TR Forums

Found this gem:
http://venturebeat.com/community/2014/1 ... t-of-hand/
Yeah I know it's two years old but I think it is still valid for today. Now I think using uncompressed audio is a dumb idea anyway due to the space it takes up. And I'm sure there are other areas where developers could shrink file sizes, like limiting the usage of FMV. I personally don't like waiting 6 to 8 hours or more waiting for a game to download before I can play it.

First-world problems.

If you don't want to wait for the download, just start the download before you go to bed.

It's a consequence of the "more resolution! bigger maps!" arms race.

I'm a gamer and since I live in the first world, so of course I have first world problems.

just brew it! wrote:

First-world problems.

If you don't want to wait for the download, just start the download before you go to bed.

This is typically what I do when I need to DL a big game. Makes the most sense, IMO.

As to the OP question, I mostly worry about potential laziness or sloppiness. If the developers didn't consider file size, leaving a lot of unused or rarely used data, is it possible that they messed up something else? Size on its own isn't too much of a problem since I have a decent internet connection (and plenty of storage on my machine).

I've heard the reasoning being that bigger games are harder to pirate.

Interesting article, I had no idea prerendered cutscenes were a major factor. AAA developers love using facial capture technology but probably don't want to integrate the advanced facial modeling into the game engine. It can add a lot to a story to capture every facial nuance. Surely there is a better way to do this though. To developers it probably doesn't matter so long as it fits on a Blu-ray disc.

I'd say so but that's because i live on about 30gb a month transfer limit using my phone as primary internet. Getting by an access point is an occasional treat.

Well software does grow in size over the years at a reasonable rate I find usually. Its only a few games that go outside the acceptable file sizes that most people prefer compared to the rest in their game collection. But I know someone mentioned that many unused game assets might be lingering in that huge download of a game...

Somone in the know correct me if I am wrong.. but licensing a codec *for commercial use* is hideously spendy.. combining this with making ISOs larger and less palatable to bandwidth constrained pirates and sites makes it a win win to do basic audio.

Yes/no?

I saw a conversation on reddit the other day in regards to the next Call of Duty's 130gb footprint. The top post suggested it was partly because of games downloading every audio language.

maxxcool wrote:

Somone in the k ow correct me if I am wrong.. but licensing a codec *for commercial use* is hideously spendy..  combining this with making ISOs larger and less palatable to bandwidth constrained pirates and sites makes it a win win to do basic audio.

Yes/no?

It's complicated.

Tighter audio compression will cost you either CPU to decompress it on the fly, or RAM and loading times to have it decompress while loading. And I believe most games do have the audio already fairly compressed; it's just the sheer amount that cause issues.

I've also been working on a game that uses the Unity engine, and I believe that over there it's recommended to use ADPCM for sound effects. That doesn't compress as much as Ogg Vorbis, but should still offer significant space savings compared to not doing anything; and sound effects are, well, usually plentiful in modern games, and I'd imagine game developers do not want to end up using too much CPU just to mix audio.

It's also possible to compress voice-only content very tightly, though, if you have a specialized audio codec for its use; I believe Skyrim was a perfect example of the voice compression, with extremely low bit rates for voice, but not sounding like a complete mess in the end, surprisingly enough. (I'm still trying to find out just how low it was, but it seems to be around a rate of well under 10 KB per second.)
I'm mostly indifferent about game space requirements, though it does make downloading them take a while - time that I think is a bit long with just a 4 Mbps connection. Still, even with that handicap, it only means that I'd get about somewhere close to 20-21 GB downloaded in 12 hours - as just brew it! said, sounds about right and should be a lot easier for things if you download overnight, and since you folks usually get much faster Internet than me...

And, the culprit is probably the game downloading files for every language, anyway, as mentioned by the above poster.

Though the 240 GB SSD I have is definitely feeling the space crunch with games weighing in at over 15 GB a pop, or more (the 25 GB+ ones, especially). I think it was probably a good thing I've avoided the 120 GB models, as there'd be probably not enough space for even one game, once you take into account Windows, apps, and page file + a bit of free space "slack".

I still kind of miss the days when 40 GB felt like too much space on a HDD that I could never fill it to even half ;)

The issue with space concerns is less time and more people with limited bandwidth caps. I'm lucky to have a non-capped line(Particularly useful as my family are youtube/hulu/netflix addicts..), but I know it's luck.

I've been wising up to not even needing 1/4 of what I usually have installed, and suddenly I have tons of space.

maxxcool wrote:

Somone in the know correct me if I am wrong.. but licensing a codec *for commercial use* is hideously spendy..

