231–240 of 267 posts
250gB? No problem with 1gb/S to 3gb/s fiber to the home. At least here in Ottawa, Canada Fiber to the home is prevalent and affordable. But I understand where fiber isn’t available these are large downloads.
Well shit. Does your "Canada Fiber to the home" come with unlimited fast storage for free?
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…
HTJ2K has support in OpenJPEG (master branch at least), might need to compile with a specific flag or something I can't remember.
I think JPEG-XL is ideal for these types of applications in my opinion, even if you ship the decoder with your client. Their progressive encoding/decoding is much better than J2K in my opinion.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Let me tell you a story about playing The Settlers IV on a 233Mhz 64MB RAM Voodo 3 2000. This game was cool in that it had two audio features: a soundtrack on the CD itself, played using the CD drive's DAC [^1], and you could also drop MP3 files into a folder where the game would play those instead. It was common practice to use a NoCD crack when playing online, because the CD check took long enough you could time ou…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've benchmarked it myself in my game. It adds a measurable amount of time to loads if you're decompressing all the audio up front to reduce latency, and during streaming it increases CPU usage. Obviously a modern machine can handle a few ogg/mp3 streams in the background during gameplay, but some games are playing dozens or hundreds of sounds at once. "It's not like ENTIRE 35 GB of audio needed to be loaded all at o…
Plus last gen consoles have extremely slow CPUs. They were already slow when they were released.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That is a little surprising to me. Especially if we are talking about games that are delivered online. Thinking on it, I'm actually only surprised for online delivered games. I don't see any incentive to reduce size on delivered disks. I'd expect that they use a compression that is good for transport, at transport time. I'm not too shocked that they have the assets in a way that is easy to use at runtime.
Games are duct taped together at last minute on impossible deadlines pretty much every time.
The crackers who remove copy protection often repackage (or someone else does) to greatly reduce size; since they’re in there poking around the code they can see what isn’t used.
This isn’t new, either, ancient console games have unused assets and even entire levels in the code but disabled.
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?
The Moore's Law is Dead podcast recently did a podcast with an Infinity Ward award-winning effects artist: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tmfHxJT1I3I . The crazy thing he mentioned is that if there was zero compression, the latest COD games genuinely had over 1 terabyte of uncompressed assets.
Compression optimizes for wall clock time which is (roughly speaking) sum of time it takes to get the compressed data and time it takes to decompress it. Downloads over the network are almost always bottlenecked on the network speed, so the heavier compression you have the better. However, when loading data from the local disk, the I/O can be so fast that the decompression time becomes the bottleneck and slows down l…
I think honestly the problem is small disks. Games are achieving almost photorealism on 4k with maybe 150gb. That's quite honestly not bad. You can't store the universe on a floppy disk.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
In 2003, I found out that America's Army (the US Army videogame) had compressed and decompressed all their textures at some point, so they were paying the quality hit for compression and the space hit for RGBA. This was a time when the game still took a day to download, even on a half decent connection, so >200% footprint inflation kinda mattered. The more things change, the more they stay the same!
I have fond memories of that game. 80% of the time I would play very patiently and carefully. Occasionally, though, I would go Rambo and take out the whole enemy team in 30 seconds.