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The combat dialogue we had for Halo 2 was one of the most horrific data sets we could have ever created for any game for three major reasons:
Increased complexity of the combat dialog system required an equal increase in quantity of combat dialogue sounds.
Spoken dialog had multiple language versions embedded in a single sound tag for localization purposes.
Raw sound data and tag data were interleaved throughout the sound tag.
These three factors caused the Windows file system to break when we added combat dialogue for all the major characters. Running a level now required us to read in a relatively small amount of data over thousands of files with a non-predictable access pattern. This kind of interaction with the file system managed to thrash the file system cache every time we loaded a level that had characters with combat dialogue, which inconveniently happened to be every single campaign level. This had the unfortunate side effect of exploding level loading times on the PC for everyone.
The best solution we came up with was to unmap combat dialogue for most of the artists. Which is to say we didn't really solve this problem.
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