned properly. Good AVRs come with a microphone and most of the takeover projects I did when I was in home AV had it sitting unopened in the box.
Audiophiles loathe that crap. It's not making better sound, just adds loudness and other shit. Surround? It's like when groups long time ago started using stereo and made the sound Left then Right then LEFT etc. After the first experience its just a nuisance.
But gotta sell the crap I guess. Good they just didn't care about big corpo :-)
No way you just dissed stereo, were you filtered by Vulcan Raven in MGS1?
If you don't have more or less a listening room with the loudspeakers very well placed, you won't notice a difference. Mono with a good setup will give spatial clues as good as stereo. Yes you might get the left-right mixed up I guess but does it matter?
There was some mp3 matchbox shaking sound clip that really felt like it went around your head (popular maybe 10-15 years ago?), a simple mobile phone produced the effect very well, you just needed to close your eyes.
Half assed audiophile here. I only have two ears. I just want clean and balanced. Two channels is just fine.
Yup. The game company intros are the first thing I edit out of a game's config files. Especially if they're unskippable.
PSA: On PS5, after launching your game, hit the PS button. If there are activities, you can probably hit square to resume. This speeds through all the startup wankery and the main menu straight to loading your save. It rarely saves time, but it means you can launch your game and walk away to get a glass of water or whatever. I enjoy it.
What a chad move
Things like these make might heart warm. They remind me of a time when video most games where about making a good experience for the users, not about endless MTX and soulless always online games that all try to be the same thing. Good to see that there are still some people in the industry, who carry own these principles.
well I guess it was because the person who spearheaded the game project was also someone who liked and knew what games were about. Now that it has become a lucrative industry, the whole dynamics has shifted to something else.
Fucking based
It's especially weird to have all that time dedicated to something nobody cares about. Who goes looking to see if a game or movie was made using Dolby?
yea, ill go looking for great movies and games which have good Dolby Atmos... but once i buy it, i dont need to see a splash screen every time.
Wish we could have a single splash screen with all the bits of tech. then its only one, instead of screen after screen...
Anyone with good media equipment cares.
Anyone with good media equipment cares when they consider purchasing a game. Nobody needs this info every time they launch it.
Playstation 1 boot up sequence plays in background
The two go hand in hand. Want DolbyVision? The logo comes with that.
Wow
You don't need to be reminded about sound encoding every time you boot the game even if you do care.
Dolby (and others) have determined that it is in the best interest of their brand to put this alongside developers, producers, publishers, and others. It is now part of their license agreement.
Okay, and their ego maniacs for thinking they're that big of a part of the game to be credited everytime. That's why most people in the thread applaud the move.
I don't agree, but it's good that you always have the option of not buying a game with a brief splash screen.
It's good that creators have the ability to boot parasitic vendors like Dolby when their licensing agreements are insanely greedy too.
Ok boss, sure
That information belongs in the specs/feature list on the encasing, not in the fucking splash screen as dedicated video.
For the buyer that would be too late and for the one who bought it already and now wants to play it's utterly pointless.
It’s on the box. In order to license it the grantor requires screen time.
No, the grantor requires fees. Screen time is just a bonus
Wow
You were down voted, yet here I am. A person who cares about surround sound options.
But do you as that person need to know that fact every time you launch the game or is finding out about it before you buy it from it's technical information sufficient?
You can care about surround sound options, but a non skippable splash screen on every launch gives you zero information or use.
Nobody is advocating for the sound to play at startup. The comment that started this conversation specifically uses the word "looking". We're just saying people do pay attention to what kind of surround sound something has.
It must be weird to care about being reminded of what surround sound the game is using everytime u play it? Nobody's saying they don't care about sound quality, nor options. Idk how u can read this thread and that be your takeaway. It should be on the box/product description, no need for a splash screen in the game is what the argument is about...
I was originally responding to the comment about looking for surround sound options and was not trying to defend the sounds. Obviously, the info on the box is usually the best way to tell.
But as we discuss it, some use cases for the sound come to mind.
If the media is just a file on a hard drive or if the original packaging is lost or damaged, I might appreciate having the sound to indicate what settings to use on the receiver.
And honestly beyond all that... Who cares if somebody does like having the sound play every time? We all do weird shit.
Pro gamer move
The only thing worse than unskipable ads are the waiting screens (press a button to continue) in front of the loading screens.
I mean, the machine is capable of billions of operations per second. Why is it waiting for ME to push a button?
