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I wish more game developers optimized for space. I stopped playing video games almost altogether because I'm not going to download 70 GB every time I want to pl

I wish more game developers optimized for space. I stopped playing video games almost altogether because I'm not going to download 70 GB every time I want to play something. The size has gotten absurd.

forgotusername6 4y ago
My first computer had a 7GB hard drive. At that time we had CDs with ~700mb capacity. Now we routinely have 1TB storage and games are 70GB. As a percentage of total storage these are similar. I'm not sure how the download rate of 70GB compares to the read speed of a CD but installs took a while back in the day as well.
- throwaway744678 4y ago
  "Patch day, no play!"
- TylerE 4y ago
  I had a cdrom drive in a 486 with 8mb of RAM and ~200MB of disk. I could either have a game or two installed (which at the time invariably ran in DOS) or Windows 3.1 installed. Not both. At the time it was like… wait I just bought this fancy CD-ROM… why do I need to install 30 or 40 whole megabytes to disk to play it? At that time it was pretty common to actually install all the game files to disk (drives were slow… I think it was 4x read speed) and then the music was encoded in the cd as additional tracks of plain CD audio.
- 314 4y ago
  I don't have the fastest internet connection but downloads from steam sit happily at 30MB/s so in an hour I can download 108GB of data. The earliest cdroms that I remember were 1x drives - so it took an hour to read that 700MB. Obviously drive speeds increased tremendously over the lifespan of cdrom (did it reach 48x?), but compared to the earliest generation it is about the same.
  - BackBlast 4y ago
    The limiting factor of the CD/DVD drives was seek time, not read speed. Seeking a spot on the disk was on the order of 150ms. You basically got 5-7 read OPS. The best drive I remember stood out at 120ms seek, some would be over 200ms seek. Sometimes this was a hard number to track down. Even with a 48x drive, installation could easily still take 30+ minutes particularly if the installer wasn't optimized for sequential read off a flat file. Sometimes you got a really bad installer, and it could take a pretty grueling 2+ hours. Some companies chose to optimize for space (thus cost..) rather than user experience. As space got more plentiful it would sometimes be easier to copy the disk and remount it and then install.
laserbeam 4y ago
Textures are big... bigbly big! And to be fair, game devs even have middleware solely dedicated to compression (such as Oodle http://www.radgametools.com/oodle.htm http://www.radgametools.com/oodle.htm). I am sure that some % of that space can still be recovered, but it's definitely not significant. I'm sure you can't drop to half and maintain the ultra settings.
- maccard 4y ago
  You would be surprised, actually. This [0] shows an example of some excellent space savings. I used to work for Epic and the results we got on other projects were in this ballpark too. [0] https://dev.epicgames.com/community/learning/tutorials/ry2D/reducing-package-sizes-with-oodle-compression https://dev.epicgames.com/community/learning/tutorials/ry2D/...
  - laserbeam 4y ago
    My assumption was that you get down to 70gb packages after using tools like oodle. But hell, I may be wrong there and may be giving most AAA devs too much credit.
    - maccard 4y ago
      > But hell, I may be wrong there and may be giving most AAA devs too much credit. I don't think this is a fair comment. Theres an enormous tradeoff to make when compressing game assets, and uncompressed game assets are _absolutely enormous_. My current project has about 30 people at the moment. The game content is ~50GB, the client itself is ~4GB but the source substance files/fbx files/photogrammetry assets are tipping on 500GB. We're a _small_ AAA game. My previous project was closer to 500GB for the game content, and the source assets were multiple TB. Tools like Oodle are third party licenses that need to be considered. Most games are compressing but switching to better compression methods can make the differences shown. Theres still huge tradeoffs to be made though. Most GPU formats for consoles require platform specific texture formats, and some of them don't compress well (hello dxt). You might have to trade a 20% file size reduction for a 30 second increase load time. Is that worth it? Maybe. Either way, it's not just "dumb Devs". We care, we work hard on this.
deadmutex 4y ago
> I stopped playing video games almost altogether because I'm not going to download 70 GB This is why some people love game streaming. Esp true if you only play a game once in a while.
- JonChesterfield 4y ago
  Game streaming presumably needs a high bandwidth, low latency internet connection? If so that's exactly the connection that makes a 70GB download something that can happen in the background while you start playing
- alrlroipsp 4y ago
  Or why others still love FITGIRL repacks.

