• popcar2@piefed.caEnglish
      15 days

      Audio is another big one. If you want good quality music and your game is voice acted you would be surprised how much space all those audio files take. Add in tons of other gigabytes if you offer voice acting for other languages.

      • applebusch@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
        14 days

        evidently a lot of games dont compress their audio files at all, so a ton of data is wasted on that by itself. theres really no excuse for that because there are plenty of lossless compression algorithms and compressed files will often have faster loading times because the disk read speed is the limiting factor even with the added computational cost of the decompression. thats also true for all the other game files such as textures and meshes and whatnot, which are often also uncompressed.

        • jumponboard@lemmy.worldEnglish
          14 days

          Why is it uncompressed? For speed? Is it written such that the data does not need to be serialized into RAM?

    • ampersandrew@lemmy.worldEnglish
      15 days

      They optimized for things other than install size. Optimization is often choosing one thing at the expense of others.

        • ampersandrew@lemmy.worldEnglish
          14 days

          When time is money, optimizing for time is a worthwhile endeavor. 6+ year dev cycles aren’t something anyone wants. But realistically, large file sizes probably aren’t going away with more dev time.

          • Shanmugha@lemmy.worldEnglish
            14 days

            6+ years dev cycles is something I am comfortable with, because I want something done well, and if it’s something big enough (like Cyberpunk 2077 or Baldur’s Gate), then of course it will take a long time, even with big command team

            But I still haven’t figured out another end of such a deal: how to keep all the command team members alive, fed and comfortable for this long time? Buying a game once, even multiplied by whatever-count-of-copies-they-have-sold-for-now, doesn’t give a guarantee that all those people have enough money to just keep creating something exciting for as long as it takes

        • Err(()).unwrap()@lemmy.worldEnglish
          14 days

          Pray tell, how do you think “they” should optimize game assets? People who have zero experience in game development love to talk about “optimization” like it’s a slider in the options or some challenge that can be solved by throwing resources at it. Modern compression algorithms like Oodle are about as performant and artifact-free as mathematically possible. Everything beyond that is a trade-off between quality, size, and performance.

          But are you thinking about it in abstract? Would you prefer a game to have occasional pop-in, stutter issues, and CPU spikes in exchange for a smaller size?

          (edit) Before you say it, I know there are relatively low-fidelity games that run like ass. Those are usually caused by poorly written game logic or shader codes, which can be refactored, but won’t have an effect on file sizes.

          • MinnesotaGoddam@lemmy.worldEnglish
            14 days

            Hey, listen to OP and turn your file compression spider up at least 50%

            I remember jak and daxter being amazing because they optimized to not have loading screens (unless you teleported). First time I remember that in a 3d game

            edit: it stays :3

              • MinnesotaGoddam@lemmy.worldEnglish
                14 days

                just don’t leave any important paperwork around it or you’ll have to go hunting for it on the web.

    • Float@startrek.websiteEnglish
      15 days

      And a huge number of art assets in general. These days in the AAA industry the artists work much faster than the designers and programmers, so by the time the designers and programmers have finished their part, the art team has had time to make 3-4 times as many assets as they really need.

  • insomniac_lemon@lemmy.cafeEnglish
    15 days

    Various things:

    • uncompressed audio (perhaps needlessly, for lower-end CPUs)
    • pre-rendered cutscenes, multiple resolutions
    • large texture sizes (also think normal maps etc), multiple resolutions
    • redundant or unused data
    • large model sizes, or more assets in general
    • previous issues may be multiplied by multi-language support

    I would also say it could be a problem of art direction, having no constraint and ignoring smart techniques that use less data.

    Also, a higher-budget --> more preorders?
    More data --> more game?

  • Carighan Maconar@piefed.worldEnglish
    15 days

    For a very simple element, consider that if you used to have texture resolutions of 256² = 65536 pixels, you now might easily have 4096² = ~16.7mil pixels, a 25480% increase.

    So our 4k texture packs really guzzle up harddrive space. And that’s ignoring how many many many more things there are to texture in the first place, how each element has multiple textures overlaid for shading, and all the other parts also needing more space like higher-def audio.

