Yea you mean archives, another one of the industry norms? Wouldn’t necessarily call them compressions as the size difference is sometimes insignificant, but I seem to be missing your entire point, what is it? What are game devs doing wrong?
And stop asking stupid questions about “what are developers doing wrong”. Unless I have their source code, I can’t tell, can I? But game size definitely grows by poor optimization which you don’t realize goes beyond including middleware and copy pasting code. From image compression to audio, etc. Never though I’d have to explain that MP3 is smaller than WAV file and that constitutes optimizing an asset, but here I am.
I’d hazard a guess no because optimization is not “coding scripting thing”.
And that’s where you’re wrong.
Here educate yourself an learn a bit about asset consolidation.
Again, archives are not compressions. At least to the point where you saved 100s of gbs of storage for using them.
And stop asking stupid questions about “what are developers doing wrong”.
No I wont, you seem to think game devs are lazy shitters who don’t know what they’re doing and that’s the reason games today are big. The reality of audience wanting higher resolution graphics for their higher resolution screens to display is but a side problem, it’s the devs laziness that’s the real problem. I guess game devs themselves never made a game, worked with an engine or wrote code.
But game size definitely grows by poor optimization which you don’t realize goes beyond including middleware and copy pasting code.
Sure, let’s assume so. An “unoptimized” game (whatever that even means in practice) is, let’s be generous and say, 1gb bigger. Now all you have to shave off is 99gb more. What do you do, “optimize” more? Bro just optimize lmaoo, optimize these 4k textures to the point where they are indistinguishable from 256p, gamers love buying a 4k game that just eats VRAM but looks like PS2 Lara Croft, that’s optimization bro.
From image compression to audio, etc. Never though I’d have to explain that MP3 is smaller than WAV file and that constitutes optimizing an asset, but here I am.
Now I know sound files are also a big part of the games filesize, but I’m not an audio guy and honestly textures generally take way the fuck more space from games. Looking at Skyrim for example, the sounds+voices archives, including music, soundfx and voices are around 3.3gb, textures (9 separate archives) total a 7.5gb, more than half of the total 14.5gb data folder.
So you did write code and played with game engine and you have no idea how game can get big and you don’t know how it can be optimized to be smaller? Right. Now I just think you are trolling. You know what you should do? Go to your phone’s camera and configure for files to be saved in RAW or BMP. While you are at it convert all your songs to WAV. See how fast your drive space goes. When instead of saving 2-5MB JPEG images you start having 40MB per image. Free space goes away pretty fast.
Archives don’t need to be compressed, but when they are… it’s optimizing for lower space usage. That’s what optimization is… sacrificing one resource for another, in this case loading/cpu time for storage size. Am also not sure how you assumed it’s not compression at fault here. You are telling me basketball game has terabytes worth of compressed assets? Fat chance of that even if you take into account all the shenanigans they do these days by adding slot machines and day one DLCs.
And yes, not only game, but all developers have become lazier. Me being one and coming into contact daily with other people’s code I can tell you this has changed over the years. People will import 45MB big SDK so they don’t have to write a single POST request. Use AI to write a function because they couldn’t be bothered to look up documentation. Just look at popularity of Electron. Bundle entire web browser so they can avoid learning native libraries of writing code in some other language. You also seem to think I said developers are lazy bums, which is not true. They did get lazier considering hardware is relatively cheap these days most won’t bother with using the least amount of resources because they don’t have to. This being a talk about game, it’s probably a combination of multiple factors.
You should really look into 64k intro scene and see what people can achieve with just 64kb of executable size. It is an example in opposite direction where people compete in cramming as much as possible in 64kb and optimizing it to all hell, but it goes to show it can be done. Look at Clean Slate from 2021 competition. Or on a different tangent, look at KolibriOS, entire operating system with minimum boot option being single floppy, 1.44MB or entire collection of applications at 40MB, including browser, games, word processor, compiler, debugger, file manager, drivers for all kinds of hardware, etc. It’s possible… takes time but it’s possible.
