MP3 and OGG add decompression overhead and aren't lossless so for sound effects we are going to stick with WAV (you can have stereo in WAV files, in fact many of D2's WAVs are stereo) --- as for music, one of the prospect features in the long run is to make the game use external playlists, everyone has a different taste of music so instead of forcefully packing new music with the mod (there will be a sound track available in a seperate non mandatory mpq, which the game will use when instructed to) this will allow people to play what they want from their own collection without extra overhead being imposed on the game (when you turn the music volume to 0 in D2 and have a third party player in the background you still have D2 loading its music and that player running, so theres a lot of unneeded overhead caused by such an approach), the new music in the MPQ will either use OGG or FLAC (unless the MPQ formats built-in audio compression turns out to be better then these approaches), the playlist stuff will support MP3 as well.
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For a small headsup,
I can't 100% guarantee this, but the next time this thread gets updated there may be some actual videos (not gifs), after the audio pass is over theres no reason not to
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EDIT: For a more precise state about what is being done right now, we found that many LoD spells had no sound effects (think about blood lust, blood mana, defense curse et al.) so beside adding sfx for new things, we also have to adjust and edit everything existing (there are a myriad of problems with sounds.txt, resulting from very lazy copy/paste jobs, for example the lod sfx for monsters tends to have the same settings for each sound, except for filename and volume -_-, this makes a lot of stuff, like async and pooling settings in need of editing, there were also bugs in the core audio system which I fixed recently, this will be posted in the update thread when the time for that comes). I'm currently synthing sounds for the sirens and some spells, which put some delay on the work of the remainder (sound settings for monstats is almost fully completed beside this, along all player spells, missiles and states).
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