How Massive is Wolfenstein: The New Order?

[Albino Boo]

I have had time to think now and excise some google fu and come up with adjustments.

The Acorn electron/bbc b series had around 10000 games. The zx spectrum had 11k, the amstrad cpc had 1500 and the msx platform had around 1000. The call those extra 22k 8 bit games another 2 gig of data.

The 16 bit era with the amiga and atari st. Those machines came with 1.44 mb floppies allowing much bigger games, I remember heart of china being on 6 1.44mb disks. Lets the average size for both systems was 1 meg. The Amiga had 3658 and the Atari had 1500 so thats 4.5 gb. That however reduces the non commodore c64 figure to about 120 meg.

Adding that lot up gives a figure of about 6.6 gb of data to add to the commodore's c64 2gb. So as a rough estimate the early home computing comes in at 8.6gb

 

[Albino Boo]

The figure for from home computer games both in terms of the DoS era and in terms of the MASSIVE home computer scene in Europe. I think i safe assumption to make as a baseline of those up to 1992 DoS games is that they probably average out filling a single floppy of the time, 360KB.

Going to have to disagree with you there. The 3.5 inch floppy became standard by about 1988 giving a 1.44 mb max size per disk. Even then, some games like Kings quest IV was 2 meg in size even in 1988. By the time Kings quest v came out in 1990 you are talking 6mb for the game. Non shooter games by the early 90s were getting big, most adventure games came on multiple 3.5 inch floppies. The size of those games pushed pcs in the direction of cdroms.

 

[Albino Boo]

The figure for from home computer games both in terms of the DoS era and in terms of the MASSIVE home computer scene in Europe. I think i safe assumption to make as a baseline of those up to 1992 DoS games is that they probably average out filling a single floppy of the time, 360KB.

Going to have to disagree with you there. The 3.5 inch floppy became standard by about 1988 giving a 1.44 mb max size per disk. Even then, some games like Kings quest IV was 2 meg in size even in 1988. By the time Kings quest v came out in 1990 you are talking 6mb for the game. Non shooter games by the early 90s were getting big, most adventure games came on multiple 3.5 inch floppies. The size of those games pushed pcs in the direction of cdroms.

Well yes, that would be the next step, but what i was alluding to is that 200k probably isn't even a conservative estimate for the bottom end. The ubiquity of games utilizing the 3.5" 1.44mb format in 1992 would be debatable. I know by 1989 we had an Acorn Archimedes (a pretty decent home computer in it's day) in our house and that used only 1.44MB floppy disks but actual file sizes? No idea. Games as large as 6MB could merely be outliers. If we could take a sample of games that came out in 1991 we might be better placed to get get a better DoS and home computing average.

My main concern is with arcade technology though. The relative power and advancement of arcade machines by 1991 compared to home computers showed a pretty big gap. There is also the issues of interactive video tech like "Dragon's Lair". These tended to have pretty hefty file sizes. The top 10 biggest games by file size in 1991/ early 1992 will probably make up most of the total amount. Wolfenstein 3D gets dangerously close in time scale to FMV games like Night Trap. The main problem with 1992 is that it stands at such a convergence of so many different game storage technologies that could lead to so many variables in file size.

Put it like this the first game I bought was the greedy dwarf in 1984. I had boxes full of 3.5 inch floppies with games from the 80s, by 1990 they had stopped releasing games on 5.25 inch. I know the files sizes because I was running games of a 20mb mfm hard drive on a second hand IBM AT which I bought in 1988. I was always juggling what was on the hard drive.

 

[BeerTent]

I'm reading this going insane thinking "POWERS OF TWO, FOOL!"
A Byte is 4 Bits.
A Kilobyte is 1024 Bytes.
A Megabyte is 1024 Kilobytes
A Gigabyte is 1024 Megabytes

A Megabyte is 1048576 Bytes
A Gigabyte is 1073741824 Bytes.

Mind you, this does nothing but support you, so by aggressively rounding things, you've made it more difficult on yourself to prove your theory. That being said, I didn't think the claim of all games before Wolf3D being smaller than Wolfenstien-NO was asinine or shocking. I really didn't think that all games, with their miniscule sizes would even get close to 3GB. So you got me there. With your math, all 4 generations would add up to...

3291408000 Bytes
3214265.625 Kilobytes
3138.931 Megabytes
3.065 Gigabytes

Now, I'm just curious what kind of value we'd have to add for Arcade games? Excluding pinball, mind you. You'd be lucky to break a KB on a pinball machine. Do we add remakes from arcages? A lot of them were games already established on home consoles, like Mortal Kombat.

 

[Objectable]

The question is, how massiver were THOSE games in their time. A while back, 200 megs was top shit.

