It'd be nice if Steam and the other stores gave you checkboxes for a game's localizations and they'd only download/install the ones you actually want.
Of course that's not the whole problem and games also need to use lower texture sizes for small objects instead of using 4k textures all the time even for a toothbrush prop in the background.
Steam has supported this for a very long time, it’s just down to the developer to use it e.g. https://steamdb.info/app/28050/depots/
https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/store/localization
Games do use smaller textures for smaller objects. "4k texture" has little to no meaning.
What would be nice is if high res textures were optional and it downloaded assets in order so you could start playing the tutorial without waiting for everything to be downloaded (like origin)
Games should use smaller textures for smaller objects, but don't, like, audit that shit, and routinely end up having some of them way over-res anyway.
Oh shit telling people about the memory efficient way I store mazes is my kink. Lmk if you want the details 🥵
Imagine a grid of cells where the cells have data about which direction you can move through (a wall or an empty space). I typically do this just with x/y axis but it can be expanded to be n-dimensional using all the same concepts. There's no need to store complete data in every cell though. For instance a cell that has information about if there is a wall in the positive x direction would overlap with its neighbor's data about if there is a wall in it's negative x direction. So the cells only need to contain 2 bits of information, for example 'is there a wall in the positive x axis' and 'is there a wall in the positive y axis', and the information about if there is a wall in the negative x/y axis can be determined by checking the neighbor in that direction. For a 2d maze you can store this info in a bit array and treat it like a 3d array (x axis, y axis, the two walls). Visually a single cell is rendered as a 2x2 but one of the spaces is always a wall, one is always a path, and the other two are the variables. To render a full maze you need to also add an extra containing wall on two of the sides or it'll look chopped but that's visual only no data needs to be stored about that. So a maze that is 100x100 'choices' in size would be rendered like a grid that's 200x200 and take only 1.25kb of memory. Here's a C++ implementation of this concept using a vector<bool> as the bit data structure. Let me know if you also want pictures of the different steps, completed mazes, or the nonsense you can do by extending it to 3 dimensions to build a nearly impossible to solve maze pyramid in a game
All in the name of running it at 4k with 10 fps indoors and it crashes when you go outdoors. Thanks game publishers that's just what we all need!
It also makes you re-download another 100 gbs every time the game updates
Every time I think about reinstalling Ark, I see that and just go "I don't want to delete everything else on my hard drive just to play this one game."
If they're going to stick 83 gigs of uncompressed audio to the end of their 50gb game I want any option where the randomizes each line from the available localizations.
It's quite insane. A couple years back I bought and played an indie space game that had beautiful graphics, weather effects, 'splosions, space stations, hundreds of star systems etc.
That game's installed size?
260MB.186MB on checking.Show
The full game could fit on a CD-ROM about five times over and it was still many hours of cool gameplay. This massive universe exploration game is smaller than 90% of the 2D procedurally generated games I own.
Looks like they still develop, and still offer demos which I think is awesome. And their game sizes look still super reasonable.
I'm not really sure how you achieve that kind of compression, I assume most textures are hand-written shaders or something rather than 4k .png files.
Not everyone has SSDs, not everyone has 2+ TB of storage, and even if that were true you shouldn't have to ship your entire studios development server to your customer. A game shouldn't be bigger than 50 GBs (Yes that even includes Elden Ring). That's the limit. I can always go online and download more RAM, but I cannot download more storage space. We live in an age where code can be hyper optimized both by humans engineers as well as their thinking machines. Fuckin' make your games smaller and run better.
Not everyone has SSDs, not everyone has 2+ TB of storage
I do, but the game sizes still make me pause to think and bigger pause to free some space.
I want to update baldurs gate but my versions is like patch 3 or 4 or something so it’ll mean downloading the whole game over again which is like 180gb. I also use my laptop for work so space is a little limited and I maxed out my newest backup drive lol
what laptop do you have? i also do everything in my laptop and am worried if my laptop would
lag heavilyexplode if i tried to run baldurs gate lol /genqAsus rog scar hero 3. It's got a 2070 in it so, not running it on ultra or anything but it runs pretty well
Yeah western. Cause Genshin doesn't install terabyte sized patches every 2 weeks...
I find it very funny that vr games, nominally a cutting edge of game development, are often tiny because they have to more or less run on cellphones (facebook's headsets) and even on pcs the strain of rending can make a strong system cry.
Was part of a small team trying to crack and preserve a delisted game about a year ago. In the process the team realized like half the game's files don't even do anything. Literally ~25GB of data doing fuck all. You can just delete them with no consequences.
I thought about playing the remastered warcraft 3 but it's like 40 ffucking gb fuck that
