bloated games

Skerries

are devs becoming lazy these days due to hard drive sizes?
in the 8 bit and 16 bit days they would try and get every inch of space to get a game down but now we are looking at game installs of 7-8 gbs and in some cases over 20 gbs!!?

Zeouterlimits

...
I'm honestly a bit baffled by your perspective.

Surely the data size is practically irrelevant and it's the game content that matters. Game development (especially HD titles) has become so expensive and labour intensive that shrinking big detailed textures down can sometimes not be a priority.

Sure, some devs compress more & better than others but honestly I'd look on this as a non-issue. There are other ways in which you can call some devs lazy, this wouldn't be one I'd think of. Memory, especially as storage, is cheap in this age.

gizmo

Skerries wrote: »

are devs becoming lazy these days due to hard drive sizes?
in the 8 bit and 16 bit days they would try and get every inch of space to get a game down but now we are looking at game installs of 7-8 gbs and in some cases over 20 gbs!!?

No, as art assets become more complex they require significantly more hard drive space. The only thing that can be done about this is using compression which at best, requires more CPU power to decompress them at run time and at worse, can degrade the quality of the visuals themselves.

Overheal

They will if they have to but no not so much. Devs still compress their installation files; Starcraft2 fits on a DVD with about a max size of 8+gb when the game itself takes over 12gb.

What devs spend more time on is Performance Optimization which as Gizmo alludes to involves whatever you can do to improve the actual program performance, not its footprint on the storage drive. Using uncompressed files makes for infinitely faster loading of assets.

As for that optimization, what they do optimize is the footprint on working memory - RAM - if they can, or how many clocks it takes to perform program (and especially Engine) actions. Taking the shortest amount of Programming syntax to load an object (such as a Tank in a wargame) would often be made faster if a lot of that is already pre-created, for example in a lua script file or more accurately a model file. Instead of having the program have to generate the model from a compressed game file that includes only the tank's most basic attributes. This saves the computer from having to spend clocks generating new vertices and texels for the new tank, based on the parameters. Also, the more you generate on the fly, the more its going to deviate between hardware. Even in the classroom we saw how in one lecture hall where the lecturer's PC used an integrated chipset, our graphics professors OpenGL program rendered differently then in another building where the lab computers were using discrete GPUs. The more assets that you pre-make, the more uniformity there is between hardware; fairly important in the industry - but don't think Intel and Nvidia havent at one time or another gotten in bed with game developers to get certain aspects of a game to render better on their own chips. I think original call of duty for example used procedurally generated fog that only nvidia GPUs could really render.

You also have to figure in Graphics Options. Especially on a PC, you have different texture sets for the Whole Game for Low, Medium, High, and Ultra texture resolutons. All of these take up progressively more working memory so its up to you the user to decide which one the machine can handle. But, the dev provides you with all of the texture assets so you can make that determination. As of yet I havent seen any company allow specific selection of which high res assets you want to be installed vs. low res. And I can understand why: its numbing minutae.

Kiith

I know what you mean. It takes me 4 times as long to pirate games these days. Those inconsiderate pricks :P