There are open source or free codecs.

making ISOs larger and less palatable to bandwidth constrained pirates

I doubt it's a real hindrance.

It is party due to growing demand for detailed textures, however part of the reason is because game developers aren't paying much attention to keeping content size under control since mainstream users have TiBs worth of capacity on their computers. The only bottleneck right for them is how much data they can cram onto BR media. For a while gaming content was limited by the capacity of DL-DVD media until the debut of Xbox One and PS4.

Data limits on cable broadband are out of hand. Especially since UWP apps like GoW 4 apparently make you download the entire game again even for tiny patches.

And let's be honest, downloading an 80GB app every time there's a patch is stupid. Fix this, Microsoft.

maxxcool wrote:

making ISOs larger and less palatable to bandwidth constrained pirates and sites makes it a win win to do basic audio.

Those pirates just recompress the stuff or cutting out really optional content. Once again the pirates are providing what some consumers want faster and cheaper, and they wonder why they can't get rid of piracy.

derFunkenstein wrote:

And let's be honest, downloading an 80GB app every time there's a patch is stupid. Fix this, Microsoft.

Not defending Microsoft here, but the other side of the argument can be "capping the pipes is stupid. Fix this, carriers."?

Flying Fox wrote:

derFunkenstein wrote:

And let's be honest, downloading an 80GB app every time there's a patch is stupid. Fix this, Microsoft.

Not defending Microsoft here, but the other side of the argument can be "capping the pipes is stupid. Fix this, carriers."?

Because needlessly wasting bandwidth isn't an issue if you're not paying extra for it?

just brew it! wrote:

Flying Fox wrote:

derFunkenstein wrote:

And let's be honest, downloading an 80GB app every time there's a patch is stupid. Fix this, Microsoft.

Not defending Microsoft here, but the other side of the argument can be "capping the pipes is stupid. Fix this, carriers."?

Because needlessly wasting bandwidth isn't an issue if you're not paying extra for it?

When headline speeds of 100Mbps (or even 1Gbps) down are being bandied around in marketing materials, sticking with a 300GB monthly cap does not quite make sense. But of course, if you can afford these games, you should be able to afford more bandwidth (I am all for bandwidth rollover and/or reasonable extra bandwidth for the month that I need it, but carriers are not giving people enough reasonable options ). As you said though, first world problems.

Let's all thank the developers of Titanfall..... as far as I know, that was the game that pushed space requirements from <10GB to >40GB in one day thanks to its uncompressed audio.  Dumb.

Flying Fox wrote:

derFunkenstein wrote:

And let's be honest, downloading an 80GB app every time there's a patch is stupid. Fix this, Microsoft.

Not defending Microsoft here, but the other side of the argument can be "capping the pipes is stupid. Fix this, carriers."?

Why can't it be both? In the part you didn't bother quoting, I said that limits are out of hand.

Flying Fox wrote:

just brew it! wrote:

Flying Fox wrote:

Not defending Microsoft here, but the other side of the argument can be "capping the pipes is stupid.  Fix this, carriers."?

Because needlessly wasting bandwidth isn't an issue if you're not paying extra for it?

When headline speeds of 100Mbps (or even 1Gbps) down are being bandied around in marketing materials, sticking with a 300GB monthly cap does not quite make sense.  But of course, if you can afford these games, you should be able to afford more bandwidth (I am all for bandwidth rollover and/or reasonable extra bandwidth for the month that I need it, but carriers are not giving people enough reasonable options ).  As you said though, first world problems.

Well why not fix both? Uncapped the pipes and cut out unneeded stuff in games.

derFunkenstein wrote:

Data limits on cable broadband are out of hand. Especially since UWP apps like GoW 4 apparently make you download the entire game again even for tiny patches.

And let's be honest, downloading an 80GB app every time there's a patch is stupid. Fix this, Microsoft.

That would be stupid if it were true, but I've never heard anyone actually claim it.  The Store has had delta patching in for a long time.
My problem with it is the information shown is not quite as good as it should be.  The Xbox Ones download info issues were fixed, so I keep hoping the Store will make more sense soon.  (It already does make more sense than it used to, but still hasn't quite caught up.)

Well, that link is TR's editor-in-chief claiming exactly that.

derFunkenstein wrote:

Well, that link is TR's editor-in-chief claiming exactly that.

I was speaking of anyone who had actually researched it rather than making an off the cuff remark.
Figured that would be obvious, but knew I'd get that response anyway.

Eh.  I'm sure they added it, but until I can find the info to back it up I withdraw my claim.

(Though considering they've used them since XP it'd be a little weird if it didn't support them.)