forgotusername6 4y ago

My first computer had a 7GB hard drive. At that time we had CDs with ~700mb capacity. Now we routinely have 1TB storage and games are 70GB. As a percentage of total storage these are similar. I'm not sure how the download rate of 70GB compares to the read speed of a CD but installs took a while back in the day as well.

throwaway744678 4y ago
"Patch day, no play!"
TylerE 4y ago
I had a cdrom drive in a 486 with 8mb of RAM and ~200MB of disk. I could either have a game or two installed (which at the time invariably ran in DOS) or Windows 3.1 installed. Not both. At the time it was like… wait I just bought this fancy CD-ROM… why do I need to install 30 or 40 whole megabytes to disk to play it? At that time it was pretty common to actually install all the game files to disk (drives were slow… I think it was 4x read speed) and then the music was encoded in the cd as additional tracks of plain CD audio.
314 4y ago
I don't have the fastest internet connection but downloads from steam sit happily at 30MB/s so in an hour I can download 108GB of data. The earliest cdroms that I remember were 1x drives - so it took an hour to read that 700MB. Obviously drive speeds increased tremendously over the lifespan of cdrom (did it reach 48x?), but compared to the earliest generation it is about the same.
- BackBlast 4y ago
  The limiting factor of the CD/DVD drives was seek time, not read speed. Seeking a spot on the disk was on the order of 150ms. You basically got 5-7 read OPS. The best drive I remember stood out at 120ms seek, some would be over 200ms seek. Sometimes this was a hard number to track down. Even with a 48x drive, installation could easily still take 30+ minutes particularly if the installer wasn't optimized for sequential read off a flat file. Sometimes you got a really bad installer, and it could take a pretty grueling 2+ hours. Some companies chose to optimize for space (thus cost..) rather than user experience. As space got more plentiful it would sometimes be easier to copy the disk and remount it and then install.

laserbeam 4y ago

Textures are big... bigbly big! And to be fair, game devs even have middleware solely dedicated to compression (such as Oodle http://www.radgametools.com/oodle.htm http://www.radgametools.com/oodle.htm). I am sure that some % of that space can still be recovered, but it's definitely not significant. I'm sure you can't drop to half and maintain the ultra settings.

maccard 4y ago
You would be surprised, actually. This [0] shows an example of some excellent space savings. I used to work for Epic and the results we got on other projects were in this ballpark too. [0] https://dev.epicgames.com/community/learning/tutorials/ry2D/reducing-package-sizes-with-oodle-compression https://dev.epicgames.com/community/learning/tutorials/ry2D/...
- laserbeam 4y ago
  My assumption was that you get down to 70gb packages after using tools like oodle. But hell, I may be wrong there and may be giving most AAA devs too much credit.
  - maccard 4y ago
    > But hell, I may be wrong there and may be giving most AAA devs too much credit. I don't think this is a fair comment. Theres an enormous tradeoff to make when compressing game assets, and uncompressed game assets are _absolutely enormous_. My current project has about 30 people at the moment. The game content is ~50GB, the client itself is ~4GB but the source substance files/fbx files/photogrammetry assets are tipping on 500GB. We're a _small_ AAA game. My previous project was closer to 500GB for the game content, and the source assets were multiple TB. Tools like Oodle are third party licenses that need to be considered. Most games are compressing but switching to better compression methods can make the differences shown. Theres still huge tradeoffs to be made though. Most GPU formats for consoles require platform specific texture formats, and some of them don't compress well (hello dxt). You might have to trade a 20% file size reduction for a 30 second increase load time. Is that worth it? Maybe. Either way, it's not just "dumb Devs". We care, we work hard on this.

deadmutex 4y ago

> I stopped playing video games almost altogether because I'm not going to download 70 GB This is why some people love game streaming. Esp true if you only play a game once in a while.

JonChesterfield 4y ago
Game streaming presumably needs a high bandwidth, low latency internet connection? If so that's exactly the connection that makes a 70GB download something that can happen in the background while you start playing
alrlroipsp 4y ago
Or why others still love FITGIRL repacks.