Dunno if you want a serious answer, but 'press start' titlescreens that start up an animation if you leave it unpressed too long are a throwback to when if a screen showed the same image for too long, it would fry the image on to the screen and leave a little ghost image, so screensavers were a screen saver. This allowed one to demo software and just leave it running without worrying about damaging the product hardware.
These days however it is totally unnecessary.
So that if you leave the room to make yourself a tea or something while the game is loading, your won't miss the cut scene / beginning of the action / lose the game because it started without you present.
It's just an arcade feature that got brought over
At least some games parallelize this. The game then already loads assets, caches shaders etc while the intro rolls.
But however will it determine the player one controller .... on a desktop computer?
That's what integrity looks like
Now if they can just spread that to the rest of Nintendo...
I am so glad when a PC game just has the intro videos as separate file, always go there to delete them, I do it with every game.
Kirby sucks and blows anyway
(╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻
Oh, nvm, sorry
┬─┬ノ( º _ ºノ)
This took me back so fucking far I'm so old
Lots of people ITT complaining that Lemmy is blanket anti-business, meanwhile I’m just surprised that something involving Nintendo isn’t being downvoted into oblivion
This place is getting more diverse, I like it
Fe-diverse
MasterHero SoccerGuy is too pure for downvotes.
I definitely wish there was more negotiation with tech library companies about this. It makes sense for movies - it's a one-time experience, you only see the supporting studios' logos one time, and it's just building anticipation for the opening moments of the movie. But games are things people play twenty times a week. Someone might see the logos more if they play in shorter sessions, and maybe even avoid playing for a night because they're familiar with the two minutes of setup to get to "actually playing".
I even wish there was more effort to put gaming menus before the launch. A long time ago, Steam standardized a server picker for their own games, so you could skip "launching the game, hitting Server Browser", instead just open the server list, double click one, and then that's your "launching" task taking you to the thing you want to play. Even consoles could do this, even for games using matchmaking. I remember this being something the PS5 promoted in its menus but, not having a PS5, I'm curious if many games followed though.
You would think that the shit-shoveling marketeers would figure out that showing an unskippable logo does brand damage.
luckily, most games are easily modded: Just put a 1-2 frames black video file where the brand logos used to be. Done.
Sakurai is the goat.
Can't you add surround without dolby?
I'm not an expert on this by any means, but I think the issue is they would have to work out how to encode the audio for surround themselves, and then it would be up to all of the different AV receivers out there to decode it properly. Using Dolby just standardizes it to where if your receiver supports that format you know it'll decode it properly.
As far as I'm aware, yes.
I use Dolby with a lot of my games but don't have the 'Ad screen".
You might have to due to licensing, if the technology is patented. I don't know about this
Short answer, Yes.
Longer answer, no.
This was a GameCube game. It only supports stereo output. It would have needed Dolby Surround/Pro Logic II libraries to do surround sound encoding within the stereo signal. The use would have also needed a receiver with Pro Logic II support and surround speakers.
Yes there are other formats such as DTS and Auro 3D. You can even do it with straight up LPCM if you want, but DD is one of the quickest ways to do it and iirc DTS has similar licensing requirements with their logo, and barely anyone has Auro. You could try to use LPCM but you’d need a multichannel output such as 6x analog connections or a digital source using bitstreamed output which many didn’t have at the time.
I don't think people are playing Kirby games expecting Dolby surround sound anyway, so this seems like it'd be a pretty easy decision.
The hero we didn’t deserve.
You deserve it.
Oh fuck I forgot about Kirby Air Ride. That game was amazing. My mom and I would get insanely competitive over it.
Wise man. I don’t care about Dolby but I do care about loading
The hero we deserve!
The only Dolby worth sitting through is Thomas.
Corporate loga are cancer. I don't give a fuck about your shiti brand. I paid you for use the license. You don't get to fucking stick your shiti advert into my life after I pay you.
Actually yes, they do. You paid for a license.
See, now before you used to be able to buy an individual copy of the game. Then you did have the right to edit those out. Can't do that when you only buy a license.
Yarrr ;)
Dolby Surround is just weird to me. Why no just use multichannel wav/flac/etc?
Most people have just two speakers, and if you have headphones a good stereo surround software can actually be even better than the surround from multichannel
I approve.
Hey bro, just pause the game and play their jiggle on your phone if you miss it so much.
Was anyone complaining?
Yeah... i don't understand why this is a good move. Sacrificing an element that would noticably improve a core aspect of the games design for the sake of not looking at a picture for a few seconds on startup? Seems completely backwards if you ask me.
