Imagine how much more game you could fit on a hard drive if character models didn’t have billions of triangles
i want SMALLER👏 GAMES👏 made by FEWER👏 DEVELOPERS👏 who are PAID👏 MORE👏 to DO👏 LESS👏 and i’m NOT👏 KIDDING👏
Model vertex count has a negligible influence on size. Model data is small (provided the textures aren’t baked in), and modern GPUs can render ten thousand separately animated instances of the same base model simultaneously when using the right techniques.
It’s the insanely high-resolution textures and audio that bloat install size. That and including the same files many times to reduce HDD seek time, but that’s finally becoming less common as SSDs take over (or at least it was until the current component shortage).
I miss when HD texture packs were separate downloads. If I’m only running a game in 1080p, downloading a hundred gigabytes of 8k textures I’ll never use is a colossal waste of bandwidth and disk space.
I remember being appalled when Titanfall 1 had a separate 80 GB download just for the audio because they couldn’t be bothered to compress it. Audio compression has been largely a solved problem for 20 years now, even if the result is somewhat lossy.
If I’m only running a game in 1080p, downloading a hundred gigabytes of 8k textures I’ll never use is a colossal waste of bandwidth and disk space.
I kinda wonder if there’s a visible difference between native 1080p textures and those that are downscaled from a higher resolution. I imagine there isn’t, but I am curious about it.
My favorite instance of unnecessary file bloat was due to a bug. The Microsoft Store and Epic Games versions of Fallout 3 would download the full game once for every single translation the game supported, with every translation in its own subfolder. A nine gig game ended up taking over forty gigs of hard drive space.
And then there’s shit like ARK: Survival Evolved, a ten year old game that requires the better part of a terabyte with all the DLC. Infuriatingly they did eventually reduce the install size, but only for the terrible UE5 port that nobody asked for.
And on the opposite end of things, Helldivers 2 reduced their install size by over a hundred gigs (down to around twenty total) by simply removing duplicate data from the game files, if anyone was wondering how expensive that HDD seek time optimization I mentioned was in disk space.
With that HDD optimization, it should really be an option, like a separate program that comes with the game that restructures the data for use with an HDD. The game could even detect when it would be useful by profiling load times and offering to do that (along with a warning about how much more disk space it will use) for users who don’t even think about that.
As someone who has put money and thought into optimizing my system, it’s annoying to have to still deal with shit intended for those who haven’t. I wonder what the portion of people still gaming from HDDs is at this point. SSDs have been the standard (in my mind) for a long time, even if it’s just a SATA one.
Massively depends on where the texture is used. If it’s for a main character that gets closeups, body and especially detailed textures can be massive and can add up fast even when compressed. Little low contrast details can definitely work fine and go unnoticed next to super hifi textures while being small themselves, though so many just make everything hifi. Bleh.
I miss when games went for lowfi art instead of the modern deluge of AAA pseudo-cinema 100G+ games or friendslop with the art direction of a two day game jam… (obviously there are outliers, but the industry trends are disappointing lately)
I would love if games had options to “only download the medium preset assets”
FLAC is pretty good compression.
We need those super hi-res textures so that we can put a bunch of blurry effects on top.
Motion blur and depth-of-field were bad enough. Now we have AI upscaling and frame gen that absolutely destroy fine details, but are almost required to get a high framerate in some games due to a lack of optimization (I’m looking at you, half of all released Unreal Engine 5 titles).
Yeah, one of the reasons why I like low-fidelity games is because the devs can just think of an idea, slap together a few pixels into a texture and ship it. You just get much more varied and interesting content that way, because they can easily experiment with ideas and also remove stuff, if it doesn’t work out, without it being much of a time loss.
This is why I hate voice acting. There are times a game had a voiced remake, and I think “Huh…that’s not quite the voice I pictured for them.” Or “Wow, they deliver those lines so slow. My reading speed is much faster, I was able to picture that conversation having snappy comedic timing.”
I should do a much longer analysis on that type of performance disparity, could make a good video.
The reason why I think Pokemon peaked at Gen 5 and went downhill from there. I imagine if Square Enix’s HD-2D engine had caught on earlier, TPCI would’ve gone that route instead of diving headfirst into 3D concrete without a helmet.
There’s something charming to me about the emotes of the FF7 hoof-hand characters that I don’t think is replicated well in the remake models. Overall, remake is better, but for 8 million cents on the dollar.
A YouTuber showed some guides on doing low poly models in the style of Megaman Legends, and it seems to give a great effect for indies.
Could fix this by switching to a theoretical physics engine.