    • 🇨🇦 tunetardis@piefed.caEnglish
      14 days

      I figured it had something like 4k texture packs. I have a Steam Deck and don’t generally play anything at high res even when connected to a monitor. There ought to be a way to say hey limit the install to the res I’ll actually be using?

      • Jotunn@lemmy.worldEnglish
        14 days

        Far from standard, but some games on Steam offer their HD textures as a free DLC. Then you could choose not to install it. Way back when games still came on disks and DRM wasn’t so invasive you could also mod games and replace the HD textures with lower res, but I don’t think that is possible with today’s game engines. If it weren’t outright an option during the installation.

    • Tropper@lemmy.zipEnglish
      14 days

      I remember when Shadow of Mordor released and they added the 4k dlc. I think that the dlc alone took up as much space, if not more than the whole game did without it.

      Iirc it was about 60GB or something, might have been smaller as it’s an old game, but still huge.

  • ChromaticMan@lemmy.worldEnglish
    15 days

    Storage and computing power was pretty cheap until recently, so it’s just “wasted” time and money to optimize games. I think in the coming years games will be optimized more since everything is becoming so expensive.

      • givesomefucks@lemmy.worldBanned from communityEnglish
        15 days

        Bruh it’s literally how tech advances…

        When resources (compute power) is cheap, there’s huge leaps in tech. When resources are scarce, the fat gets trimmed.

        It’s not optimism, it’s pattern recognition.

    • MasterBlaster@lemmy.worldEnglish
      14 days

      Back in the nineties, I advocated for “build on the most powerful system, test and improve on the least”.

      I think it’s still relevant.

      The idea of course is as developers, we need the best equipment to make the work bearable and more efficient, but the users rarely have that luxury. Make it work well on the least powerful reasonably representative equipment.

      It’s easy to think your work is done on the dev box, but have a disaster in the real world.

  • m-p{3}@lemmy.caEnglish
    14 days

    Cheap storage and RAM availability (until recently) meant that developers could sacrifice space and minimize the amount of compression on assets.

    Decompressing files require processing, and if you can avoid that, then you free up some computer resources.

  • FarceOfWill@infosec.pubEnglish
    15 days

    Equal parts textures and arranging duplicate data next to each other for fast streaming

    • [deleted]@piefed.worldEnglish
      15 days

      The duplicate data isn’t necessary anymore when installed on SSDs but a bunch of games still have it.

      Helldivers 2 on PC as an example went from a bloated 150+ GB install down to less than 40 GB at some point when they found out that the duplication both wasn’t helpful for the vast majority of PC players and it didn’t have the impact it used to. Now it is comparable to the console install, which was always smaller.

  • eezeebee@lemmy.caEnglish
    14 days

    It’s not Steam games, it’s AAA games.

    Save cost on optimization. Increase the demand for storage. Manufacture the need for data centers. Profit. Why make a product ready for you when they can sell you a problem and a solution along with it?

    Indie games on Steam tend to be a few GBs at most.

    • filcuk@feddit.ukEnglish
      14 days

      AAA do not manufacture demand for storage, that’s frankly ridiculous.
      This is a simple issue of optimization:
      A: noone cares to optimise the size when performance is a much bigger issue.
      B: games are still often optimised for HDDs on consoles (duplicated assets), then ported to PC with as little effort as possible

  • Kairos@lemmy.todayEnglish
    14 days

    Modern games are typically large and have a lot of assets & textures. And these textures are high resolution (4096x4096 typically) and the downscaled versions are also stored.

    Also, lack of optimization.

    • disconnectikacio@lemmy.worldEnglish
      14 days

      Texture file size tells nothing about the resolution, or quality. You can make a game with a single 4096x4096 texture, which contains the terrain, soldiers, vehicles, skybox, etc… and you can do a single decal in game with 4k texture.