I'd like to see more fine-grained control over "optional" items in game installs.  Give us some check-boxes!! 
Audio seems to be a big space hog lately, surely most users are only interested in playing games in their native language, so why even download/install the others that you'll never use?  
Don't want the Hi-Fi uncompressed audio? I'm sure there's a complete set of compressed audio included in most game installs also.
Have no interest in playing the single-player campaign?  Don't install it.  If you change your mind later, simply download/install that chunk and the single player button goes from grayed out to active.

I'm no developer, and I've never coded anything, but from my basic understanding, the things listed above would be pretty easy to implement.

Is anyone using NTFS compression on their games' directory? Would be interesting to know the results for larger games.

People are spoiled these days.

I remember when we wanted to download something way back in the year 1997, we had to go to a relative's house with a stack of floppy disks. We downloaded at less than 33kbps (that's kbits). A 1MB file took between 4 and 6 minutes usually... on a bad day, 10 or more. And that's not counting all the time spent waiting for pages to load to get to the files. We would download game modding programs, patches, etc. When we got home, we'd find out what worked, what had survived the download (and the time spent on a floppy disk) and what was actually compatible with our game\system.

When we finally got internet at our house a year or two after that, our dial-up would either connect at 24.6 or 26.4 (on a good day) because we were so far out of town. 1MB files always took 5+ minutes. Keep in mind... one computer online at a time, and no phone calls (or cell phones, tablets or texting) were available while you were online. We had to use special download managers (not at all like the adware riddled things that are all over the internet these days) like Getright to improve our chances of files actually surviving the download process on dial-up. That's right... you could leave a 100MB download going all night, only to have it be corrupted in the morning, either due to the modem disconnecting or the general horrors of the internet. Lots of larger downloads were broken up into multi-part .rar files which had to be downloaded separately... maybe one or two a night until you had the whole batch, then you'd hope and pray that they were all intact. If one was broken, you'd have to redownload it another night.

On top of all this, hard drive space was a premium back in these days as well. I remember buying a 2GB Quantum Bigfoot (5.25" hard drive) just to be able to install ONE game (Bladerunner) without having to uninstall others on our 500MB drive (our 1.2GB drive had just failed, and we lost everything because... no flash drives or CD burners). Games with lots of FMV would be on 4 CDs... that's up to 2.8GB... just for one game, if you didn't want to wait for the disk to spin up for every cutscene.

Sure, modern games probably take up more space (and bandwidth) than they need to, but at least the games aren't in the TB range yet. Our storage devices and bandwidth have greatly exceeded the needs of most people, even gamers.

ozzuneoj wrote:

People are spoiled these days.

I remember when we wanted to download something way back in the year 1997, we had to go to a relative's house with a stack of floppy disks. We downloaded at less than 33kbps (that's kbits). A 1MB file took between 4 and 6 minutes usually... on a bad day, 10 or more. And that's not counting all the time spent waiting for pages to load to get to the files. We would download game modding programs, patches, etc. When we got home, we'd find out what worked, what had survived the download (and the time spent on a floppy disk) and what was actually compatible with our game\system.

When we finally got internet at our house a year or two after that, our dial-up would either connect at 24.6 or 26.4 (on a good day) because we were so far out of town. 1MB files always took 5+ minutes. Keep in mind... one computer online at a time, and no phone calls (or cell phones, tablets or texting) were available while you were online. We had to use special download managers (not at all like the adware riddled things that are all over the internet these days) like Getright to improve our chances of files actually surviving the download process on dial-up. That's right... you could leave a 100MB download going all night, only to have it be corrupted in the morning, either due to the modem disconnecting or the general horrors of the internet. Lots of larger downloads were broken up into multi-part .rar files which had to be downloaded separately... maybe one or two a night until you had the whole batch, then you'd hope and pray that they were all intact. If one was broken, you'd have to redownload it another night.

On top of all this, hard drive space was a premium back in these days as well. I remember buying a 2GB Quantum Bigfoot (5.25" hard drive) just to be able to install ONE game (Bladerunner) without having to uninstall others on our 500MB drive (our 1.2GB drive had just failed, and we lost everything because... no flash drives or CD burners). Games with lots of FMV would be on 4 CDs... that's up to 2.8GB... just for one game, if you didn't want to wait for the disk to spin up for every cutscene.

Sure, modern games probably take up more space (and bandwidth) than they need to, but at least the games aren't in the TB range yet. Our storage devices and bandwidth have greatly exceeded the needs of most people, even gamers.

Since I had dial up as well before broadband became commonplace, I do see your point. However I am considering getting a 4 TB or higher HDD just for games. Overkill? Well yes, for now.