You need to toake into account that we're talking about a Kirby game here, which are all 2/2.5/sometimes 3D platformers. So The real effect of Dolby in such a thing would have been close to zero.
The context is Kirby Air Ride, a racing spinoff. Not that it changes much, but it is fully 3D and a genre that can take advantage of surround sound.
That came out on GameCube back when we were all still using composite cables that didn't support surround anyway.
Edit: Apparently I was misinformed, still KAR was such a casual arcadey game that I'm sure it got more benefit out of quick startup than it would have from surround support.
This is not true at all and demonstrates a profound misunderstanding of how surround sound worked.
Nintendo 64 games like Donkey Kong 64 and Conker's Bad Fur Day supported surround sound. Even Star Fox on the SNES supported surround sound. All through composite cables.
It works by encoding multiple channels into two channels, so it can then decode those channels to send the proper signal to the proper speaker. For Dolby specifically, you need a Pro Logic compatible receiver, which could decode that signal. If you don't have a Pro Logic compatible receiver then you will only hear stereo output.
Well TIL.
profound misunderstanding of how surround sound worked
You got me, I didn't know anyone who even owned a surround sound setup in the gamecube era.
Exactly. Until around 2005 with the advent of affordable HDTVs and the war between HD-DVD and Blu-Ray, anything more than what came stock with your TV, which was usually standard definition picture and stereo sound, was something of a luxury. Sound bars were only really starting to become a popular thing.
oh, it was the racing game? I must have gone through the text too quickly then. Yet, if we're pragmatic: How many people would have really enjoyed that game (which wasn't stellar to begin with) more with properly encoded surround sound, and how many would have enjoyed it a tad less because of the annoying logo spam on startup? I don't think Surround-Sound-enjoyers were the target audience for that one.
Yeah I did consider that when I made my comment. And keep in mind I do see where they're coming from. It's not like I'm calling them stupid for this decision. I personally just see it as a massive overcorrection for something that will, in the grand scheme, have virtually no effect on the quality of the game for literally anyone besides the person who made this decision.
I know it's not the best comparison, but to me it would be like if RTX support required an RTX logo, and a major studio just removed RTX from their game, not for any performance or quality issues, but solely for a logo. Again, it just seems like an overcorrection for a non-issue. I'll admit, I sometimes get annoyed by intro logos, but never enough to the point where I'd think it's worth removing features to get rid of them.
I got the impression that “removing” means removing before it was really implemented. Like, it was planned and decided upon, but it wasn't ready. He checked the license and went “nope, not having it” and scrapped the feature. It doesn't truly become clear in the text, of course, but that's how I read this.
This is Sakurai's explanation, and it seems reasonable to me:
“I feel very sorry for making the user wait,” he explained. “If you take one second from each user, that means you’ll be taking 10,000 seconds from 10,000 people. The more this repeats over the years, the more time you will cause players to lose."
I remember one of l Hank Green's older videos when he added up all the viewtime from all of their videos and realized it was longer than the average human lifespan. Of course, he immediately framed it as "We've killed a man!"
You realize this is Lemmy, and on Lemmy you have to hate every business and every product produced by a business apparently, right? If it isn't FOSS, then you aren't allowed to like it.
This scrub is why Brawl ran in slow motion and included random tripping because the 5 melee players scared him with enjoyable competitive gameplay.
It's probably because they didn't want to pay Dolby licensing fees, not because it makes a 2 second difference in the loading screen.
even see how this would affect the loading screen considering I run live AC3 encoding on an old laptop much older than the switch and it has zero effect on the boot and login time. nvm it was a GC game.
Basically every Wii game shipped with Dolby Digital no issue.
User experience over marketing.
Here's an example of the Dolby logo from another GameCube game that offered surround.
https://youtu.be/cE4KVPJYLCo
Is that the whole thing? I thought it would be a long screen with JUST Dolby. That’s like two seconds and has other credits on it. I don’t understand folks’ rage over that.
GREAT game
Honestly, 5.1 surround sound is worth waiting the extra like 2 seconds of the logo. The fact that the game only has mono or stereo sound output just because he didn't want to have a logo on the screen for a few seconds is not putting user experience over marketing.
It would honestly make more sense that Nintendo told him he couldn't add it because they didn't want to pay for it and this is how he justified it to himself.
Most households have a TV with TV speakers, only capable of L/R. Why pay money and have people sit through a corporate short film for a feature most won't use?
Its two seconds for the benefit of 5.1, so the people that have it can benefit. And the people that don't can upgrade later.
