How are Games Staying so Small?

Hard drive space requirements I mean. Most games now days (besides MMOs) require between 5-10gbs of space to play. Now looking back at older games the original Freespace, released in 1998, was almost 1gb (with expansion), or Baldur's Gate (1999) at almost 2gb.

However, since then graphics, cutscenes and audio have exponentially improved. So How is all that fitting into a not much bigger package, where as the quality is leagues better?

 

edit: didn't read the OP thoroughly

 

2GB to 10GB is five time increase. 3-8GB's of textures is A LOT.

Plus most newer games I have are about 10-15GB at least. Some are up to 20GB.

 

But even just look at the power requirements between the games. Back then an 8mb integrated graphics card and 128mb of ram were sufficient.

Now you need at least 4gb of ram and a gpu with min. 128bit bus / ~500 shaders.

 

Game devs try to fit the size limit of a single DVD (Wonder why? ) but installing a game with +15gb is not an issue for me.

 

I think a lot of it has to do with texture compression too. I mean look at this demo from 2006. 96 KB (yes KB not MB) in size, yet it has varied textures and a full "game". I am uploading a video to YouTube right now.

It's called .kkreiger by .theprodukkt

You can see the site here: .theprodukkt

but most links seem to be down. You can download it here: Krieger The World's Smallest Filesize Game

Here's some images: http://gamingdownload.blogspot.com/2010/12/kkreiger-greaat-fps-game-only-800kb.html



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There's a similar principle with, say, video encoding. Divx/XviD used to be the go-to compression system back then. Now we have x264 which gives much better image quality for a usually smaller file size.

And I still blame the frigging Viking for getting me into h264 encoding. Sigh.

 

real time render requires less HDD space than pre-rendered. a lot of older games contain tons of CGIs

 

was gonna post .kkrieger too. and it's 96KB.

 

Dang, that's wacky. How on earth do they pack that much into 96 KB? Does the game rely on a bunch of directx libraries or something?

 

Developers aren't using texture compression or data compression anymore these days, due to lead skus being mainly consoles.
As an example games like Rage (althought with tweaks) offer a so-so texture work.
There are many other games that are frickin' big in size but they are poorly executed in textures, story, videos etc etc.
Mainly the thing is that they can store the game on two dual layer discs (Xbox) or wasting the space of a blueray (ps3).
If you look into the data size of a multi platform ps3 game everything turns clear.
There are games however that still use pc potentials such serious sam 3, which still offer a decent textures (at least on par with other big titles), big environments with plenty of details while keeping the size under 6gb.
It's a matter of design choices for porting sake, and a lazy way to do things. Nowadays adsl is pretty much the standard above 4mbit everywhere (almost) so they aren't even bothering about optimizing the whole thing.
Also localizations takes space (alot of games are localized for 5-8 languages, both text and speech) while 10 years ago the best you get was just subtitles.
Building two different versions for English users and "world" users would be time consuming and will introduce more costs into production since it will mean two distribuitions plans along with some filters etc etc.

 

Rage does use texture compression... If it didn't, textures in Rage would take up more than a TB of space, according to John Carmack.

And for Skyrim, one of the features was a new form of texture compression that kept the game down to 5-6GB, according to Bethesda.

 

Well, if you look, the sounds are all really low quality and the textures seem really small (lots of tiling). There's not a lot in the way of assets.

 

But still, 96KB. I mean I have small wordpad documents that take up more space than that. It actually has varied textures, 3D detail, and a game level, albeit basic and small. But very impressive. Heck, Angry Birds is a bunch of 2D sprites with only a few sound samples and it's several MB in size.

 

The simple answer is...

The current consoles are holding game development back.

Thus efficiency tech like texture compression is getting a lot of attention as the xbox can only use a normal DVD and the GPU/CPU can only do so much.

 

It's no doubt impressive. I was just answering the question of how it's done, which is with minimal assets. Textures and sounds and art make up a large part of most game packages.

 

There is absolutely NO way they could have made a first person shooter, including the decent 3D engine, interface, game logic, PLUS all the assets (textures, animated 3D models, level, sounds) in 96KB. The textures alone would top that.
And yet they did.

How?

All of the game's assets are created procedurally during pre-loading. That is, all of the textures, animated 3D models, level, and sounds are created using some math and program logic. Only the description on how to recreate them is hard-coded in to the 96KB. Of course, the guys who made this are absolute gods at coding and efficiency to fit all of this in only 96KB.

Games nowadays are terribly inefficient.

 

Well I'm sure people could learn a thing or two from this. Instead they take several hundred 25MB textures and just throw them in a big file. Little optimization whatsoever.

 

That's only true to a certain extent.The PC was by far the slowest platform to make the move from CD to DVD for selling retail software especially video games. They lagged behind the consoles for years and used multiple CDs instead. The next gen of consoles may or may not use Blu-Ray but with trend toward downloads it doesn't seem devs will be inclined to incorporate lots of additional data like uncompressed HD audio and video.

As for console processors holding back game development, yes that's true but you also have to consider that graphics APIs like D3D are vastly inefficient.

Wow,to really answer this in detail you would have to trace the development of video games over the last twenty years and examine current trends.

Suffice it to say that compression techniques have made a huge difference. Not only do you have texture compression but also compression of other things like audio, save files and map data. Modern CPUs can decompress files rapidly while also handling things like AI and physics.

Also devs have moved away from video based cutscenes to realtime rendered cutscenes and in-game scenes. Those video files could take alot of storage space but also they could cost more money to produce them.

 

The reason for the jump to DVD in consoles is because, well, that's what they used as their medium of choice when the Xbox came out. They don't install games (well didn't at the time) locally, it mainly runs/ran off the DVD. PC's on the other hand tend to cater to the least common denominator, at least used to, and usually installed the game directly to the hard drive, so whether you had six CD's or one DVD, you only had to do it at install, then done. Now you almost HAVE to have a high speed internet connection with most games going digital distribution.

 

Spoiled by massive storage media and broadband downloads.

 

Good point, but you also had some console games on multiple discs where you switch to the next one partway through the game.

As for catering to the lowest common denominator, absolutely right. You have to have a killer app for poeple run out and buy the latest tech and then you'll see widespread support. Either that or a huge company like MS, Apple or Sony to say f*** it, we're going to move this technology along and the consumer will learn to like it.

 

Games are growing in size and getting more complex compression.

A lot of games are also dropping CG video in place of in-engine video, and then using that space for more content

Factoring all that in, I'd say the growth rate is actually pretty crazy. Game size has jumped by a factor of 10 over a period of 10 years. Meaning, storage space requirements have increased by 2^3.3 over 10 years. That's a doubling every 3 years.

Meanwhile, developers are getting better compression methods, and are actively trying to minimize space requirements.

 

Consoles did not begin as a major limitation. In their last incarnation they were ahead of the curve in optical and processing and behind by a small margin in GPU. None of this really was an issue back then. The problem is the refresh cycle.

PCs adopt as needed and their tech changes as the user's upgrade relatively cheaply. (If a game released on bluray and you don't have Blu-ray now, you add it for $60.)

Compression would have been developed either way in the name of efficiency... but the FOCUS has been compression due to the inability to expand on the hardware side.

PC games have suffered as even incredibly imaginative games like Skyrim are only a shadow of what they could be.

Game content is extremely affected as companies strive to squeeze today's game world on antiquated storage mediums.

 

Lots of interesting points have been brought up so far, but essentially my question has been answered. I don't really have anything to contribute because I don't have much knowledge of coding, optimizing or compression.

However, I do agree with Kernal that more recent games are definitely limited by consoles.