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Video games don't really care about binary size.
by Thaxll 6y ago
Video games don't really care about binary size.
- mrec 6y agoSome don't, some do. Users living out in the sticks with poor satellite connectivity care about binary size. The HTML5 platform, which I see becoming increasingly important as things like wasm and webgpu mature, cares about binary size because you're potentially downloading it every time you play. It's slightly surreal poking about on itch.io where practically every game is 50 MB, even when most of them are simpler than a 4k demo.
- necubi 6y agoI would expect that for most games the vast majority of bytes will be assets (textures, models, sounds, etc.), not code. Even reducing the code size to 0 is unlikely to make much of a difference in the total size.
- mrec 6y agoFor AAA titles, sure, but there's a long tail of indies, game jam entries etc. For something retro-styled like Dwarf Fortress or Baba Is You, I can absolutely believe that asset size is relatively minor compared to e.g. a Unity baseline footprint. Harking back to ancient history for a moment, Frontier: Elite II was a AAA title for its day and was basically all code.
- sitkack 6y agoThe days of all code AAA games is over. Binary sizes are still mostly irrelevant. They matter to you, but they don't matter to the market.
- xwdv 6y agoIs this a game engine dedicated to making games for people living out in the sticks, or a game engine for making some serious games?
- vvanders 6y agoOn a console every 1mb of binary is one less mb for assets. We ran LTCG on every game I shipped.
- Thaxll 6y agoWhen your game is 125GB it does not really matters if your dll is 20MB instead of 30, it was the case 15 years ago now it's a much different story.
- meheleventyone 6y agoIt does a bit when you have 8GB of shared memory between the graphics card, OS and your game. Download size isn't the only memory constraint affected by binary size.
- mijoharas 6y agoI think you might be underestimating the binary size by at least an order of magnitude
- vvanders 6y agoYou're thinking about on-disk space and not in-memory space which is much smaller.
- pjmlp 6y agoSure they do, when targeting consoles and mobile devices. Their overlords always stress on developer conferences how install size is the number one reason for users to remove applications and games from their devices.