Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Faster LZ is not the answer to 150-250 GB video game downloads

richg42.blogspot.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

171–180 of 267 posts

Re: Faster LZ is not the answer to 150-250 GB video game downloads

#171

Post by kevingadd »

tzs wrote: post #141
kevingadd wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Titanfall shipped uncompressed audio on purpose to cut out audio decompression CPU usage. You can disagree with the decision, but it wasn't an accident or negligence.

Why not ship the audio compressed and decompress it once when the game gets installed? That wouldn’t help people whose issue with large game size is the amount of space used on their disk, but it would help people whose issue is the long download times.

For all we know it actually worked that way. Steam definitely decompresses game assets at install time. The people complaining about game sizes aren't looking at the depot files you download when installing the game, they're looking at their HDD (which is fair!)

My guess is Valve doesn't offer a 'decompress your ogg files to wav at install time' feature though.

Re: Faster LZ is not the answer to 150-250 GB video game downloads

#172

Post by zimpenfish »

uoaei wrote: post #80
taeric wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This feels wrong. In that, I'd be surprised if they are not using compression. I think folks are just drastically underestimating how many resources are under discussion. And how big they are. Heck, just the geometry is probably far larger than folks anticipate.

The geometry would be hard to compress, but I suspect there's some clever tricks with some kind of fractal compression[1] that could drastically reduce texture sizes for camo, foliage, etc. without any effect on aesthetics. Encoding is the hard part, but only need be done once when building the final release. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fractal_compression

> there's some clever tricks with some kind of fractal compression

It's a shame that IFS hamstrung the adoption of fractal compression with their expensive license fees - wouldn't necessarily have been The Future Of Images but at least we'd have had the option.

Re: Faster LZ is not the answer to 150-250 GB video game downloads

#173

Post by kevingadd »

langsoul-com wrote: post #158

I think games should have advanced textures optional by default. 4k textures are unnecessary if it results in a 50gig+ download.

It used to be more common to have optional texture packs like this. It seems to have fallen out of favor, I can offer some informed speculation as to the reasons:

* Every additional configuration i.e. 'texture pack vs no texture pack' is more QA workload to verify that everything works as expected. So adding this option is more work for your already-busy testers.

* Adding DLCs to deployment systems like Steam or PSN is additional work and then when patching the game you would also need to patch the DLC. I can imagine the coordination overhead here being a pain.

* Some users will fail to install the DLC and then complain that the game is ugly or that the screenshots were misleading. This is ultimately a user education problem but it's also the case that the flow for installing DLC on most platforms is awkward.

* The DLC install process adds additional points of failure, so you need to handle all of that now too.

* Users installing a new graphics card will probably be annoyed to have to suddenly wait for a HD texture pack to download before they can test it out.

All pretty minor individually, but it probably adds up to explain why most studios don't do this.

I wonder how widespread developer support for Xbox Smart Delivery (which is basically what you describe) actually is at this point?

Re: Faster LZ is not the answer to 150-250 GB video game downloads

#174

Post by zimpenfish »

gatane wrote: post #101
uoaei wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The geometry would be hard to compress, but I suspect there's some clever tricks with some kind of fractal compression[1] that could drastically reduce texture sizes for camo, foliage, etc. without any effect on aesthetics. Encoding is the hard part, but only need be done once when building the final release. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fractal_compression

Wait, are there more papers on this? Seems interesting.

When I was messing around with this (~1995?), there was a Yuval Fisher paper floating around which did a good job of explaining it. Although it looks like it now costs ~$40 to get that paper or ~$100 for his book. Helpful!

Re: Faster LZ is not the answer to 150-250 GB video game downloads

#175

Post by jayd16 »

Sohcahtoa82 wrote: post #106
kevingadd wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The uncompressed audio was on purpose to manage CPU usage, you can find quotes explaining this in interviews. https://www.escapistmagazine.com/titanfall-dev-explains-the-... I can attest that MP3 and OGG decompression (the two audio codecs that would have likely been used at the time) are both pretty slow. It adds up.

What a bunch of absolute horse shit. MP3 isn't slow. I was playing MP3s on a 100 Mhz 486 DX4 in 1996. Certainly a system in 2014 can handle decompressing MP3s on the fly. Even if you didn't want to do it on the fly during game play, they easily could have been decompressed at load time and it would have taken only a couple seconds. It's not like ENTIRE 35 GB of audio needed to be loaded all at once, nobody had that R…

Ok, how much uncompressed audio does need to be resident in RAM, do you think? Last gen hardware had 8GB total. I think the XBONE could only use 5GB for games. That was shared for CPU and GPU. Is it worth kicking out a lot of texture data so you don't have to stream audio?

Re: Faster LZ is not the answer to 150-250 GB video game downloads

#176

Post by ntauthority »

kevingadd wrote: post #171
tzs wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not ship the audio compressed and decompress it once when the game gets installed? That wouldn’t help people whose issue with large game size is the amount of space used on their disk, but it would help people whose issue is the long download times.

For all we know it actually worked that way. Steam definitely decompresses game assets at install time. The people complaining about game sizes aren't looking at the depot files you download when installing the game, they're looking at their HDD (which is fair!) My guess is Valve doesn't offer a 'decompress your ogg files to wav at install time' feature though.

Titanfall did work this way on the EA launcher. There was a tool that it'd run on first launch to decompress the compressed audio files.

Re: Faster LZ is not the answer to 150-250 GB video game downloads

#178

Post by ant6n »

midnightclubbed wrote: post #166
recursive wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's like 50 hours of uncompressed stereo audio at CD quality. (2×16bit@44.1kHz) Do games really have that much stuff in them these days? I mean, I wouldn't doubt it, but it's surprising.

For story based games (with voice acting) absolutely yes. Dozens of story characters, hundreds of supporting npc and all of them talking as either part of your missions or just to fill in the world. Maybe 50 hours is a lot for a non story based game but even then once you factor in all the sounds and all their variations to reduce repetition you might be up there.

Do they all talk at the same time?

Re: Faster LZ is not the answer to 150-250 GB video game downloads

#179

Post by tester756 »

naikrovek wrote: post #136
Waterluvian wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In terms of attracting engineering talent, how does the video games industry fare? 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 pe…

game developers work so much harder than enterprise developers, and enterprise developers look down on game developers as is they are sub-human or something. it's completely inverted to reality. I'm not saying that you are doing this, I am saying that this is done. watch some GDC developer videos on YouTube. these people work HARD for performance.

Are you sure those people were talking about "game developers", not "game industry"?

Re: Faster LZ is not the answer to 150-250 GB video game downloads

#180

Post by Gelenoto »

Animats wrote: post #162

Meanwhile, over in metaverse land, there are petabytes of content in the big worlds. I've been working on a faster Second Life / Open Simulator client. Those have a reputation for being sluggish. That's rapidly changing. All content is loaded on demand. Textures are stored in JPEG 2000 format. JPEG 2000 decoders come in several flavors - slow and flaky, fast but need the GPU, and midrange but expensive. If you want t…

So you compare a highly detailed state of the art game with gigabytes if proper assets to the 'art' dessert of vr?
Post reply on HN