Putting the 'role' back in role-playing games since 2002.
Donate to Codex
Good Old Games
  • Welcome to rpgcodex.net, a site dedicated to discussing computer based role-playing games in a free and open fashion. We're less strict than other forums, but please refer to the rules.

    "This message is awaiting moderator approval": All new users must pass through our moderation queue before they will be able to post normally. Until your account has "passed" your posts will only be visible to yourself (and moderators) until they are approved. Give us a week to get around to approving / deleting / ignoring your mundane opinion on crap before hassling us about it. Once you have passed the moderation period (think of it as a test), you will be able to post normally, just like all the other retards.

"How game sizes got so huge, and why they'll get even bigger"

Wirdschowerdn

Ph.D. in World Saving
Patron
Joined
Nov 30, 2003
Messages
34,463
Location
Clogging the Multiverse with a Crowbar
Shadow of War (and Mordor) allows HD Textures and 4K videos as a free DLC. I hope giving us that option becomes standard for all Triple-A games.
 

FeelTheRads

Arcane
Joined
Apr 18, 2008
Messages
13,716
As for the article - unless graphical engines start to move away from textures into other rarely explored territories (they exist)

Do tell.
https://www.allegorithmic.com/products/substance-designer

This is already supported in big engines like Unreal and Unity. Possibly others.

What you do with it is create procedural textures. So instead of having huge bitmaps you have files that are just some hundreds of kilos which can be scaled up and down with no loss of quality.
However, they require more processing power, since they are calculated on the fly. And of course, they're more time consuming to create than taking pictures of real world textures.

I think it's already used a lot in the game industry, but I think it's mostly used as a generator.. that is, just exporting bitmaps from it instead of using the procedural files.
 

mondblut

Arcane
Joined
Aug 10, 2005
Messages
22,205
Location
Ingrija
Daggerfall (1996) had several options for installation size, with the largest occupying about half a gigabyte of hard drive space. In terms of game size relative to typical hard drive size, even the most bloated games of today can't compare. :M

It was simply a choice of what is copied on the hdd and what is pulled from the cd. Today's analogy would be what content to stream from steam servers or something in realtime. Would you?
 

DragoFireheart

all caps, rainbow colors, SOMETHING.
Joined
Jun 16, 2007
Messages
23,731
The file size is huge but the actual game is small and meaningless.

shit companies are gonna shit
 

soulburner

Cipher
Joined
Sep 21, 2013
Messages
809
I think this thing shows how some games could use compression to reduce their filesize:
https://www.reddit.com/r/Windows10/comments/76hj26/i_tested_25_games_against_the_windows_compact/

I'm wondering about another thing: loading speed. Isn't reading smaller (compressed) data from disk and uncompressing on the fly during loading faster than loading big files and bottlenecking the I/O of an HDD? Might me less of an issue on an SSD, but then size becomes a problem due to small SSDs...
 

Lazing Dirk

Arcane
Joined
Dec 12, 2016
Messages
1,865,452
Location
Shooting up your ride
What I'm reading between the lines here is that some devs have just gotten lazy with compressing because hard drives have gotten better and internet speeds are faster.

Company of Heroes: 1gig.


Six years later...

Company of Heroes 2: 30gigs.

20gb of that is probably all the extra vehicle skins that you didn't - and probably never will - purchase
 

Infinitron

I post news
Staff Member
Joined
Jan 28, 2011
Messages
97,236
Codex Year of the Donut Serpent in the Staglands Dead State Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Kingmaker Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth
I'm wondering about another thing: loading speed. Isn't reading smaller (compressed) data from disk and uncompressing on the fly during loading faster than loading big files and bottlenecking the I/O of an HDD?

Urrr, that doesn't sound like it could possibly be true in the general case. If it was then everything everywhere would be compressed. I mean obviously you don't want to use a wastefully large data format on purpose, but there's probably a point of diminishing returns where decompressing would be slower than reading a larger file from disk.

I can believe a lot of things but I don't believe game developers would make their games slower if they could avoid it. That's one thing they do care about.
 

Andhaira

Arcane
Joined
Nov 25, 2007
Messages
1,868,966
Fuck textures anyway, tiles were always superior.

To wit: Exile series vs Avernum; Eschalon vs ELEXXX
 

FeelTheRads

Arcane
Joined
Apr 18, 2008
Messages
13,716
Do they still do actual cinematics these days? I am very disconnected from the AAA world but at some point everyone was doing exclusively in-engine shit animations.

Or you had fucktards like Bioware who recorded in-engine animations and put them on disc as movie files, like they did with Jade Empire. Guess they had space to spare.
 

fantadomat

Arcane
Edgy Vatnik Wumao
Joined
Jun 2, 2017
Messages
37,087
Location
Bulgaria
Devs of the old had to work around the limited technology,devs of nu have to work around their lack of skillz. They do it by splashing a lot of shiny shit on the screen and call it a day.
 
Unwanted

Pequod

Unwanted
Joined
Jan 22, 2018
Messages
75
nuXCOM was like that, half the game size are the 1080p cinematics. But some of them are in-engine just with custom animations...
 