 

[Andrew_C]

Hmm you seriously underestimate the size of both DOS and Amiga floppies, and you forget the Sinclair ZX Spectrum (Timex in the US). That had a massive library in the thousands of games, although there was a lot of overlap with the Commodore 64/128 and BBC Micro.

EDIT: And massive overlap between the Amiga and BBC Micro libraries as well

The question is, how massiver were THOSE games in their time. A while back, 200 megs was top shit.

And not long before that 20 MB, and before that 512kB. But the original Wolfenstein came on 1 Shareware 1.2 MB floppy and 1 or 2 floppies for the additional levels you paid for, about 3MB in total. Average for the time. Steam says it's 6 MB, but half of that is DOSBox.

 

[MartyGoldberg]

1) PONG was not the first commercial video game, not sure where that came from. If we're talking about arcade games then 1971's Computer Space was the first. If we're talking about consoles, the Magnavox Odyssey also predates the PONG arcade game (the idea of PONG came from the Odyssey's Tennis game).

2) I'm also not sure where you got the idea the arcade games were more visible and culturally relevant. By the boon of the very late 70s certainly, but certainly not through most of the 70s. Home PONG consoles actually dominated in those aspects during the mid through late 70s. As Jeff Bell (an employee in Atari's coin-op division starting in 1973) stated: "In 1972-74, we had to explain to people what a video game was. By 1976 that had changed to explaining what a ?coin-op? video game was." What you're thinking of as coin domination didn't actually occur until '78-'79.

3) "By the late 70's there was a Space Invaders or an Asteroids tucked in the corner of just about every bar and Pizza joint in America." Certainly true of Space Invaders but not Asteroids. Asteroids wasn't released until November '79. It didn't hit critical mass until into 1980.

4) The first and second generation game size doesn't make a lot of sense. The first generation (Odyssey, the PONG consoles, other dedicated consoles) aren't microprocessor driven and have no game code. There is no "game size" involved. All the games are via dedicated circuitry.

5) Activision didn't "invent" bank switching for Atari 2600 games and by '81 the switch was being made to 8K ROMs at Atari. Asteroids, Raiders of the Lost Ark, ET, Realsports Baseball, Realsports Football, Star Raiders and Swordquest Earthworld are all examples of 8K games. Pac-Man (developed during '81) was one of the last 4K games by them. Likewise the first 16K games were being done by Atari the following year (Dig Dug was in 1983 followed by Crystal Castles in '84 which was the same year Activision's 16K Pitfall II was done).

 

[IndieForever]

I suspect the growth in the size of the average install for a game is simply due to the availability of affordable storage technology at any given time. Floppy drives used to be hideously expensive (I'm thinking of my Research Machines RML 380z as I type this) but as businesses needed more and more affordable storage, the prices came down to the point that they were affordable for the average consumer or hobbyist. Fast tape, CD-ROM, all followed suit.

Now, what followed was a complete paradigm change in how games were written precisely because of that storage being available.

The first machine I wrote games for commercially was the ZX Spectrum as mentioned many times above. Fitting a whole game into 16k or 48k is challenging, to say the least, so we would optimise for efficiency, much as the people on the Amiga/PC demo scene did in the late '90s. Games were written in assembly language, clever compression techniques were used but this came at the cost of performance. Compress your data/text/audio and somewhere along the line you have to decompress it which carries a performance overhead. It was always a balance between the two, but it generally fell into the 'smallest possible piece of code' camp more often than not.

We did horrible things like self-modifying code just to save a byte or two here and there, and there was no longer any need with the advent of massive, cheap storage.

When we had the luxury of not having to compress our data, we didn't do that either - extra performance.

That is, I suspect, why the Titanfall installation has uncompressed audio. It probably saves a frame or two by being in that format on machines with onboard sound. Maybe it doesn't, but if you don't *need* to compress it, there's no point imho.

What might be interesting is that with the now mature market for digital-only releases, some of this slightly wasteful use of space might have to start being reconsidered. We shall see!

 

[Amir Kondori]

I consistently download games from Steam at over 6MB/s, so this stuff doesn't bother me too much. I have a 2TB RAID 1 volume that is pretty much just for my Steam library, so space isn't too much of a concern either.

Of course I have 50Mbps downstream with no caps, which I know a lot of people just don't have access to.

 

[008Zulu_v1legacy]

How much of Wolfenstein New Order is actually in the textures? Titanfall was also massive but a lot of it was in (for whatever reason) uncompressed audio.

Titan used uncompressed audio because it was less intensive on hardware resources. A consideration they had to take in to account for the X360.