Bear in mind that Kirby Air Ride came out in 2003, on a console that's only meant to be hooked up to CRTs. How many users back then do you think would've had access to this feature in the first place? Or would still be playing this game if/when they upgrade later?
It was uncommon, but not so uncommon that it didn't warrant being added to the game. Especially when Dolby was handing out licenses like candy apparently. I would imagine it was cheap to get a license, and would make some sense why Air Ride wouldn't have it. Air Ride is my favorite Kirby game, but even I recognize that Air Ride is probably one of the lowest budget Kirby games.
That sounds a bit as if you were saying: The plebs shall wait for the joy of the wealthy.
The problem people have with your argument is not the existence of 5.1 surround sound.
Nor is it that the vast majority of households can’t afford a properly tuned surround sound setup instead of haphazardly throwing speakers around which arguably creates a worse experience than stereo.
It’s that the Dolby implementation requires publishers to license it and pay for an unstoppable ad that plays before every session, while benefitting only the petit bourgeois.
Notice how you reverted so quickly to your capitalist brainwashing. May be a good inspiration to see what other ideologies have been implanted into you.
It is two seconds.
Per use.
I strongly prefer 0 seconds.
If every single software a company licensed to produce a video game required this, you would be waiting an hour to see the start menu. Don’t let any company do this or they all will.
Negative change worms it's way in through small defeats. The first DLC's were a small price for a lot of content, the first YouTube ads were only a single ad that was just a few seconds long, the first video game preorders came with amazing rewards, etc. When you allow for 2 seconds, then what's 3 seconds? What's 4, 5, 6? What's 30 seconds? What's 2 minutes? We've seen examples of this all throughout capitalism's history; to ignore them is, well, ignorant.
Not only is it just 2 seconds, but it's 2 seconds while the game is no doubt being loaded into memory while it plays anyway.
This is like whining about the Pixar animation that plays before all of their movies (for much longer than 2 seconds).
Gamecube doesn't have enough RAM to preload everything at startup like that, you have to go through the menus and pick a game mode and map to load.
Surely if it needed that startup load anyway, then Sakurai wouldn't be saying he turned the license down in order to get players in the game faster. I'm going to trust Sakurai's word here!
Sure, and the Spectrum ZX I used to use 35 years ago had even less. The GameCube is ancient history, it's not the benchmark for a reasonable amount of memory for anyone.
Edit: apologies, I forgot we were talking specifically about a GameCube game.
I would understand the complaint if it was longer, like 5 or 7 seconds long for just the Dolby logo. But its not.
Like, if seeing a logo for two seconds bothers you that much, better close your eyes when
drivingriding the buswalking around town, otherwise you might see a dreaded billboard or advertisement.Gonna just completely ignore that said 2s is otherwise unneeded so you can feel like you still have a point, hm?
Seeing an ad while walking does not require me to stop what I'm doing and wait for the ad. Putting an unstoppable ad in your pre-game logo does
Loading screens in a game take longer than two seconds and don't have the benefit of running one time before the game starts and adding surround sound support. So you would rather be greeted with a black screen as a game with less features loads instead?
Great idea.
People in this thread don't want to waste 2 seconds per use of a video game on a logo screen, but will happily waste the day discussing it.
Absolutely
Yeah. It's called principles. Maybe when your corporate overlords have some for sale you'll be and to afford them.
My state banned billboards for the same reasons.
It's a really good reminder when I'm ever in another state that things like that just... Aren't needed.
The advertising thing is a slippery slope, and it's OK for people to draw the line for how far down the slope they're willing to go higher up than you would. It's also OK that your line comfortably holds a 2-second ad.
No position here is unreasonable, and everyone should keep that in mind.
So many assumptions here.
Let me refute them through educated guesses.
So because some people have a crappy home theater setup everyone should have a crappy experience?
Hey my setup's great, I just don't need 5.1 surround sound that bad
Without at least 5.1, why even bother playing games or watching movies?
Now you're just playing
Sound is at least as important to the experience as the picture. Go watch a scary movie with the sound muted and you’ll notice it’s not scary at all.
Playing a game or watching a movie with just 2.0 audio, or worse: using the TV’s built-in speakers, is such a diminished experience that you might as well not bother.
IMO
Watching a movie with 5.1: great
Watching a movie with 2.0: great
Don't get me wrong, I think it's cool, and I find good sound design at least as important as good visuals. It's all part of the aesthetics package. One of my fondest media memories is watching Jurassic Park at a relative's house with the sounds of the raptors coming from speakers all around. I even spent great expense setting up my own 5.1 setup.
