12 gig games

MooseJam

Whats the story with these - Stranglehold and now I've seen blacksite too is 12 gigs, how can the size of a game suddenly double, what are they putting into these games to make them so big :eek:

Blowfish

High quality textures, and lots of them.

Rhyme

Music in .FLAC format perhaps.

Kiith

Pft, 12 gigs. Vanguard (the online MMO) is a 17gig install...

Zombrex

MooseJam wrote: »

Whats the story with these - Stranglehold and now I've seen blacksite too is 12 gigs, how can the size of a game suddenly double, what are they putting into these games to make them so big :eek:

That is what people said when games moved from floppy to CD

As the store space goes up they simply add higher resolution graphics and sound

Mantel

Some games just need the space to swap files about. One of the patches for Battlefield 2142 or Rainbow Six: Vegas (can't remember which one) needed 10gb of space to be free for installation. About what the original install needed.

L31mr0d

I think Moosejams point is that it seems like games have suddenly just doubled in size whereas the length of the games and the graphics hasn't substantially increased proportionally. I'd tend to agree, I mean Stranglehold is a short game, and while nice looking, is nowhere near as nice as some other, smaller sized, longer games out there.

Although i've been expecting this for the last year or so which is why I moved off my faster 74GB Raptor RAID 0 and onto a slower 640GB SATA II RAID 0. At the moment I have around 400GB of games installed on my main PC. Expandable content games like HL2 (CSS) and UT4 take up a lot of space, Stranglehold, CoH, Blacksite, Crysis, TR:L...etc also take up +10GB of space.

Zombrex

L31mr0d wrote: »

I think Moosejams point is that it seems like games have suddenly just doubled in size whereas the length of the games and the graphics hasn't substantially increased proportionally.

Not sure, but could be due to compression, or lack of

A lot of textures are compressed on disk and then uncompressed as they are used. This makes for small installs.

Some developers might have just figured "feck it" and decided that they don't need to bother doing this any more. So you have similar textures suddenly becoming much bigger because they are no longer compressed.

spooky donkey

yes good point. I think the average time these days to finish a game is like 6 hours. With a game being 6 gigs when a game goes to 12 gigs you would hope there is 12 hours of gameplay till you finishe it. Single player story mode im talking about of cource. Multiplayer element of games can leed to thousands of hours play time. Sure look at my sig.

TheHairyFairy

Spooky do you use Firefox? If so then have a look at this.

Happy New year to everyone.

witnessmenow

^^^^^^^^^^
What a useful comment I thought it really added to the discussion.


Its only going to get worse, when games start being shipped on the "next gen" of optical media (blu-ray or HDdvd) They'll be even lazier with compression! Thats presuming games will get shipped on them

astrofool

I doubt either HD format will take off and have enough market for them to be the default shipping format. Content will be downloadable in the future.

Sure, it's only in the last couple of years that DVD's started to be used, a good 10 years after first introduction.

Cuddlesworth

witnessmenow wrote: »

^^^^^^^^^^
What a useful comment I thought it really added to the discussion.


Its only going to get worse, when games start being shipped on the "next gen" of optical media (blu-ray or HDdvd) They'll be even lazier with compression! Thats presuming games will get shipped on them

Compression in game files came about because there was a lack of hard-drive/removable media space. That is not the case any more, so whats the point in doing it. Do you want increased load times and added stress on your proc? Seems like a backward step in terms of progression.

witnessmenow

Agreed that it wont happen today or tomorrow but i'd be suprised if Pc games aren't eventually shipped on either. But sure if it doesnt happen in the next 8 years i'll give you a tenner!!

Not to get into a debate about it but its my personal opinion that neither format will win and multi-format players will be the only way to go, so i don't think it will matter which its shipped on.

I don't know where you live but i wouldn't like it to go down the D/L route yet. Ireland's broadband isn't able/ready for it. Heck theres people who live in not so remote areas you cant get bb at all.