 

[Kahani]

I was hoping for somebody to mention the Speccy... except that it doesn't really amount to a hill of beans. The World Of Spectrum archive racks up about 11,000 games; but they're titchy. The dominant Spectrum model was the 48K; taking that as the size of a RAM dump - and thus an average game - you still haven't got a CD's worth (515Mb). Using the 128K model as the average (to allow for multiloaders and such) only gets you to 1375Mb.

You claim that doesn't amount to a "hill of beans", whatever one of those amounts to, but compare that with the numbers Shamus gives - under 2GB for C64, and under 500MB for "everything else" in the same period. But as you point out here, you easily get somewhere from 0.5-1.5GB from just one of the systems he missed out. Of course it's still not going to be as big as Wolfenstein, but even taking the lower end of that estimate it would still be the second biggest single contribution to the total. Given that the whole point of the article is to give an estimate of the total size of games, failing to even mention one of the biggest and best known contributors is a pretty massive failing.

Throw in the failure to take 3.5" floppies (from the mid-80s) and CDs (from around 1990) into account as well, plus other systems like the BBC Micro and Archimides (ever heard of ARM? That would be Acorn RISC Machine.) and the whole article is just a joke. What's the point in trying to estimate the size of games if you're going to completely ignore most of the factors involved?

How much of Wolfenstein New Order is actually in the textures? Titanfall was also massive but a lot of it was in (for whatever reason) uncompressed audio.

Titan used uncompressed audio because it was less intensive on hardware resources. A consideration they had to take in to account for the X360.

It's a consideration you need to take into account for everything. Processing power is almost always the biggest limiting factor for games, regardless of what system they're for. Decompressing files takes some of that power that could be used elsewhere. Since drive space is incredibly cheap in comparison, using uncompressed textures and audio can often be a very sensible choice. This is why I really don't understand why people keep complaining about large games. They're not large because the developers are no good at optimising things, but rather for the exact opposite reason - you get better performance by having everything uncompressed rather than forcing the computer to decompress it every time it needs something.

 

[Kinitawowi]

You claim that doesn't amount to a "hill of beans", whatever one of those amounts to, but compare that with the numbers Shamus gives - under 2GB for C64, and under 500MB for "everything else" in the same period. But as you point out here, you easily get somewhere from 0.5-1.5GB from just one of the systems he missed out. Of course it's still not going to be as big as Wolfenstein, but even taking the lower end of that estimate it would still be the second biggest single contribution to the total. Given that the whole point of the article is to give an estimate of the total size of games, failing to even mention one of the biggest and best known contributors is a pretty massive failing.

Throw in the failure to take 3.5" floppies (from the mid-80s) and CDs (from around 1990) into account as well, plus other systems like the BBC Micro and Archimides (ever heard of ARM? That would be Acorn RISC Machine.) and the whole article is just a joke. What's the point in trying to estimate the size of games if you're going to completely ignore most of the factors involved?

Ignoring the existence of the ZX Spectrum is a chronic failing that this site has suffered from for a very long time (yes, it drives me nuts too), and it all comes down to Americanitis - missing a whole system's worth is easy when that system barely made a dent in what we are constantly reminded is this site's target demographic. The C64 dwarfed the ZX Spectrum (and the Timex variants) in America by several orders of magnitude.

The reason it's a hill of beans is because as the article noted, all these numbers could be out by a factor of ten and we still wouldn't be close to Wolfenstein TNO's install. 1.5Gb is barely 4% of the 36Gb the article's numbers were short by.

As for the BBC machines... a little bit of searching around has told me it's very difficult to get actual numbers. Wikipedia cites an estimate of 1400 games for the Electron, the gamer-targeted variant of the BBC Micro (which were predominantly for schools); using top-end estimates for the capacity of a 5.25" disk (640Kb on a double-density double-sided 80 track disk) and allowing two disks per game, resulting in massive games considering that the system only had 32K of RAM, still only gets you about 1750Mb. I can't get figures for the number of Amstrad games, but I'll take a wildly optimistic guess that it was about three quarters of the number released for the Spectrum; again, highest end estimates - let's call it 360K for each of the 8000 games, the total capacity of both sides of a 3" CPC664/6128 disc - and again, I can't think of a game off the top of my head that used even close to that capacity - and we've got less than 3Gb.

Yes, tiny numbers add up, but the original point remains; compared to entire system libraries, Wolfenstein TNO is probably still bigger.

 

[DeadProxy]

Dont forget that 7-8 gig patch they released not long after the game came out. I have no idea what it was for, as I had already beaten the game and was working on the second timeline when the mandatory update became known to me and after all that, only experienced 1 game freeze pre-update on the Xbone version. I had hoped that the patch would make getting out of water look better, but it's janky as all hell. But that's really my only problem with the game.

 

[DoubleAgent74]

I was under the impression that most of the 40GB that make up The New Order was padding deliberately added by Bethesda to annoy pirates.

