• Skua@kbin.social
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    1 year ago

    I recently bought the 2021 remaster of a strategy game from 2004 and it was almost 50 GB. Add another 12 GB if for some reason you want the 4k textures on models from 2004. This game used to come on a CD.

    • NocturnalMorning@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      4k and 8k textures are huge. Upscaling the textures takes a lot of extra space surprisingly. That’s usually the single biggest thing bloating a games size.

      • Skua@kbin.social
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        1 year ago

        To be clear, the 4k textures are an optional free extra download that bumps the install size up significantly above the ~50GB. The 1024x1024 textures that come with it as standard will still have taken up a good chunk extra over 2004’s version though, of course

        I’ve dug around in the files a little bit for modding purposes and as far as I can tell, one of the biggest reasons for bloat is the way that they implemented an ethnicity system in the remaster. In the original, units just had a skin colour that was roughly appropriate for the historical home region of the faction they’re from. In the remaster, they added a system that gives the units some variety in appearance that takes in to account where the unit was recruited; if you recruit soldiers in England, they’ll be paler on average than the ones recruited in Algeria. However, it seems like the way this was implemented was to give every single unit a unique texture for every ethnicity. There’s no common set of, say, five-ten faces for southern European men, for example. Every single unit has one southern European face, one northern European face, one north African face etc etc. Same goes for the visible skin on the rest of the body. Multiply that across about a thousand different units and suddenly you’ve got an utterly absurd number of nearly identical textures. And since this a strategy game, players are basically never looking at any of them at a level of zoom that affords each unit more than a few dozen pixels.

        • iforgotmyinstance@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          The secret? SSDs.

          There’s no need to be smart or clever about compression or implementation, since all files can be called immediately from the hard drive.

          No need to create iterative processes now since you can just brute force the entire production. It is technologically superior, it creates superior performance, yet has the drawback of huge file sizes.

          • Darthjaffacake@lemmy.world
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            1 year ago

            There’s still very much a need to have a brain when it comes to storing data, it’ll take far longer to upload, download, load up the game and load scenes and not everyone has an SSD, heck even if they do everyone can benefit from smaller games. Also if you do it properly it will have significantly better performance as less is being loaded from the disk, memory and vram.

      • PM_Your_Nudes_Please@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        The crazy thing is that a lot of today’s models are actually much more simple than they used to be. Look at comparisons for old games like Mario Galaxy versus Mario Odyssey for good examples. But this is done because it allows for more detailed environments; The lack of polygons means that (as long as the textures can be loaded fast enough) your rendering goes much faster. You’re not being bottlenecked by polygon counts anymore, because there are fewer polygons.

        But this has caused texture sizes to balloon, because now you’re shifting nearly all the heavy lifting over to those textures instead of the polygons.

      • vivadanang@lemm.ee
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        1 year ago

        I think people also have an odd idea of what it takes to photorealistically depict a fucking stadium full of people and players with realtime reflections and sweating normal maps. The texture info alone is gonna be huge, but likewise there are tons of high res models animating in realtime all over the screen. So yeah, this being a gigantic install makes sense if 4k res gaming is what people want to play.

    • Ryantific_theory@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Yeah, I feel like the improvements in gaming hardware have gone 50% to improving dynamic systems and graphics, and 50% to messy project bloat. Not to mention the constant crunch culture means they never have time to clean things up before launch, and after launch is for game breaking bugs and DLC.

  • GreenMario@lemm.ee
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    1 year ago

    Y’all wanted 4K Next Gen Gwaphix well that shits gonna cost you some storage space lol

    Sucks but whatever. Been happening since the beginning.

      • WarmSoda@lemm.ee
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        1 year ago

        And Starfield is more than twice that. It’s ridiculous.
        There’s no reason for it.

        • TrustingZebra
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          1 year ago

          Starfield is pretty huge though isn’t it? I dunno, it feels like if any games should take that much storage space, it’s a massive space game.

          • GreenMario@lemm.ee
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            1 year ago

            You don’t uNdERstAnD, a game must be less than 1GB in size or it’s unOpTiMiZeD.

            But at the same time, man I’m sick of these last gen/old non raytracing cards are holding us back! Where are my rig melting next gen games?!?! Oh wait I have to download 100GB and still turn down settings to High!?!? unOpTiMiZeD!! furiously leaves bad steam review

    • weeeeum@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      I think the solution to game size (aside from optimization) is breaking up the game into optional downloads. Things like, 4k textures, high poly models, multiplayer, singleplayer etc.

  • GreenBottles@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    I mean I can understand how textures add up but 161 gigs for a basketball game seems like a lot of unoptimized stuff going on

    • RaoulDook@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Do they not even use compression anymore? I’ve been wondering since Steam came out if I was downloading compressed game files or wasting bandwidth every time. They used to try to conserve storage, compressing everything to fit on one or two discs (or floppy disks before that)

  • DAMunzy@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    1 year ago

    The uncompressed sizes make for a much faster install. Repackers like FitGirl compress the duck out of the game files to make the download smaller but it takes ages to install the games afterwards.

  • Mio@feddit.nu
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    1 year ago

    Diablo 2 lod installed: 3 gb Diablo 2 resuracted 25 gb

    Is 4k images consuming that much more space?

    • Knusper@feddit.de
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      1 year ago

      These are rarely mutually exclusive. Rather the opposite, as these textures and whatnot need to be pumped through RAM and VRAM via the CPU.

    • nooneescapesthelaw@lemmy.ml
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      1 year ago

      In third world, internet is expensive, so shit like this would cause alot of people to have to download it over more than a month

  • SaakoPaahtaa@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    i want good graphics

    NO FILLING THE HARDDRIVE, only good graphics😡😡

    Jesus christ what a braindead thread this is. Evil devs just filling your games with bytes just to piss you off right

      • Rakonat@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Compression, rendering and other algorithms that use the processing power of the console rather than then entire ssd storage. This 161gb is so incredibly lazy

        • MeanEYE@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          It would mean slower loading perhaps but there’s a balance to be struck there. Besides, game being fun has nothing to do with game being high fidelity or huge hard disk space.

          • stevehobbes@lemm.ee
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            1 year ago

            Not just slower loading. Less available performance in game.

            Every time it needs to load a texture it’s uncompressing it on the fly…. That’s going to take away from CPU and RAM (both the compressed and uncompressed versions will be in RAM).

            • MeanEYE@lemmy.world
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              1 year ago

              It’s not going to be less performance in the game. Once uploaded to GPU texture is ready to be used. Just the loading part would be slower.