Why are games so big?


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the other week i got StarWars: the force unleashed and there where 2 discs both 6gb each when i installed it it took about 20 gb oof space

i was wondering why that is

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Exactly. You'd think they could find a way to compress them a bit, though.

With the size and cheapness of hard drives these days, compression isn't so much of a requirement. It would decrease performance which people would bitch about.

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MGS4 could barely fit on a dual-layer 50GB blu-ray. Although the game itself was like ~8 hours.

That is because PS3 games require redundancy on a Blu-ray disc in order to allow them to get information off the disc faster. So the game probably took around 20-30% less space than it did.

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With the size and cheapness of hard drives these days, compression isn't so much of a requirement. It would decrease performance which people would bitch about.

True that. Makes it a pain to download through Steam though. I already pay $100 for 50gb at ADSL+2 speeds :s Damn, we've got ****ty internet in Australia.

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With the size and cheapness of hard drives these days, compression isn't so much of a requirement. It would decrease performance which people would bitch about.

Actually it wouldn't, and the graphics (textures) most likely where compressed. DX textures generally come pre compressed from the developer in the dx texture format.

This is because whether they do it or not, they will be compressed by the graphics card , but then they won't have any quality control of the compressed texture. And the textures need to be compressed to fit enough of them even on the huge graphics card memories of today.

If they didn't pre compress them, not only would they lose the quality control but you'd have a performance hit as the textures would be 10 times bigger to load of the HDD, and there'd the a performance hit when the graphics card compressed the textures to fit into the graphics memory.

Also for the guy with the MGS comment, you whoudln't believe everything developers tell you ;)

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kkeiger is however awfully slow, but the fact is with modern games that they use very rich textures at high resolution, which take up almost all of the disk space that most games use

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It always amazes me why games are so big nowadays when you see what can be done with tight coding:

http://www.theprodukkt.com/kkrieger

http://www.theprodukkt.com/debris (not playable, but still awesome).

I'd love to see these guys write a full game.

Procedurals are awesome for their purpose. But they can't be used for anything in top end games, as a feature demonstration in demoscene demos and show off gsames like kkrieger, sure. But they have limits for actual games. they work great for stuff that generally is procedural or for adding dirt and scarring detail and such on top of other textures.

so procedurals, great for grass, foliage, asphalt, and added detail/dirt layers. Not so good for detailed technical stuff like face textures, armors, or anythign where you need control of how it's going to look exactly.

in fact I believe TFU does in fact use procedurals. stuff like lava and such.

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That is because PS3 games require redundancy on a Blu-ray disc in order to allow them to get information off the disc faster. So the game probably took around 20-30% less space than it did.

MGS4 was actually due to uncompressed 7.1 audio.

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MGS4 was actually due to uncompressed 7.1 audio.

Why would a game have 7.1 audio ?

it should only have single channel audio since the game/console would do the surround processing.

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Why would a game have 7.1 audio ?

it should only have single channel audio since the game/console would do the surround processing.

That's fake surround sound.

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That's fake surround sound.

Err, no it's not.

How is the developoer going to know what direction you are looking and how far away from every explosion you are at all times in the game ?

surround sound processing live in the game is about as real surround as it gets. the software/hardware is also able to properly synthesize the sound depening on sound occlusion, distance, room sizes, materials, echoes from the actual enviroment ++

I think you may be confusing this with how some Tv's and such add "surround" to regular stereo sound. I'm talking about actual surround sound processing based on the 3D enviroment. or on metadata stored in movie files for the voice and sound effects.

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Maybe its textures and sound that take a lot of space but i wander why Left 4 Dead in ISO takes ~3GB and Left 4 Dead 2 takes 14GB?

I mean, maybe L4D2 is new, it has improved graphic and longer campaigns but there is not that big difference in quality between L4D and L4D2 that makes such a HUGE file size difference.

Dling l4d2 on steam took ages... Should bought box version.

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Err, no it's not.

How is the developoer going to know what direction you are looking and how far away from every explosion you are at all times in the game ?

surround sound processing live in the game is about as real surround as it gets. the software/hardware is also able to properly synthesize the sound depening on sound occlusion, distance, room sizes, materials, echoes from the actual enviroment ++

I think you may be confusing this with how some Tv's and such add "surround" to regular stereo sound. I'm talking about actual surround sound processing based on the 3D enviroment. or on metadata stored in movie files for the voice and sound effects.

7.1 surround sound for the CUTSCENES

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A lot of PS3 games are bigger due to them coming with HD audio, or a PCM track or DTS. 360 games are Dolby Digital 5.1 I believe.

Plus 7.1 for some PS3 games.

Then there is assets, textures, more sound effects/ambience and what not from games of the past.

This is just a stupid battle 360/PS3 owners tend to get into, games are needing more space depending on genre/length and how they go about things, it's as simple as that. Developers need what developers need.

Gamers want developers to need what they want based upon their console preferences and magical thoughts on compression, doesn't work like that, let the developers do their work and tell us what they need.

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Hi there. As some of you may know, I work at Stardock (I code games for a living).

Anyway, here are the top reasons why games have gotten so big.

#1 Multiple languages. Typically, the game now contains all the different languages on the same DVD. With all those voice overs (which are often cooked into cut scenes) that makes things quite big.

#2 Multiple platforms. Similar to the above (and a multiplier of the above) different platforms have different texture libraries due to compatibility or capability. These tend to all be on the same DVD. So the PS3 version of TFU probably has the Xbox 360 textures in there somewhere along with the French version of some cut-scene that would only be played on the PC version.

#3 Anti-Piracy. DVDs are cheap. A lot of people will think twice before bit-torrenting 20 gigs.

Hope that helps. :)

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