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

richg42.blogspot.com

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

#191

Post by rootw0rm »

GuB-42 wrote: post #45
LinuxBender wrote: post #11

I recall a lot of hype more than a decade ago about all the textures going away and being replaced with math formulas to generate everything on the fly. Games were supposed to get dramatically smaller. What ever happened to that?

And there was also the opposite, John Carmack in particular didn't have a problem with using huge amount of data, "Rage" is an application of this idea. The game uses a single, huge, non-repeating "megatexture", with elaborate caching strategies to keep it playable even on slow media (HDD/optical). The idea was to give complete freedom to artists and not require them to be mathematicians. Further down the line, he ev…

I love Inigo's work! I've been learning about shaders, and being able to edit and reload his code on shadertoy has been really cool

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

#192

Post by gambiting »

Sohcahtoa82 wrote: post #111
jjoonathan wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It attracts truly extraordinary talent. One of many examples: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eviSykqSUUw . There is more technical ambition in a single slide of that project than an entire department at places I've worked. However, it also tends to demand more and pay less, so there is churn and burnout and when it comes time to triage, the triage can cut very deep. If I were to dive into the JIRA for any one of the…

> However, it also tends to demand more and pay less, so there is churn and burnout and when it comes time to triage, the triage can cut very deep. Yeah, I've often heard that the advice for people who really want to make games is to get some friends together and try to put out something together as a side gig while you work somewhere boring to pay the bills. SWE at a game studio, especially any AAA game studio, is a…

>>SWE at a game studio, especially any AAA game studio, is an awful experience.

Just as a counter point - I work at one of the largest AAA game companies and we have great work life balance(been here 9 years). Don't remember when was the last time I worked more than the required 7.5h/day, never worked on the weekend, the people I work with are all passionate about their work and want to deliver something great. The pay is "ok" - it's not exceptional but it allows for good quality of life. In comparison all my friends who went to work in traditional software development are paid somewhat more than I am but they all 100% hate their jobs, so......I don't think it's a bad trade off.

As for the infinite supply of people wanting to do this - it's only really true at junior level, as soon as you talk anyone above junior it's extremely hard to recruit and you might be getting a handful of candidates a year. We've been trying to hire a senior rendering programmer for over a year now and we've had like 5 candidates total.

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

#193

Post by BlueTemplar »

saberience wrote: post #190
rvba wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Blizzard us a bad example. Their games take incredible amounts of time to start. I think they dont play their own games and nobody gives a shit. The launcher is bugged and downloads either empty or 137mb patches (maybe bad CRC at some server? Different CRCs at some?). Every time. Starcraft remastered was bugged at some point and couldnt be played for a week. If you statt Heroes of the storm, it takes few minutes to d…

Your experience is not my experience at all. Blizzard is the gold standard for me in starting games faster than any other launcher. In fact they are the only one I’ve seen that lets you play the game part way into the download. No other dev seems to have this technology. I waited hours to play Witcher 3, Cuberpunk, Assassins Creed Odyssey. With WoW I was playing within minutes.

In the Beyond All Reason (still "alpha") RTS, the game itself is only a couple Go, but maps are downloaded on the fly, because downloading all of the featured ones would take a dozen Go.

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

#194

Post by cliff »

saberience wrote: post #190
rvba wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Blizzard us a bad example. Their games take incredible amounts of time to start. I think they dont play their own games and nobody gives a shit. The launcher is bugged and downloads either empty or 137mb patches (maybe bad CRC at some server? Different CRCs at some?). Every time. Starcraft remastered was bugged at some point and couldnt be played for a week. If you statt Heroes of the storm, it takes few minutes to d…

Your experience is not my experience at all. Blizzard is the gold standard for me in starting games faster than any other launcher. In fact they are the only one I’ve seen that lets you play the game part way into the download. No other dev seems to have this technology. I waited hours to play Witcher 3, Cuberpunk, Assassins Creed Odyssey. With WoW I was playing within minutes.

Other games have 'start with partial download' technology. In fact, the core tech of the team that eventually created Valve's Steam was downloading assets on-the-fly so that you could start playing a game before everything was downloaded.