Fine if the compression is hampering the quality of the game thats a bad thing, but i'm sure there is alot of compression that doesn't.

Ciaran500

krazy_8s wrote: »

Compression in game files came about because there was a lack of hard-drive/removable media space. That is not the case any more, so whats the point in doing it. Do you want increased load times and added stress on your proc? Seems like a backward step in terms of progression.

Compression is used because everything still has to fit into ram and video memory, also compression is used to decrease loading times in every game.

Cuddlesworth

Ciaran500 wrote: »

Compression is used because everything still has to fit into ram and video memory, also compression is used to decrease loading times in every game.

I'm sorry but that makes no sense to me. I can't see how compressed data can be used properly with uncompressing it, if it can its not really compressed. Certain things like sound compression equaled a loss in quality and were not really true compression in the space saving algorithmic sense. Games have gotten larger mainly because of better textures. This has also lead to a increase in size of ram needed in graphics cards and the system. Games didn't need 2+gigs system and 512meg+ gfx 4 years ago, the same way they didn't need 15+gigs of hard drive space.

Blowfish

krazy_8s wrote: »

I'm sorry but that makes no sense to me. I can't see how compressed data can be used properly with uncompressing it, if it can its not really compressed. Certain things like sound compression equaled a loss in quality and were not really true compression in the space saving algorithmic sense.

That's not actually true. There are lossless compression algorithms where absolutely no quality is lost, FLAC being among them, hence why some games use FLAC for the audio.

Their can actually be a speedup when loading compressed data, simply because the amount of time saved while loading from disk saved can be greater than the extra time spent uncompressing that data with the CPU. It's a matter of balance though as compressing absolutely everything is just going to make your game overly CPU intensive.

'seamless' games with no loading times are another story, as some of the textures are uncompressed by the CPU while playing, which means a balance has to be struck between the number of compressed and uncompressed textures as too much of one will bottleneck the CPU while too much of the other will bottleneck the HDD.

Cuddlesworth

Blowfish wrote: »

That's not actually true. There are lossless compression algorithms where absolutely no quality is lost, FLAC being among them, hence why some games use FLAC for the audio.

Their can actually be a speedup when loading compressed data, simply because the amount of time saved while loading from disk saved can be greater than the extra time spent uncompressing that data with the CPU. It's a matter of balance though as compressing absolutely everything is just going to make your game overly CPU intensive.

True, I forgot about near lossless audio codec's, the near part is arguable. They also put a much higher strain on the cpu. For graphics, I'm not sure there is anything similar, since compression of images has always been a sore point within the industry.

I suppose there is a balance to be had, I would prefer to take advantage of the increasing hard-drive space available nowdays instead of increasing the workload on the cpu(which is becomeing the bottleneck within games at the moment).

Blowfish

krazy_8s wrote: »

True, I forgot about near lossless audio codec's, the near part is arguable. They also put a much higher strain on the cpu. For graphics, I'm not sure there is anything similar, since compression of images has always been a sore point within the industry.

FLAC is actually true lossless compression. Think of it in the same terms as how .zip and .rar are lossless but still compress.

krazy_8s wrote: »

I suppose there is a balance to be had, I would prefer to take advantage of the increasing hard-drive space available nowdays instead of increasing the workload on the cpu(which is becomeing the bottleneck within games at the moment).

Well this is where multicore CPU's come in handy. If written properly, a game can devote one core to the gameplay calculations and others to texture decompression. It makes loading on the fly a lot easier.

hellboy99

MooseJam wrote: »

Whats the story with these - Stranglehold and now I've seen blacksite too is 12 gigs, how can the size of a game suddenly double, what are they putting into these games to make them so big :eek:

It's to stop people from downloading them

It's higher quality of graphics, game fmv and music. That's all good but I'd rather have more gameplay. Long gone are the days of 3D Wolfenstein & DOOM.

witnessmenow

hellboy99 wrote: »

It's to stop people from downloading them

Its funny cause its true