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I really want to see someone make a renderer that can work on compressed textures. No need to decompress if you can just read the data on the fly.
BC1-5 have been standard practice since before the original XBox. I think when people here are talking about "uncompressed assets" they mean "not applying variable-rate zip style compression on top of BCn compression."
He completely misses the point. Games don't take hundreds of gigs because they have sub-optimal compression. They take hundreds of gigs because they don't use ANY compression. Jedi Survivor takes 139 gigs on Series X and mere 44 gigs on Series S. It didn't come out yet, but I'm 99.99% certain that this difference is just from inclusion of 8k textures into Series X version. That kind of scaling means that they don't u…
Agree - OP even links to this[1] PC gamer article which calls out Hitman 3 as having a much smaller size compared to Hitman 2 (and Hitman 3 includes all of Hitman 2 ). How did they do it? Compression[2]. [1] https://www.pcgamer.com/biggest-game-install-sizes/ [2] https://www.pcgamer.com/how-hitman-3s-devs-shrank-the-entire...
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Yes, that's the problem. You can compress them for size at download time, and recompress them to a GPU-optimal format at the time of installation. You may even be able to do it at runtime with modern hardware, shortening loadtimes and sometimes even improving performance indirectly.
Then you have to have the game reprocess all the assets on the users machine which could easily take an hour
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Guild Wars 2 and others solve this with progressive downloads. You may start playing after a fraction of the content is downloaded. There is effectively no downside: new players can't access most of the content anyhow. It also applies to updates: you can start playing after a big update with a partial download. The background process can be safely interrupted and resumed without glitches.
War Thunder kind of has that, except that the "progressive" bit means you need to download the full thing to progress in the game beyond a certain point. Enlisted, which uses the same engine, is fine though.
I've seen many games create a vast file system mess, and they're forever plagued by "corruption" or something, complete with "fix" tools, "cache" clearing push-ups and players reinstalling after big updates that don't install correctly for whatever reason. Somehow ArenaNet surrounded this whole problem and solved it optimally.
He completely misses the point. Games don't take hundreds of gigs because they have sub-optimal compression. They take hundreds of gigs because they don't use ANY compression. Jedi Survivor takes 139 gigs on Series X and mere 44 gigs on Series S. It didn't come out yet, but I'm 99.99% certain that this difference is just from inclusion of 8k textures into Series X version. That kind of scaling means that they don't u…
In a crunch situation, I can think of how easy it is for some to be able to circumnavigate various pitfalls while others fall into them and have no time to address it.
Very much a skill/experience thing. There’s countless examples of games that run horribly given their level of presentation, or have no business being so impressively performant on the hardware they’re running.
I can guess what execs will pick when faced with “delay the game or ship a massive bundle.”
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And, besides, his solutions aren't really good. Radical solution would be shipping image generating model with the game and generating textures on the fly. That's how all texture-related data goes from being measured in hundreds of gigs to being measured in hundreds of megs. So basically becomes non-issue.
That would be far, far slower than just downloading the image
Why not simply make several versions? Like 1 Gb, 10 Gb and 100 Gb versions?
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Maybe not for that particular game, but a lot of games have been shown to use uncompressed assets. It's not just speculation.
> It's not just speculation. So it’s exactly speculation. A lot of games have done a lot of things for a lot of reasons over the decades. Why are new games so large? Good question. This entire thread is speculative.
The thread might be speculating about _why_ they do that, or whether this particular game does that, but that's a non sequitur, that isn't what I was talking about.