Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Bohandas]

I recently acquired a copy of the classic computer game "Wasteland" over Steam.

On going to install it I discovered that it it took up about 370 Megabytes; this may not seem like a lot now, but that kind of drive space basically didn't even exist in the 1980's when Wasteland originally came out. Presumably some sort of emulator would be required to make the game work on a modern PC, but I've checked around, and the kind of emulator that would be needed should only account for about two extra megabytes, I've checked. That leaves well over 300 megabytes still unaccounted for; Where did it come from? What does it do?

I've noticed similar things with a lot of other games. They take up much more space than it seems they should need. I had always attributed it to modern programmers putting less emphasis on making programs efficient now that we have drive space to spare, but then I saw this. WTF happened!?

[Girlinhat]

Partly because these were built to run on OLD machines.  Ever try to run something from DOS on a modern PC?  Gotta have that fancy DOSBox emulator.  Which is what much of the bulk is - it's the game itself, as well as the emulator to make the game think it's running on old hardware.  It's just hotwired directly into the game, instead of being separate.  With so much memory available now, they can afford to do so.  And then there's extra stuff, like DRM, compatibility modes, joystick support drivers, steam overlay support for when you shift-tab, and other frivolous stuffs.

[Astral]

It also, in some cases, ends up being an issue of performance versus storage space. For some games, they could compress the hell out of all the assets, such as sounds, textures, and even models, but that would end up adding overhead to loading times, and stuttering issues if you have the sort of seamless open world games that seem to be in vogue these days.

Another part of it is just lazy programming; why put extra effort into making it a smaller game, and work more efficiently with fewer resources (need those pretty shiny graphics with <10 hours of actual gameplay!) when they can force you to download huge files and buy new hardware? Battlefield 4 is a particularly bad example, as each map takes around 1-3 GB of space each. The original game was probably about 10-15 GB, but with all the expansions it got pushed in the 60-70 GB range.

[Nick K]

I think lazy is a bit of an exaggeration - games from big companies are often made by programmers working "crunch time" long-hours for months at a time.
As a management decision, it makes sense to me - almost anyone nowadays has tons of extra storage space and that's especially the case for those "pretty shiny graphics" games that won't run on older machines regardless. My PC is 3 years old and won't run new graphics-intensive games well, but a quick look on C: shows "1.36TB free of 1.81 available". I definitely wouldn't want the programmers on any of the games I play to have spent extra time making them more efficient with storage space when they could be fixing bugs or adding content instead.

[BigD145]

Around 1990 I had an external 50MB scsi hard drive and that was huge at the time. There's no way Wasteland should be 300mb+. I run the original on my Android tablet with dosbox and that all is nowhere near 300. Someone did a bad thing on the Steam release.

[Girlinhat]

Around 1990 I had an external 50MB scsi hard drive and that was huge at the time. There's no way Wasteland should be 300mb+. I run the original on my Android tablet with dosbox and that all is nowhere near 300. Someone did a bad thing on the Steam release.

For some reason that made me remember something.  Some antivirus programs automatically flag small executables as viruses, because all modern programs are pretty big, and a 20mb file looks suspicious, like it's a virus with clean, to-the-point programming and nothing more.  I've seen legitimate websites have a disclaimer "Your antivirus may be cautious because this game is so small that it looks like a virus."

[alway]

I think lazy is a bit of an exaggeration - games from big companies are often made by programmers working "crunch time" long-hours for months at a time.
As a management decision, it makes sense to me - almost anyone nowadays has tons of extra storage space and that's especially the case for those "pretty shiny graphics" games that won't run on older machines regardless. My PC is 3 years old and won't run new graphics-intensive games well, but a quick look on C: shows "1.36TB free of 1.81 available". I definitely wouldn't want the programmers on any of the games I play to have spent extra time making them more efficient with storage space when they could be fixing bugs or adding content instead.

This.

Additionally, memory use comes from textures, video, sound, and other asset files. A standard 1024x1024x32 texture is 4MB on its own. Back in ye olden daeys, those were compressed to hell and back, procedurally generated, and otherwise smooshed into a tiny blob of data using the hackiest systems they could come up with. Toss out those bits of silliness to quickly eliminate the bugs/problems/complexity in the code, and you get a much larger file size. And nobody cares because it's 0.03% of your hard drive space, instead of 0.005% of your hard drive space.