But I've been chasing this dragon for too long. Audiovisual fidelity doesn't move the needle for me anymore (pardon the metaphor overload). I no longer feel the need to have my media reach out and immerse me - if it's good, I can do the work and use my imagination to get lost in the fantasy
Imagine consuming media with speakers rather than high-end OEMs to shut out all outside sound. Might as well just read books in a crowded café.
Imagine not being able to feel explosions in your gut because you have a pair of tiny speakers strapped to your head instead of a big long-throw woofer moving air.
Sorry I'll be explicit: I'm making fun of how pretentious you sound and can't take anything you say here seriously. I actually agree that a monster sound system can greatly enhance a movie or game experience, but the difference depends on the specific media. I saw Fury Road three times in the theater because I knew my home system would never match the experience. Something like Star Trek TNG or My Cousin Vinny or, as the topic of this post, Kirby's Air Ride hinges far less on the audio quality to deliver the intended content. Gatekeeping enjoyment behind speakers makes you a colossal ass.
From the pareto principle it can be said that if the cost for adding a feature for the little percentage of users is quite high, it is not worth it.
Who games on a 5.1 surround setup?
Except the 2 are not causally related. One can have 5.1 without the logo or, even worst, the waiting time.
Yepp. Surround sound is not tied to Dolby.
If it was money thing, couldn't he just say "I needed as much coin as I could scrape up to get Sora from Disney" like he basically said with the last wave of DLC characters?
Maybe it's my nostalgia glasses, but this is something I actually believe coming from Sakurai. The man almost hates useless ads as much as Lemmy users.
Nah, not for me anyway
Not sure why you're getting downvoted. This is a significant enough feature that a couple seconds is really not a big deal. There are likely time-wasters just as long, if not longer, elsewhere in the game and they do not contribute a much richer audio experience. While I'd love to minimize time wasting as much as possible, this is something that appears once on boot-up while I'm sure there are other time-wasters that appear multiple times while you're playing the game. If they're even a fraction of a second, they will quickly add up more than this logo's time.
Donald Knuth has a great quote on this: "The real problem is that programmers have spent far too much time worrying about efficiency in the wrong places and at the wrong times; premature optimization is the root of all evil (or at least most of it) in programming."
Two issues though. Sakurai was taking about how he likes the ability to jump from game to game at an arcade and jump straight into the game. But a lot of console games had you go through intros, menus, tutorials, etc. And he didn't like that, hence why he was saying he'd rather not have an extra logo screen to click through
The second issue was that the game in question was a GameCube game. It only outputs in stereo. Surround sound wasnt a common thing in games at the time. It would have been the old school Dolby Surround/Pro Logic II encoding. Most gaming setups didn't have surround sound receivers or sound bars yet. Also, it's a Kirby game. The target audience wouldn't have cared
The arcade experience is fundamentally different from the console experience. Arcade games are generally crafted to eat quarters and kick players off as soon as possible without making them feel ripped off. Jumping in and out of games is common at arcades. While it's nice to save that couple of seconds on a console game, it's not something that adds up a lot unless you're jumping between games a few minutes at a time, which again, is more like an arcade and doesn't make as much sense in a console gaming context because you generally have a better idea of what games you own and want to play.
As for the second issue, if it was a feature that wasn't worthwhile and that nobody cared about, then why was he considering it in the first place? There are many technical details in games that exist that casual players don't pay attention to, but subconsciously would enjoy. Surround sound adds quite a bit to a racing game, considering that the entire game is about racing against other characters that are positioned all around you.
The perception of delay is a lot larger for a single initial delay than a lot of smaller delays within the game. It's very noticable if a game takes 20 seconds to get past the intro screens, while it is barely noticeable if a quarter of a second of delay is added to the loading between each level, even if it adds up to a lot more than the initial loading screen.
Considering that the use of 5.1 surround would be a very rare case for the target aidience, I find the choice of dropping it to be excellent to enhance the experience.
Perception plays a huge role, that's true, but I guess we're just going to have to agree to disagree since it's ultimately subjective.
Because Lemmy hates everything that isn't FOSS. The more time I spend here, the more I see that it is no better than Reddit.
Nope. It's just an unnecessary label which provides no additional features, i.e. no benefits. You can have Dolby sound without the Dolby label.