Yea you mean archives, another one of the industry norms? Wouldn’t necessarily call them compressions as the size difference is sometimes insignificant, but I seem to be missing your entire point, what is it? What are game devs doing wrong?
Lack of compression. Hence huge game sizes. Lack of optimization as well.
We already went through compression, that is not the issue as basically every game is already compressed.
Optimization, as I understand usually regards the coding/scripting part of things. That has arguably 0 effect on filesizes.
So tell me, what are game devs doing so wrong they accidentally or through sheer laziness added 100s of gbs of useless data?
Have you ever made a game? Or worked with engine? Wrote code…etc.? I’d hazard a guess no because optimization is not “coding scripting thing”.
Here educate yourself an learn a bit about asset consolidation.
And stop asking stupid questions about “what are developers doing wrong”. Unless I have their source code, I can’t tell, can I? But game size definitely grows by poor optimization which you don’t realize goes beyond including middleware and copy pasting code. From image compression to audio, etc. Never though I’d have to explain that MP3 is smaller than WAV file and that constitutes optimizing an asset, but here I am.
No
Yes
Yes.
And that’s where you’re wrong.
Again, archives are not compressions. At least to the point where you saved 100s of gbs of storage for using them.
No I wont, you seem to think game devs are lazy shitters who don’t know what they’re doing and that’s the reason games today are big. The reality of audience wanting higher resolution graphics for their higher resolution screens to display is but a side problem, it’s the devs laziness that’s the real problem. I guess game devs themselves never made a game, worked with an engine or wrote code.
Sure, let’s assume so. An “unoptimized” game (whatever that even means in practice) is, let’s be generous and say, 1gb bigger. Now all you have to shave off is 99gb more. What do you do, “optimize” more? Bro just optimize lmaoo, optimize these 4k textures to the point where they are indistinguishable from 256p, gamers love buying a 4k game that just eats VRAM but looks like PS2 Lara Croft, that’s optimization bro.
Now I know sound files are also a big part of the games filesize, but I’m not an audio guy and honestly textures generally take way the fuck more space from games. Looking at Skyrim for example, the sounds+voices archives, including music, soundfx and voices are around 3.3gb, textures (9 separate archives) total a 7.5gb, more than half of the total 14.5gb data folder.
So yeah just optimize bro, what are you lazy bro?
So you did write code and played with game engine and you have no idea how game can get big and you don’t know how it can be optimized to be smaller? Right. Now I just think you are trolling. You know what you should do? Go to your phone’s camera and configure for files to be saved in RAW or BMP. While you are at it convert all your songs to WAV. See how fast your drive space goes. When instead of saving 2-5MB JPEG images you start having 40MB per image. Free space goes away pretty fast.
Archives don’t need to be compressed, but when they are… it’s optimizing for lower space usage. That’s what optimization is… sacrificing one resource for another, in this case loading/cpu time for storage size. Am also not sure how you assumed it’s not compression at fault here. You are telling me basketball game has terabytes worth of compressed assets? Fat chance of that even if you take into account all the shenanigans they do these days by adding slot machines and day one DLCs.
And yes, not only game, but all developers have become lazier. Me being one and coming into contact daily with other people’s code I can tell you this has changed over the years. People will import 45MB big SDK so they don’t have to write a single POST request. Use AI to write a function because they couldn’t be bothered to look up documentation. Just look at popularity of Electron. Bundle entire web browser so they can avoid learning native libraries of writing code in some other language. You also seem to think I said developers are lazy bums, which is not true. They did get lazier considering hardware is relatively cheap these days most won’t bother with using the least amount of resources because they don’t have to. This being a talk about game, it’s probably a combination of multiple factors.
You should really look into 64k intro scene and see what people can achieve with just 64kb of executable size. It is an example in opposite direction where people compete in cramming as much as possible in 64kb and optimizing it to all hell, but it goes to show it can be done. Look at Clean Slate from 2021 competition. Or on a different tangent, look at KolibriOS, entire operating system with minimum boot option being single floppy, 1.44MB or entire collection of applications at 40MB, including browser, games, word processor, compiler, debugger, file manager, drivers for all kinds of hardware, etc. It’s possible… takes time but it’s possible.