SFML community forums
General => General discussions => Topic started by: Jim70 on September 14, 2015, 10:42:58 am
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Don't know about you, ive made a decently complex game with plenty of sprites and a lua saving system but its still less than 10 MB, Why do most games take 1-4 gigs then?
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Mostly because of assets. If you work with high-res textures you'll quickly end up with many MiB of image data. Now add some high quality sound and tons of sound effects and you can easily get into the GiB.
If you look at the executable they often aren't that big either.
But it varies from game to game a lot.
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There are a myriad of good games out there that are <50MB.
and a lua saving system
Lua is like 200kb-ish.
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As eXpl0it3r said, it's mainly assets.
Large and many textures is one thing type that can start to inflate the game.
Sounds (especially lots of dialogue and many musics) can really increase size.
Videos (tutorial videos or cut scenes, for example) can also make a massive difference in size.
Even extremely large map definitions, animation definitions, and lots of complicated AI formulae can push up the bulkiness.
Why do most games take 1-4 gigs then?
Which games are you referring to?
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Definitely the assets. I think the big Blizzard games are like 10GB each or so (at least SC2 was last I checked).
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Don't know about you, ive made a decently complex game with plenty of sprites and a lua saving system but its still less than 10 MB, Why do most games take 1-4 gigs then?
The games using multiple gigabytes of disk memory are usually AAA games or at least games who are very asset-intensive. Indie games are typically smaller.
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Definitely the assets. I think the big Blizzard games are like 10GB each or so (at least SC2 was last I checked).
probably, considering I'm very used to procedural content.
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Bigger games are usually 3d games, it is rare to see a 2d game get very large. 3d games are large for several reasons, but here are the big 2:
1- The 3d mesh nowadays can be VERY detailed, it is actually getting ridiculous, we are reaching "triangle smaller than the rendered pixel" kind of ridiculous, so you would need larger space to store them, not to mention that you will need multiple level of detail copies for each object, at least until tessellation become more popular.
2- Textures in 3d is much, much worse than the 2d ones for 2 reasons:
a - In 3d you can get closer and farther away from objects, so the texture on them would need to be much bigger than the screen to not be pixelated, unlike 2d where you rarely need texture bigger than the screen other than the backgrounds, in 3d you need large textures every where.
b - In 3d, textures are not used just for color - called diffuse map -, textures are also used for bump, normal, reflection, refraction, lighting, wet, specular, opacity... and many other types of maps, and almost every object uses multiple of these if not animated ones so the size can get bloated very very easily.
I sill will take mario 64 - 6MB - over most all of these 30 GB games ::) . Games used to be fun, not fakely epic, and boring :P
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Well, first Elite was less than 48Kb. =)
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Well, first Elite was less than 48Kb. =)
Well Elite games didn't take much space because of their massive use of procedural content, and they didn't take much in ram because the generated content was not as detailed as something you will display on hd monitors today, so yeah.
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also some games contain video files - that are huge
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Sounds (especially lots of dialogue and many musics) can really increase size.
Sound is increasingly the culprit these days. Many AAA engines such as Unreal allow for some pretty complex realtime audio processing, but the catch is the source waveforms are often uncompressed. This results in a massive amount of disk space being burned.
Mesh data, even with extremely high levels of detail, doesn't really contribute all that much to the size of a game, but the textures for those meshes certainly do. Especially in this day and age where you dont just have a diffuse (color) texture, but often several... for lighting, normals, shadows, etc.
And yeah, movies are still a big pig for space, although I see less and less FMV in games, although it does seem to be making a bit of a revival.
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Sounds, HD cutscenes , textures and high res models take up 90% of space. The compiled instructions, in comparison take nothing more than a 'speck of dust's' space
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Sounds, HD cutscenes , textures and high res models take up 90% of space. The compiled instructions, in comparison take nothing more than a 'speck of dust's' space
Not sure why you resurrected an old thread to repeat what has been said already a number of times :P