The title states "Masahiro Sakurai refused to add Dolby Surround to a Kirby game because players had to sit through the logo" presumably because you actually cannot have Dolby sound without the logo. Yes, technically you could, but it's likely part of the license agreement and so him refusing to display the logo as outlined by the license means he couldn't use Dolby sound in the game (or would get sued if he went ahead and did it anyway).
Don't like it? Write your own equivalent and selfhost it using my favorite distro. /s
Exactly. This place sucks just as bad as Reddit, and the only reason I don't go back to Reddit is out of principle.
Cry moar!
Based. Unskippable logo screens are a nuisance.
They're so pointless too. What are they even expecting forcing them in our faces to accomplish? You either care about audio or you don't. Seeing your logo isn't going to change that
Marketing. If people think Dolby is good, they will prefer products with Dolby compatibility, and Dolby makes money from that licensing.
Except most people don't give a shit about Dolby. Even audophiles mostly don't care about them as a company or the fact that they're involved beyond the games ability to support high end output devices. Put that garbage on the box or in the credits at the end of the game where it belongs
Most people that say they give a shit about surround sound don't have it set up correctly anyway lol
They're lucky if the speakers are even in the right place....let alone tuned properly. Good AVRs come with a microphone and most of the takeover projects I did when I was in home AV had it sitting unopened in the box.
Audiophiles loathe that crap. It's not making better sound, just adds loudness and other shit. Surround? It's like when groups long time ago started using stereo and made the sound Left then Right then LEFT etc. After the first experience its just a nuisance.
But gotta sell the crap I guess. Good they just didn't care about big corpo :-)
No way you just dissed stereo, were you filtered by Vulcan Raven in MGS1?
If you don't have more or less a listening room with the loudspeakers very well placed, you won't notice a difference. Mono with a good setup will give spatial clues as good as stereo. Yes you might get the left-right mixed up I guess but does it matter?
There was some mp3 matchbox shaking sound clip that really felt like it went around your head (popular maybe 10-15 years ago?), a simple mobile phone produced the effect very well, you just needed to close your eyes.
Half assed audiophile here. I only have two ears. I just want clean and balanced. Two channels is just fine.
Yup. The game company intros are the first thing I edit out of a game's config files. Especially if they're unskippable.
PSA: On PS5, after launching your game, hit the PS button. If there are activities, you can probably hit square to resume. This speeds through all the startup wankery and the main menu straight to loading your save. It rarely saves time, but it means you can launch your game and walk away to get a glass of water or whatever. I enjoy it.
What a chad move
Things like these make might heart warm. They remind me of a time when video most games where about making a good experience for the users, not about endless MTX and soulless always online games that all try to be the same thing. Good to see that there are still some people in the industry, who carry own these principles.
well I guess it was because the person who spearheaded the game project was also someone who liked and knew what games were about. Now that it has become a lucrative industry, the whole dynamics has shifted to something else.
Fucking based
It's especially weird to have all that time dedicated to something nobody cares about. Who goes looking to see if a game or movie was made using Dolby?
THX audio master race
yea, ill go looking for great movies and games which have good Dolby Atmos... but once i buy it, i dont need to see a splash screen every time.
Wish we could have a single splash screen with all the bits of tech. then its only one, instead of screen after screen...
Anyone with good media equipment cares.
Anyone with good media equipment cares when they consider purchasing a game. Nobody needs this info every time they launch it.
Playstation 1 boot up sequence plays in background
The two go hand in hand. Want DolbyVision? The logo comes with that.
Wow
You don't need to be reminded about sound encoding every time you boot the game even if you do care.
Dolby (and others) have determined that it is in the best interest of their brand to put this alongside developers, producers, publishers, and others. It is now part of their license agreement.
Okay, and their ego maniacs for thinking they're that big of a part of the game to be credited everytime. That's why most people in the thread applaud the move.
I don't agree, but it's good that you always have the option of not buying a game with a brief splash screen.
It's good that creators have the ability to boot parasitic vendors like Dolby when their licensing agreements are insanely greedy too.
Ok boss, sure
That information belongs in the specs/feature list on the encasing, not in the fucking splash screen as dedicated video.
For the buyer that would be too late and for the one who bought it already and now wants to play it's utterly pointless.
It’s on the box. In order to license it the grantor requires screen time.
No, the grantor requires fees. Screen time is just a bonus
Wow
You were down voted, yet here I am. A person who cares about surround sound options.
But do you as that person need to know that fact every time you launch the game or is finding out about it before you buy it from it's technical information sufficient?
You can care about surround sound options, but a non skippable splash screen on every launch gives you zero information or use.