 

[4Aces]

It is not about the overall size, but if that size is warranted. Rage for example was not that great for the large texture sizes, but since I could not find a tool to decompress them I could not determine if they were badly optimized or just badly created. This game at 40GB just sounds *horribly* optimized. More likely the devs were trying to wow everyone with their ridiculous numbers, hoping that no one would ever get under the hood and find out what is driving it.

Now I am really interested in borrowing a copy just to see the textures, if we have access to tools that is.

EDIT

If it is padding, then Beth is open to internet users billing them for having to go over their internet cap to download more than they needed - as in class-action lawsuits (one per country). It would also be one of the first things that pirates strip out (once again - if tools exist).

 

[IndieForever]

It is not about the overall size, but if that size is warranted.

Totally agree with this. I actually like where this thread is going - it's moved from an (amusing but trivial) discussion about at what point in the games development timeline the total sum of historic code was less than the largest available single game into something very relevant; how large can download/install sizes keep inflating given, a) the predominance of the digital purchase and, b) the fact that, as several commentators have pointed out, even in Europe/USA most of us are on sub-par connections compared to what is actually possible.

I think there is some confusion about 'optimisation' though. When I think of that term, I think of the most efficient piece of code to perform a given task in clock cycles of the processor. Even when you are doing something simple like sorting a set of data into alphabetical or numerical order there are many different ways this can be accomplished. Some do this more efficiently in terms of speed (my definition of optimisation these days) and some do it more efficiently in terms of how many bytes those instructions takes up in memory (my old definition of optimisation back in the '80s and '90s!).

I think it is a bit disingenous to compare 'install size' to optimisation as the actual code that runs the game is a very small percentage of the total data on any install these days. I suppose if you are talking about something like using a 2048x2048 texture when a 256x256 would do then, yes, I'd agree to a certain extent but I still maintain there is no point in compressing data anymore, apart from at the download stage.

Back in the '80s I wrote a lot of those text-only adventure games for the Spectrum. We used quite a clever little system that scanned through all the text the writer had created looking for repeating patterns or common words: the, ing, you, look, walk, etc., etc. We then replaced those multi-character words or partial words with a one-character replacement so that when the game was reading through the text data and found a non-alphabetical code, it looked it up in an array and replaced that code with the letters. Clever use of this system could get more text into 48k than should actually have been possible, but damn, it was slow come time to throw it up onto the screen:

Because we didn't know how long a given line of text was going to be at any one time due to these characters, and the fact that we had a fixed width screen, we had to generate the line in memory and then figure out if the last word would wrap onto the next line. If it did, we saved it, backtracked, deleted that word and then added it into the buffer for the next line and so on. This is no big deal on your 2.5Ghz PC. It is a massive deal on a 2.5Mhz Spectrum!

I know that was a bit rambling, but I thought the more technically-minded (and perhaps older!) readers would appreciate an explanation of why 'TEH OPTIMIZINGS!' means different things, at different times to different people, and not necessarily why installs seem bloated sometimes.

Why go through all that hassle these days to display some words? Well, we don't now. We leave it 'unoptimised' in terms of space allocation, but very optimised in terms of speed.

As game worlds get larger, as graphics data becomes more complex, as voice and a huge variety of music, effects and soundtracks become de-rigeur for even small indie projects, it is inevitable that there is only one way installation sizes are going to go and it most certainly not downwards as I see it.

I wonder if there is a Moore's Law equivalent for this or if there is a critical point at which it all falls apart due to lack of infrastructure for all but the lucky few? If I hadn't had this half bottle of Merlot, I feel quite sure I would already have worked out the equation

 

[direkiller]

After I turned this in, I re-read it and felt that the size I came up with for DOS games was just way too small. On the other hand, the number was a really wild guess and I don't know how to come up with a more solid number. I didn't want to submit a re-write with one arbitrary number replacing another simply because the new number seemed "better" in some ill-defined gut-sense of the word. What I really needed was a better way to extrapolate an answer, and I didn't have one. I'm content to leave the DOS stuff as a weak spot in the article and see if readers have any better answers. Even if I was off by a factor of ten, the main thrust of the article stands: Wolfenstein: The New Order is BIG.

Looking forward to what other numbers people come up with, if anyone wants to take a crack at it.

From a technical standpoint, I find it interesting that you account for 5.25" floppies, then jump right to CD-ROM, forgetting completely about the 3.5" [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floppy_disk#3.C2.BD-inch_floppy_disk] disks. Most of the DOS/PC games I ever knew came on the 1.44mb disks, up until CDs replaced them.

I think because he realised how futile it is to add up the space usage of all the old games after he made his point with consoles.
even if they do add up to a lot I don't think it's 24,000 floppys worth of different games for DOS out there.