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Yes, that's the problem. You can compress them for size at download time, and recompress them to a GPU-optimal format at the time of installation. You may even
by sudosysgen 4y ago
Yes, that's the problem. You can compress them for size at download time, and recompress them to a GPU-optimal format at the time of installation. You may even be able to do it at runtime with modern hardware, shortening loadtimes and sometimes even improving performance indirectly.
- coffeebeqn 4y agoThen you have to have the game reprocess all the assets on the users machine which could easily take an hour
- sudosysgen 4y agoEssentially any modern image compression format is going to be limited, or close to, by storage speed (for decompression). So unless the user has insanely fast internet (and the servers are also able to saturate their connection), it will be faster in the end.
- xboxnolifes 4y agoWith the size of games nowadays, that's likely a net time save for many people from the discounted download time.
- jon-wood 4y agoGamers being gamers though they’re not going to say “well, we on reflection I’ve not had to wait so long”, they’re going to slam you with one star reviews for the fact there’s an hour long loading screen on first start.
- xboxnolifes 4y agoThe recompression/decompression logic could (and I would argue, should) be packaged separately for distribution platform instead of being embedded as part of the game's logic. In the case of using Steam, it would be no different than how it shows separation of time spent downloading vs time spent installing. This allows it to be ran automatically after download without having the user need to launch the game.
- lpghatguy 4y agoYou can combine the approaches! KTX2, for example, supports "supercompressing" GPU block compressed formats with LZ4 or Zstandard. The project I have been working on ships BCn textures compressed with zstd and it has been pretty dang good.