Nobody is advocating for the sound to play at startup. The comment that started this conversation specifically uses the word "looking". We're just saying people do pay attention to what kind of surround sound something has.
It must be weird to care about being reminded of what surround sound the game is using everytime u play it? Nobody's saying they don't care about sound quality, nor options. Idk how u can read this thread and that be your takeaway. It should be on the box/product description, no need for a splash screen in the game is what the argument is about...
I was originally responding to the comment about looking for surround sound options and was not trying to defend the sounds. Obviously, the info on the box is usually the best way to tell.
But as we discuss it, some use cases for the sound come to mind.
If the media is just a file on a hard drive or if the original packaging is lost or damaged, I might appreciate having the sound to indicate what settings to use on the receiver.
And honestly beyond all that... Who cares if somebody does like having the sound play every time? We all do weird shit.
Pro gamer move
The only thing worse than unskipable ads are the waiting screens (press a button to continue) in front of the loading screens.
I mean, the machine is capable of billions of operations per second. Why is it waiting for ME to push a button?
Dunno if you want a serious answer, but 'press start' titlescreens that start up an animation if you leave it unpressed too long are a throwback to when if a screen showed the same image for too long, it would fry the image on to the screen and leave a little ghost image, so screensavers were a screen saver. This allowed one to demo software and just leave it running without worrying about damaging the product hardware.
These days however it is totally unnecessary.
So that if you leave the room to make yourself a tea or something while the game is loading, your won't miss the cut scene / beginning of the action / lose the game because it started without you present.
It's just an arcade feature that got brought over
At least some games parallelize this. The game then already loads assets, caches shaders etc while the intro rolls.
But however will it determine the player one controller .... on a desktop computer?
That's what integrity looks like
Now if they can just spread that to the rest of Nintendo...
I am so glad when a PC game just has the intro videos as separate file, always go there to delete them, I do it with every game.
Kirby sucks and blows anyway
(╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻
Oh, nvm, sorry
┬─┬ノ( º _ ºノ)
This took me back so fucking far I'm so old
Lots of people ITT complaining that Lemmy is blanket anti-business, meanwhile I’m just surprised that something involving Nintendo isn’t being downvoted into oblivion
This place is getting more diverse, I like it
Fe-diverse
MasterHero SoccerGuy is too pure for downvotes.
I definitely wish there was more negotiation with tech library companies about this. It makes sense for movies - it's a one-time experience, you only see the supporting studios' logos one time, and it's just building anticipation for the opening moments of the movie. But games are things people play twenty times a week. Someone might see the logos more if they play in shorter sessions, and maybe even avoid playing for a night because they're familiar with the two minutes of setup to get to "actually playing".
I even wish there was more effort to put gaming menus before the launch. A long time ago, Steam standardized a server picker for their own games, so you could skip "launching the game, hitting Server Browser", instead just open the server list, double click one, and then that's your "launching" task taking you to the thing you want to play. Even consoles could do this, even for games using matchmaking. I remember this being something the PS5 promoted in its menus but, not having a PS5, I'm curious if many games followed though.
You would think that the shit-shoveling marketeers would figure out that showing an unskippable logo does brand damage.
luckily, most games are easily modded: Just put a 1-2 frames black video file where the brand logos used to be. Done.
Sakurai is the goat.
Can't you add surround without dolby?
I'm not an expert on this by any means, but I think the issue is they would have to work out how to encode the audio for surround themselves, and then it would be up to all of the different AV receivers out there to decode it properly. Using Dolby just standardizes it to where if your receiver supports that format you know it'll decode it properly.
As far as I'm aware, yes.
I use Dolby with a lot of my games but don't have the 'Ad screen".
You might have to due to licensing, if the technology is patented. I don't know about this
Short answer, Yes.
Longer answer, no. This was a GameCube game. It only supports stereo output. It would have needed Dolby Surround/Pro Logic II libraries to do surround sound encoding within the stereo signal. The use would have also needed a receiver with Pro Logic II support and surround speakers.
Yes there are other formats such as DTS and Auro 3D. You can even do it with straight up LPCM if you want, but DD is one of the quickest ways to do it and iirc DTS has similar licensing requirements with their logo, and barely anyone has Auro. You could try to use LPCM but you’d need a multichannel output such as 6x analog connections or a digital source using bitstreamed output which many didn’t have at the time.
I don't think people are playing Kirby games expecting Dolby surround sound anyway, so this seems like it'd be a pretty easy decision.
The hero we didn’t deserve.
