Wirdschowerdn
Ph.D. in World Saving
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.
https://www.allegorithmic.com/products/substance-designerAs for the article - unless graphical engines start to move away from textures into other rarely explored territories (they exist)
Do tell.
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.
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.
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?
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.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?
Mario Odyssey download size: ~6GB
Metacritic: 97%
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.
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.
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.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...
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.