[Graknorke]

Please check your fuckhueg hard drive privilege.

[n9103]

Just chiming in to report that Wasteland is only 1.6MB in it's original form.

[Uristides]

I got curious and checked the steam page:

Featuring toggle-able modern updates such as new paragraph voice over, new music tracks and updated portraits. Play in classic mode to get the original experience

If the audio is high quality enough it surely seems more than enough to justify a couple hundred MB, doesn't it?
Why don't you check where the bulk of the files are at and what kind of file they are?

[Girlinhat]

I got curious and checked the steam page:

Featuring toggle-able modern updates such as new paragraph voice over, new music tracks and updated portraits. Play in classic mode to get the original experience

If the audio is high quality enough it surely seems more than enough to justify a couple hundred MB, doesn't it?

So it's the "remastered and re-released" version?  /thread

[Arbinire]

I think lazy is a bit of an exaggeration - games from big companies are often made by programmers working "crunch time" long-hours for months at a time.
As a management decision, it makes sense to me - almost anyone nowadays has tons of extra storage space and that's especially the case for those "pretty shiny graphics" games that won't run on older machines regardless. My PC is 3 years old and won't run new graphics-intensive games well, but a quick look on C: shows "1.36TB free of 1.81 available". I definitely wouldn't want the programmers on any of the games I play to have spent extra time making them more efficient with storage space when they could be fixing bugs or adding content instead.

This.

Additionally, memory use comes from textures, video, sound, and other asset files. A standard 1024x1024x32 texture is 4MB on its own. Back in ye olden daeys, those were compressed to hell and back, procedurally generated, and otherwise smooshed into a tiny blob of data using the hackiest systems they could come up with. Toss out those bits of silliness to quickly eliminate the bugs/problems/complexity in the code, and you get a much larger file size. And nobody cares because it's 0.03% of your hard drive space, instead of 0.005% of your hard drive space.

Doesn't that size though depend also on the type of format the programmer is using?  1024x1024x32 in .png format is only like 30kb

[varsovie]

I think lazy is a bit of an exaggeration - games from big companies are often made by programmers working "crunch time" long-hours for months at a time.
As a management decision, it makes sense to me - almost anyone nowadays has tons of extra storage space and that's especially the case for those "pretty shiny graphics" games that won't run on older machines regardless. My PC is 3 years old and won't run new graphics-intensive games well, but a quick look on C: shows "1.36TB free of 1.81 available". I definitely wouldn't want the programmers on any of the games I play to have spent extra time making them more efficient with storage space when they could be fixing bugs or adding content instead.

This.

Additionally, memory use comes from textures, video, sound, and other asset files. A standard 1024x1024x32 texture is 4MB on its own. Back in ye olden daeys, those were compressed to hell and back, procedurally generated, and otherwise smooshed into a tiny blob of data using the hackiest systems they could come up with. Toss out those bits of silliness to quickly eliminate the bugs/problems/complexity in the code, and you get a much larger file size. And nobody cares because it's 0.03% of your hard drive space, instead of 0.005% of your hard drive space.

Doesn't that size though depend also on the type of format the programmer is using?  1024x1024x32 in .png format is only like 30kb

PNG has a lot of compression type and compression levels. Heck you get 3 pages of option trying to export in .PNG with GIMP. Same for textures, they're always compressed in some way. And the type of image will have an effect on its compression level too, a monochrome square versus "noise" won't take the same size.

I'd like some effort to get smaller releases with "AAA" for two reasons, I have internet quotas  and I'd want them to run on my SSD.

[Bohandas]

I got curious and checked the steam page:

Featuring toggle-able modern updates such as new paragraph voice over, new music tracks and updated portraits. Play in classic mode to get the original experience

If the audio is high quality enough it surely seems more than enough to justify a couple hundred MB, doesn't it?

So it's the "remastered and re-released" version?  /thread

Apparently it must be, though it's more prominently billed as "...the original..."

[Xeron]

The original as in the original game that inspired the Fallout series.