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kandoh, rok temu do games w Masahiro Sakurai refused to add Dolby Surround to a Kirby game because players had to sit through the logo

That’s what integrity looks like

PiJiNWiNg, rok temu

Now if they can just spread that to the rest of Nintendo…

PanArab, rok temu (edited rok temu) do games w Masahiro Sakurai refused to add Dolby Surround to a Kirby game because players had to sit through the logo

Wise man. I don’t care about Dolby but I do care about loading

turkalino, rok temu do games w Masahiro Sakurai refused to add Dolby Surround to a Kirby game because players had to sit through the logo

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

Zacryon, rok temu

Fe-diverse

Soggy, rok temu

MasterHero SoccerGuy is too pure for downvotes.

pyrflie, rok temu do games w Masahiro Sakurai refused to add Dolby Surround to a Kirby game because players had to sit through the logo

deleted_by_author

Blackmist, rok temu

Most games don’t use Dolby anyway. It’s PCM (although the console can often convert to DTS or Dolby Digital if you have a crappy old sound system).

Dolby Surround was only needed for mixing the surround channels into stereo output.

deafboy, rok temu do games w Masahiro Sakurai refused to add Dolby Surround to a Kirby game because players had to sit through the logo

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?

rushaction, rok temu

But however will it determine the player one controller … on a desktop computer?

Stardust, rok temu

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.

dev_null, rok temu

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.

arin, rok temu

It’s just an arcade feature that got brought over

aksdb, rok temu

At least some games parallelize this. The game then already loads assets, caches shaders etc while the intro rolls.

yamanii, rok temu do games w Masahiro Sakurai refused to add Dolby Surround to a Kirby game because players had to sit through the logo

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.

slaacaa, rok temu do games w Masahiro Sakurai refused to add Dolby Surround to a Kirby game because players had to sit through the logo

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.

iAvicenna, rok temu

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.

bigmclargehuge, rok temu do games w Masahiro Sakurai refused to add Dolby Surround to a Kirby game because players had to sit through the logo

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.

Norgur, rok temu

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.

CaptDust, rok temu

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.

the_artic_one, rok temu (edited rok temu)

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.

Grangle1, rok temu

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.

RightHandOfIkaros, rok temu

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.

the_artic_one, rok temu

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.

Norgur, rok temu

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.

bigmclargehuge, rok temu

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.

Norgur, rok temu

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.

RightHandOfIkaros, rok temu

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.

ryven, rok temu

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."

IzzyScissor, rok temu

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!”

EmperorHenry, rok temu do games w Masahiro Sakurai refused to add Dolby Surround to a Kirby game because players had to sit through the logo

The hero we deserve!

blusterydayve26, rok temu do games w Masahiro Sakurai refused to add Dolby Surround to a Kirby game because players had to sit through the logo

The hero we didn’t deserve.

ripcord, rok temu

You deserve it.

Suavevillain, rok temu do games w Masahiro Sakurai refused to add Dolby Surround to a Kirby game because players had to sit through the logo

Sakurai is the goat.

LaunchesKayaks, rok temu do games w Masahiro Sakurai refused to add Dolby Surround to a Kirby game because players had to sit through the logo

Oh fuck I forgot about Kirby Air Ride. That game was amazing. My mom and I would get insanely competitive over it.

morrowind, rok temu do games w Masahiro Sakurai refused to add Dolby Surround to a Kirby game because players had to sit through the logo

Can’t you add surround without dolby?

Palerider, rok temu

As far as I’m aware, yes.

I use Dolby with a lot of my games but don’t have the 'Ad screen".

SSUPII, rok temu

You might have to due to licensing, if the technology is patented. I don’t know about this

gaylord_fartmaster, rok temu

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.

ramble81, rok temu

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.

altima_neo, rok temu

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.

mlg, rok temu do games w Masahiro Sakurai refused to add Dolby Surround to a Kirby game because players had to sit through the logo

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.

Veraxus, rok temu do games w Masahiro Sakurai refused to add Dolby Surround to a Kirby game because players had to sit through the logo

I approve.