The fact that F-Zero only had floating cars was because they couldn’t afford the memory to render tires. Totally made the game better.
For fun:
SNES: 192Kb (total RAM+VRAM)
PSX: 3.5Mb (total RAM+VRAM)
Xbox 360: 512Mb (single bank for CPU and GPU)
PS5: 16Gb (single bank, Pro adds 2GB for CPU)
Xbox Series X: 16Gb (single bank, semi-permanent 6/10 split)
My Desktop: 72Gb (total RAM+VRAM)
Didn’t Roller Coaster Tycoon have a file size of something like 55MB?
It’s an almost perfect game, that gets to live pretty much forever with the advent of OpenRTC. That game is a true wonder of human ingenuity, and I’m not even being hyperbolic.
It totally belongs right there next to DOOM and Legend of Zelda haha.
Yeah it’s 99% written in assembly which if you know assembly is fucking hard.
You don’t even have primitives like division in assembly. You have to write that code yourself to tell the processor how to divide two numbers and handle a remainder… Modern CPUs are different now in that they have that as a built in feature but back then they didn’t.
Like the famous joke about assembly: “to bake an apple pie in assembly, first you must create the entire universe”
Yes assembly is complicated, but more like error prone and tedious than fucking hard, which still makes the game a huge achievement, especially considering its complexity. I haven’t had RCT crash on me even once for which I admire the author! What you miss compared to a programming language are named variables and especially structures, named functions and loops can be simulated (as can everything a higher language like C can do) and are just not as comfortable. And you have to have a way more intimated knowledge of the inenr workings of the processors you want to run your software on, than with higher languages.
Div has been part of the Intel assembler since the 8086 from 1978, long before RCT was written. The first processor supporting it is from 1952! (The IBM 701), fdiv (Floating point divide) was widely available on Home-PCs since the 8087 from 1980. By the time RCT was written there where already comfort functions integrated into processor instructions sets like setting single bytes with BTS or scaled index addressing. Still writing software with a programming language was way easier and faster. But the result would never be as optimized as a good assembly program.
That’s fascinating! Thank you for sharing so much detail!
The thing is, too, that blows my mind, is for how difficult/tedious the language is, he even made it calculate physics, in isometric 2D. It was accurate enough to use in my math class for designing a roller coaster lol…and yet it’ll run on a toaster these days.
Like maybe this is relatively simple for the right kind of people but here I am amazed I imported my model into Godot and was able to script a quit button, so needless to say I’m continuously in awe at how crazy this game is.
It could have just as easily been a hyper-niche hardcore simulator, too, for turbo-nerds obsessed with this kind of thing, and a million vague buttons nestled in sub-menus using engineer jargon.
But no, it has an incredibly intuitive little interface and it’s so fun that we got hooked on it as kids; It’s still a game, and it’s still an absolute delight to play.
Definitely one of my “desert island” games. :)
The dumbest part about linux is watching coreutils and systemd stuff take less than 512Mb of RAM only for any modern browser or electron app to take a fat 4gb dump all over it.
Compiz with all the fancy effects enabled only adds like 200-300Mb tops.
But rendering a crappy JS infested webpage requires 10 isolated processes because no one learned anything from 40+ years of computer security.
Epic is already teasing Unreal 6 as if Unreal 5 isn’t the reason why every “AAA” release has had horrible lack of optimization.
Don’t forget GPU makers struggling to justify the usual price increase for a “new generation” of cards, and - as a result - pivoting to selling cards the promote upscaling by default.
Not only do our games no longer run properly, they also look fucking blurry while doing so! Yaaaay.
Good performance optimization is part of the art.
Necessity is the mother of something something
I remember systems having only kilobytes. I wrote a whole list of games on a machine which had 16KB for main and graphics RAM together.
My commodore 64 only had 64K, not 64M.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodore_64That was such a nice machine. Even had a slot for game cartridges.
I developed my first games on one of those. I still have the audio cassette tapes, since they pre-dated even floppy disks.
At least before we could upgrade our systems to accommodate bloat. Now we’re getting it from the other end with RAM being made too expensive by AI. That same AI will generate even less optimal code requiring even more memory.
Well yes, but have you heard about delivering features? Crunch, agile, moving fast and breaking things?
Basically Mythos just opened the closet door and all the junk, dirty laundry and empty wrappers fell out.
Back when more people and companies would craft their own game engines with their own code. Almost everyone has been moving toward Unity and Unreal these days though.
That’s why DooM (1993) and DooM II (1994) are still the best games ever
Certainly art needs walls to be
As potential approaches infinity
Defines limits to your creativity
Solve problems; way of humanity