Zed Duke of Banville

Dungeon Master
Patron
Joined
Oct 3, 2015
Messages
11,760
It was simply a choice of what is copied on the hdd and what is pulled from the cd. Today's analogy would be what content to stream from steam servers or something in realtime. Would you?
Right, even for the larger games of that time, it was possible to fit them entirely on a single CD, and allow the player several options for how much of the content to put on one's hard-drive versus needing to read it from the CD while playing. Which perhaps points to a failure in the subsequent development of optical disc technology.

From 1995 to 2011, the size of the typical hard drive in a new computer increased by roughly a thousand-fold, from 1-1.5 GB in 1995 to 1-1.5 TB in 2011. Game sizes over that same period (focusing on larger games) increased by a factor of perhaps 40. This meant that it was possible in the late-90s to fill a computer's hard-drive with just 2 games (of the larger, CD-dependent kind), but by 2011 the relative size of large games had fallen to about 4% of what it had been 16 years earlier.

Over this same period, CDs were replaced by DVDs, which have about 7 times the data capacity. Blu-ray players became available for computers and have about 10 times the data capacity of DVDs, but I'm not sure if they've become standard in new computers even today and certainly were far from it in 2011. If Blu-ray had quickly become standard, then this would have meant a 70-fold increase in data capacity over CDs, which would have outstripped the increase in game size (though fallen far short of the increase in hard drive size), and perhaps we would have seen larger games released on a single Blu-ray disc with similar options for partial installation as existed for CD games like Daggerfall and Fallout. Instead, computer games shifted away from physical media and became dependent on players downloading game data through the internet.
 

TheHeroOfTime

Arcane
Joined
Nov 3, 2014
Messages
2,879
Location
S-pain
Game: Dark souls
File size: 75 kb

Mario Odyssey download size: ~6GB

Metacritic: 97%

Zelda: BOTW is also 13.4 GB and is an open world game. Not surprising at all if we consider that switch cartridges have 32 GB storage and optimisation is really needed. It's even more revealing if we consider that certain companies don't want to pay Nintendo for the 64 GB ones.
 
Last edited:
Joined
Nov 23, 2017
Messages
4,014
Right, even for the larger games of that time, it was possible to fit them entirely on a single CD, and allow the player several options for how much of the content to put on one's hard-drive versus needing to read it from the CD while playing. Which perhaps points to a failure in the subsequent development of optical disc technology.

From 1995 to 2011, the size of the typical hard drive in a new computer increased by roughly a thousand-fold, from 1-1.5 GB in 1995 to 1-1.5 TB in 2011. Game sizes over that same period (focusing on larger games) increased by a factor of perhaps 40. This meant that it was possible in the late-90s to fill a computer's hard-drive with just 2 games (of the larger, CD-dependent kind), but by 2011 the relative size of large games had fallen to about 4% of what it had been 16 years earlier.

Over this same period, CDs were replaced by DVDs, which have about 7 times the data capacity. Blu-ray players became available for computers and have about 10 times the data capacity of DVDs, but I'm not sure if they've become standard in new computers even today and certainly were far from it in 2011. If Blu-ray had quickly become standard, then this would have meant a 70-fold increase in data capacity over CDs, which would have outstripped the increase in game size (though fallen far short of the increase in hard drive size), and perhaps we would have seen larger games released on a single Blu-ray disc with similar options for partial installation as existed for CD games like Daggerfall and Fallout. Instead, computer games shifted away from physical media and became dependent on players downloading game data through the internet.

Aren't Blu-rays terrible at streaming data from the disc? I want to say that was the downside of Blu-ray I was hearing about during the Blu-ray HDDVD format war; more space, shit at streaming from the disc.
 

PorkBarrellGuy

Guest
Right, even for the larger games of that time, it was possible to fit them entirely on a single CD, and allow the player several options for how much of the content to put on one's hard-drive versus needing to read it from the CD while playing. Which perhaps points to a failure in the subsequent development of optical disc technology.

From 1995 to 2011, the size of the typical hard drive in a new computer increased by roughly a thousand-fold, from 1-1.5 GB in 1995 to 1-1.5 TB in 2011. Game sizes over that same period (focusing on larger games) increased by a factor of perhaps 40. This meant that it was possible in the late-90s to fill a computer's hard-drive with just 2 games (of the larger, CD-dependent kind), but by 2011 the relative size of large games had fallen to about 4% of what it had been 16 years earlier.

Over this same period, CDs were replaced by DVDs, which have about 7 times the data capacity. Blu-ray players became available for computers and have about 10 times the data capacity of DVDs, but I'm not sure if they've become standard in new computers even today and certainly were far from it in 2011. If Blu-ray had quickly become standard, then this would have meant a 70-fold increase in data capacity over CDs, which would have outstripped the increase in game size (though fallen far short of the increase in hard drive size), and perhaps we would have seen larger games released on a single Blu-ray disc with similar options for partial installation as existed for CD games like Daggerfall and Fallout. Instead, computer games shifted away from physical media and became dependent on players downloading game data through the internet.

