How Massive is Wolfenstein: The New Order?

[Kinitawowi]

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.

It's always a speed vs memory tradeoff, and the Spectrum illustrated that like no other machine (even within the ROM itself - witness the infamous seven byte square root routine). Obviously certain more plodding games (strategy, text adventures, etc) relied less on speed and more on size, hence Speccy programmers being able to see a joke in this XKCD [http://www.xkcd.com/1275] that I'm pretty sure wasn't intended (short version: "int PI" was tokenised and expressible in two bytes, while the number 3 would have needed five bytes of floating point to store). More action-oriented games couldn't have used those sorts of optimisations, because "int PI" is after all a calculation and every calculation adds more time.

Talking of time, I don't know if you've seen the disassembly of the Spectrum classic Knight Tyme [http://community.dur.ac.uk/philip.anderson/disassemblies/knight-tyme-48k/maps/all.html]; there's two sections (here [http://community.dur.ac.uk/philip.anderson/disassemblies/knight-tyme-48k/asm/43196.html] and here [http://community.dur.ac.uk/philip.anderson/disassemblies/knight-tyme-48k/asm/44061.html]) that illustrate your word encoding idea perfectly.

 

[Kahani]

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

Sure, I'm not arguing that there is necessarily enough stuff that he missed to make it bigger than Wolfenstein, just that it's a pretty poor effort when he misses out several very significant factors in trying to make that point. BBC, Acorn, Spectrum, 3.5" floppies, CD, Windows - there are multiple, hugely significant platforms, storage media and OSes that he completely failed to mention at all, despite apparently thinking it necessary to take into account tiny niche systems that had less than 30 games in total. It may not be enough to catch up to Wolfenstein, but the things he missed out are almost certainly much more significant than the things he included.

 

[MrBaskerville]

Considering how smalle the difference between ps3 and ps4 (Same goes for pc and everything else) is, it seems ridiculous that we went from 6 GB games to 40.

 

[Optimus6128]

I remember an Amstrad CPC collection of almost all games. I think the zipped archive was 100MB.
I think one way to estimate is to search for packages like all SNES ROMs, C64 game collection, etc.
Sometimes these collections, even before 1992 can be bigger, like Amiga/Atari stuff where you have the same roms 5 times from different pirated versions. And they could be few GBs for each of the 16bit machines.
Still, I think if we get all these collections it would hardly reach the 40GB size but maybe it would be 10-20.

p.s. Now I find a 250MB archive but it's also demos, applications and other stuff and maybe many different pirated versions of the same game.
https://archive.org/details/Amstrad_CPC_TOSEC_2012_04_23
p.p.s. Actually this archive would help to estimate size. Even divide by theortical half or more because it's also applications and other stuff https://archive.org/details/tosec
p.p.p.s. And yes, 40GB is too much. And the problem here is gameplay. While Wolfenstein seems fun for a while, I read it's quite short and it's not anymore like in the past with lot's of exploration and interesting gameplay. Too much size for too little gameplay.