I worked on Guild Wars 2, which has this feature. I made a first prototype of it that streamed all content on-the-fly. It's pretty easy to implement - you have an abstraction that asynchronously loads a file off of the disk, and you can just make that download from the network instead.

The tricky part is when you want to ensure all the assets are there for a specific area before you load in, or simply knowing what order to download things in. For example, there was a starter area of Guild Wars 2 that spawned monsters from many other areas, this meant that the manifest of what was needed was enormous for that area.

So the 'playability' threshold becomes a trade-off between game experience (assets popping in as you play) and quick entry.

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

#195

Post by BlueTemplar »

hellotomyrars wrote: post #8

Game size is a perennial talking point and some games earn it and some games don’t. There was a phase of games shipping with uncompressed audio in every language they support for no good reason that ballooned file size (Titanfall) Some games have gotten around this problem by having higher resolution textures or additional languages being optional installs within whatever ecosystems DLC implementation is. I think thi…

It's so different from game to game, some games are still only a couple Go despite having "4k" graphics...

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

#196

Post by yellowapple »

kristianp wrote: post #148
haswell wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I realize they’re trying to optimize for a wide base, but I have plenty of spare cores to decompress audio, and SSD space is limited. For me, the net result is that Titanfall was one of the first games to go when I needed space. Low hanging fruit. Even if it was deliberate, I have to question the logic and wonder how much usage they enabled vs. uninstalls from file size over time.

You've already bought it, so the game studio got their money, despite having a "bloated" install. So the incentives aren't quite there to reduce the size. I was thinking about buying Mass Effect yesterday, the recent update, but it requires 150GB and I don't have a Windows partition that big! (I'm Dual booting Linux) So I think money is being lost in people who aren't often gamers and haven't bought big disks for gam…

Do you have a big enough Linux partition? Mass Effect Legendary Edition runs pretty great via Proton.

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

#197

Post by tmilard »

ehaliewicz2 wrote: post #140
tmilard wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes I agree but the PNG compresion size is so great ! The Textures in total reduce enormously my game file size. By 15 times : so good. And because it is small the web download is VERY quick. Very.... So in a way I loose a bit on decompresing textures time, BUT a gain a lot od seconds in dowloading reduced textures files.

How many times do you decompress the textures, and how many times do you download them?

Only once :

- Step 1: download zip file containing my XML point file and my 90 PNG texture files.

- Step 2: open zip file and dezip in 91 filed

- Step 3: run 3D games with all the 91 Assets. The (small) game engine reads each 90 PNG files and - of xccourse- transform each one in a GPU compatible texture.

All zip takes about 6 seconds. Not so bad

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

#198

Post by wakaru44 »

BlueTemplar wrote: post #193
saberience wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your experience is not my experience at all. Blizzard is the gold standard for me in starting games faster than any other launcher. In fact they are the only one I’ve seen that lets you play the game part way into the download. No other dev seems to have this technology. I waited hours to play Witcher 3, Cuberpunk, Assassins Creed Odyssey. With WoW I was playing within minutes.

In the Beyond All Reason (still "alpha") RTS, the game itself is only a couple Go, but maps are downloaded on the fly, because downloading all of the featured ones would take a dozen Go.

what is 'Go' as a unit? size? time?

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

#199

Post by spatulon »

RajT88 wrote: post #47
hellotomyrars wrote: post #8

Game size is a perennial talking point and some games earn it and some games don’t. There was a phase of games shipping with uncompressed audio in every language they support for no good reason that ballooned file size (Titanfall) Some games have gotten around this problem by having higher resolution textures or additional languages being optional installs within whatever ecosystems DLC implementation is. I think thi…

The .kkreiger devs really showed how far you can go to reduce download size: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.kkrieger https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ya_MUKc343U It is dated, but looks pretty good by 2004 standards.

Note that one of the .kkreiger devs (ryg aka Fabian Giesen) works at Epic Game Tools on the Oodle compressors mentioned in OP's post.
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