Aren't Blu-rays terrible at streaming data from the disc? I want to say that was the downside of Blu-ray I was hearing about during the Blu-ray HDDVD format war; more space, shit at streaming from the disc.

All I remember is that people were certain there were shenanigans going on and that Toshiba got screwed hard by Sony somehow in the Bluray/HDDVD thing. If what you say is true HDDVD was objectively superior, since discs are cheap and it's not like people have never dealt with disc-swapping before.
 
Unwanted

Pequod

Unwanted
Joined
Jan 22, 2018
Messages
75
I think this thing shows how some games could use compression to reduce their filesize:
https://www.reddit.com/r/Windows10/comments/76hj26/i_tested_25_games_against_the_windows_compact/

I'm wondering about another thing: loading speed. Isn't reading smaller (compressed) data from disk and uncompressing on the fly during loading faster than loading big files and bottlenecking the I/O of an HDD? Might me less of an issue on an SSD, but then size becomes a problem due to small SSDs...
Depends on compression ratio. If your HDD reads at 100MB/s per sec but you can decompress DEFLATE at 300MB/s you win even for 100MB files at 50% compresion ratio. Before even considering seeking times.
Thats the reason most games roll in big gzipped pak filesystems.
 

Gerrard

Arcane
Joined
Nov 5, 2007
Messages
11,927
Didn't some PS3 games have duplicated data on the discs in to improve loading speed?
 

Zed Duke of Banville

Dungeon Master
Patron
Joined
Oct 3, 2015
Messages
11,760
hd-cost-graph-small.png


Someone crunched the numbers on hard drive prices and size, and found that the cost per unit of hard drive space fell by about 90% every 4 years over a long period of time, which happens to match with what I had remembered. +M Though I'm not sure if the first half of the '90s was really as far above the trend-line as seen in the graph, at least not around '94/'95, and his numbers don't seem to have picked up a slow-down in growth rates that I thought had occurred in the mid- and late-'00s relative to earlier rates (i.e. size increased by a factor over 10 over 8 years rather than 4 years from about 2003 to 2011). Since 2011, sizes for this type of hard drive have increased only at much slower rate, while PCs have adopted SSDs that offer superior performance but have a much higher price per unit per storage. Thus, the typical size of larger games might have increased faster than typical hard space in new computers over the period 2011 to present, but this is a relatively mild change compared to the enormous decline in game size relative to hard size that occurred over the period 1995 to 2011, after games first became bloated following the widespread adoption of CD-ROM technology, which led to games such as Daggerfall and Fallout having data in excess of half a gigabyte.
 

SCO

Arcane
In My Safe Space
Joined
Feb 3, 2009
Messages
16,320
Shadorwun: Hong Kong
Isn't there a direct correlation between likelihood of errors and byte density per transference?

We all know that we should backup, but it's going to get very annoying if the large file transferences of this crap increase the errors accumulating. It's actually annoying that Blue-rays didn't even reach the 100gb mark when hds are habitually reaching 2-4 terabytes. At least a good read only medium is much more resistant for storage, but i don't have the patience to segment my stuff over 10 blue-rays.
 
Joined
Jan 7, 2012
Messages
14,152
Something that hasn't been mentioned is that a lot of textures are over-ressed because no one cares to pay attention.

Artists are always doing their work in a resolution way above the final product. Ideally they'd like to have infinite resolution and let the programmers decide what the final displayed resolution is. But then you often end up in situations where the player's gun is rendered in lovingly detailed 500 DPI while the gun of a specific enemy sniper only visible from 1000 feet away... is also 500 DPI. The only instances in which devs are actually going to go back and look for textures to downgrade is if they are on a console with a hard VRAM limit.

Similar situations happen with a lot of the HD texture pack mods. Most of the big ones are mainly the modder running stuff through expensive photoshop filters in a batch file, ending up with even textures that are literally unused in the game becoming 8k or w/e behemoths.
 
Joined
Mar 3, 2010
Messages
8,819
Location
Italy
Since most PC games are downloaded now anyways and aren't usually bought off store shelves anymore, developers might as well give the option to check off which resolution of textures you want so you don't have to download a bunch of stuff needlessly. It would also help if you wanted to jump into a game faster and download the higher-res textures at a later date. Although seriously, 4k? Pretty sure some games are packed with 8k textures too with the sheer size of them.

The worst part is we could probably find some games made a few years back that were a fraction of the size of current ones that look better. Sounds like a lot of graphical bloatware included with the games as well.

can't be done.
average idiot joe downloads 64k textures, 4.5 tb download, then asks for a refund because the game runs like shit.
average idiot joe number 2 downloads 320x240 textures because he wants a small download, then asks for a refund because the game looks like shit.
99% of the downloads would turn into refunds. it just can't be done.
 

As an Amazon Associate, rpgcodex.net earns from qualifying purchases.
Back
Top Bottom