      Ive used single 4096x4096 texure 14 years ago for my locomotive DLC’s external model, to optimize drawcall count. And another 4096 for the interior model

  • huey_m@reddthat.comdeleted by creatorEnglish
    14 days

    I know this is gonna sound like petty old guy complaints, but by God the save file sizes can be ridiculous! I have a smallish system drive that’s just for the OS, mainly, and have games and media installed on a few other chunky ones. I never bothered changing save file locations, because… save files, they don’t take up that much space, I’ve still got ~40GB or so to spare on the system drive, may as well leave it. Flash forward a few months after 3 of us have been playing Baldur’s Gate 3 and I’m getting errors because there isn’t enough room on the system drive. Take a look on TreeSize for the culprit, and there’s BG3 taking up over 20GB of save files!

    I get that it’s ultimately on me for not managing files better, but I honestly never even thought of save files eating up tens of GB of storage.

    • ramble81@lemmy.zipEnglish
      14 days

      Probably do something stupid like individual bit fields for every possibility instead of a bit string. Or having it i a json wrapper for every single variable and combination, without any compression.

      Thoguh save states in general grow more complicated as games become more complicated too. Think about early games, all you needed to track was… what level you were on, number of lives, and maybe a list of weapons.

      Now you need things like the time of day in game, the weather, what interactions with other npcs you’ve had, multiple stats on every character in your party including customized outfits and accessories, etc. and just like the games themselves, they’re probably not using pointers but actual data too sometimes, which sucks.

      • too_high_for_this@lemmy.worldEnglish
        14 days

        Crusader Kings III saves are insane. There’s like 50,000 characters and each one is unique. Appearance, age, weight, health, sexual preference, fertility, culture, religion, skills, traits, money, family/relationships, holdings, probably more that I’m forgetting.

        And that’s just the characters. There’s also over 10,000 locations on the map with their own buildings, culture, faith, etc.

    • binarytobis@lemmy.worldEnglish
      14 days

      I think BG3 saves remember things like the position of every item you’ve ever left on the floor, because the entire world seems persistent. Which is cool, but it’s also a game where I have hundreds of saves. Maybe I should also check my save file size, come to think of it.

    • 🇨🇦 tunetardis@piefed.caEnglish
      14 days

      It wasn’t until I tried running a Pokémon game in an emulator that I realized how small a save file can be. They’re in the kilobytes range, even though they have to store all game play and achievements, inventory, every Pokémon you’ve ever captured with full stats and even those you’ve only seen, etc. It must be some binary format with absolutely no fat in it.

  • BartyDeCanter@piefed.socialEnglish
    15 days

    As others have said, it’s mostly audio and textures, with some of it being the choice of engine. Lossless CD quality audio and ultra high resolution textures and bump maps for a jillion triangle models take up a lot of space. The actual executables are relatively small, though certainly the layers and layers of frameworks that make up modern software development are somewhat to blame.

    • DahGangalang@infosec.pubEnglish
      15 days

      So it sounds like its an exchange of size for customizability.

      If you had a different installer for each language and/or video quality, then each installation could be much smaller. But since we (gamers) want to be able to change texture quality “on the fly” via the settings menu, we have to deal with all the possible textures coming in the game files.

      Does that sound like I have it right?

      • BartyDeCanter@piefed.socialEnglish
        14 days

        That is definitely part of it, but there’s also just plain more textures and models because people complain if they see the same texture or models reused a lot, or the textures look too grainy when they are right up next to one. An uncompressed 256x256 RGBA texture takes 256 kilobytes to store. A 4k version takes 16 megabytes.

  • username_1@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
    15 days

    Try to run any 3d modelling software and create something trivial, like a textured cube. Measure the size.

  • yesman@lemmy.worldEnglish
    14 days

    4K textures are a scam. With upscaling, even the people who run games in 4K don’t use the 4K textures.

  • Korhaka@sopuli.xyzEnglish
    15 days

    You can bypass it by not buying such large games. Plenty of good games under 5GB come out all the time.

    • ampersandrew@lemmy.worldEnglish
      15 days

      I’d say this year’s best game so far, that I’ve played anyway, is only 2.13 GB; Escape from Ever After.

  • warm@kbin.earth
    15 days

    It costs time and money to make them smaller, big studios dont want to waste that and know their games will sell regardless.

  • jtrek@startrek.websiteEnglish
    14 days

    I’ve seen a couple games that have the high res textures as a free separate download. That’d be nice. I’m not playing in 4k so I don’t need all that extra crap.