You deserve it.
Oh fuck I forgot about Kirby Air Ride. That game was amazing. My mom and I would get insanely competitive over it.
Wise man. I don’t care about Dolby but I do care about loading
The hero we deserve!
The only Dolby worth sitting through is Thomas.
Corporate loga are cancer. I don't give a fuck about your shiti brand. I paid you for use the license. You don't get to fucking stick your shiti advert into my life after I pay you.
Actually yes, they do. You paid for a license.
See, now before you used to be able to buy an individual copy of the game. Then you did have the right to edit those out. Can't do that when you only buy a license.
Yarrr ;)
Dolby Surround is just weird to me. Why no just use multichannel wav/flac/etc?
Most people have just two speakers, and if you have headphones a good stereo surround software can actually be even better than the surround from multichannel
I approve.
Hey bro, just pause the game and play their jiggle on your phone if you miss it so much.
Was anyone complaining?
Yeah... i don't understand why this is a good move. Sacrificing an element that would noticably improve a core aspect of the games design for the sake of not looking at a picture for a few seconds on startup? Seems completely backwards if you ask me.
You need to toake into account that we're talking about a Kirby game here, which are all 2/2.5/sometimes 3D platformers. So The real effect of Dolby in such a thing would have been close to zero.
The context is Kirby Air Ride, a racing spinoff. Not that it changes much, but it is fully 3D and a genre that can take advantage of surround sound.
That came out on GameCube back when we were all still using composite cables that didn't support surround anyway.Edit: Apparently I was misinformed, still KAR was such a casual arcadey game that I'm sure it got more benefit out of quick startup than it would have from surround support.
This is not true at all and demonstrates a profound misunderstanding of how surround sound worked.
Nintendo 64 games like Donkey Kong 64 and Conker's Bad Fur Day supported surround sound. Even Star Fox on the SNES supported surround sound. All through composite cables.
It works by encoding multiple channels into two channels, so it can then decode those channels to send the proper signal to the proper speaker. For Dolby specifically, you need a Pro Logic compatible receiver, which could decode that signal. If you don't have a Pro Logic compatible receiver then you will only hear stereo output.
Well TIL.
You got me, I didn't know anyone who even owned a surround sound setup in the gamecube era.
Exactly. Until around 2005 with the advent of affordable HDTVs and the war between HD-DVD and Blu-Ray, anything more than what came stock with your TV, which was usually standard definition picture and stereo sound, was something of a luxury. Sound bars were only really starting to become a popular thing.
oh, it was the racing game? I must have gone through the text too quickly then. Yet, if we're pragmatic: How many people would have really enjoyed that game (which wasn't stellar to begin with) more with properly encoded surround sound, and how many would have enjoyed it a tad less because of the annoying logo spam on startup? I don't think Surround-Sound-enjoyers were the target audience for that one.
Yeah I did consider that when I made my comment. And keep in mind I do see where they're coming from. It's not like I'm calling them stupid for this decision. I personally just see it as a massive overcorrection for something that will, in the grand scheme, have virtually no effect on the quality of the game for literally anyone besides the person who made this decision.
I know it's not the best comparison, but to me it would be like if RTX support required an RTX logo, and a major studio just removed RTX from their game, not for any performance or quality issues, but solely for a logo. Again, it just seems like an overcorrection for a non-issue. I'll admit, I sometimes get annoyed by intro logos, but never enough to the point where I'd think it's worth removing features to get rid of them.
I got the impression that “removing” means removing before it was really implemented. Like, it was planned and decided upon, but it wasn't ready. He checked the license and went “nope, not having it” and scrapped the feature. It doesn't truly become clear in the text, of course, but that's how I read this.
This is Sakurai's explanation, and it seems reasonable to me:
I remember one of l Hank Green's older videos when he added up all the viewtime from all of their videos and realized it was longer than the average human lifespan. Of course, he immediately framed it as "We've killed a man!"
You realize this is Lemmy, and on Lemmy you have to hate every business and every product produced by a business apparently, right? If it isn't FOSS, then you aren't allowed to like it.
This scrub is why Brawl ran in slow motion and included random tripping because the 5 melee players scared him with enjoyable competitive gameplay.
It's probably because they didn't want to pay Dolby licensing fees, not because it makes a 2 second difference in the loading screen.
even see how this would affect the loading screen considering I run live AC3 encoding on an old laptop much older than the switch and it has zero effect on the boot and login time.nvm it was a GC game.Basically every Wii game shipped with Dolby Digital no issue.