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 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.
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.
I would love if games had options to “only download the medium preset assets”
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)
FLAC is pretty good compression.