Insane disc space required by AAA games

[masticina]

Yup, art assets can get pretty big.

Now if you download it and it looks like arse then there are problems. If it looks awesome then well it might have been worth it.

Of course we had the issues with uncompressed audio in some games. That was just stupid.. sure it probably sounds better but during a shooter how many will notice right? Right?

I .. well yeah my speed is not that great either. Even though I do life in a country where I can pretty speedy internet I do have a more acceptable level not super downloader level speed and yes that means waiting. A shame really but if the game looks better and sounds better or has very big levels sure.

If you look at the price of HDD space it is really is just a change in time.

 

[Snotnarok]

A lot of others say the same thing

Then these faceless and apparently "a lot of" others are also saying stuff that amounts to the stupidest anti-piracy measure I've heard.

but I didn't say it's a means to prevent, it's a means to discourage.

Either way, it's stupid.

I'm not saying it'd make some rather grab it. Some don't have large bandwith plans either so it can effect them as well.

Why did you repeated what I had already said?

Besides, some people who'd legally purchase the game would also have problems with bandwith plans. Some of them might not be able to even buy a physical copy. As I also said, DD users would be equally affected.

Piracy has shown that it doesn't largely care about volume. The file sharing technologies has been developing in several prominent directions, volume is one of them - being able to download data in bulk is one of the core things they strive for.

Blowing up the volume is simply a retarded measure that has shown to not affect piracy much a decade ago when internet access and storage would largely be way smaller than today. And file sharing has not only been able to fit the extra volume, it welcomed it and it made it even easier to distribute. Showing that, no, volume is not a real obstacle. Again, aside from some people constrained by their ISP. But targeting them is akin to offering a drawing of a fluffy pony on the box - some people really like fluffy ponies and would be made to buy the game if they got a one, instead of pirate it. This would also be a way of trying to prevent piracy - targeting fluffy pony drawing lovers. I'd also call it stupid. It might even be less stupid than inflating the volume as it doesn't affect negatively the legitimate customers. Well, unless you count being deprived of a fluffy pony drawing as negative, of course.

Not affecting piracy doesn't mean anything, always online DRM didn't affect pirates, they'd rip the game apart and get it working offline after a while but Ubisoft kept doing it for many years. Limited installs didn't affect pirates, again still around for a while.
So saying it's not effective doesn't mean it wasn't intended to do as such. I believe I said I read it somewhere, which basically translates to "take these words with many grains of salt" if I didn't, please add excess salt to what I have said.

 

[RhombusHatesYou]

When I were a lad, all we had were cassette tapes. You waited almost as long for some games to load then as you do waiting for them to download now.

You forgot the joys of TYPING OUT CODE FROM MAGAZINES to get games... rechecking the code to see why it didn't work and the inevitable waiting for the next edition for the corrected bits of code they fucked up.

 

[DoPo]

So saying it's not effective doesn't mean it wasn't intended to do as such. I believe I said I read it somewhere, which basically translates to "take these words with many grains of salt" if I didn't, please add excess salt to what I have said.

I don't understand - am I to not explain how it's a poor idea...because it's a poor idea?

 

[Snotnarok]

So saying it's not effective doesn't mean it wasn't intended to do as such. I believe I said I read it somewhere, which basically translates to "take these words with many grains of salt" if I didn't, please add excess salt to what I have said.

I don't understand - am I to not explain how it's a poor idea...because it's a poor idea?

You can say it's a poor idea all ya want but- I didn't create it so don't throw me under the bus haha.

 

[CrystalShadow]

AAA games seem to have totally given up on compression and even just common sense when it comes to file sizes lately. Was it Titanfall that came with gargantuan uncompressed audio files, for every possible language you can play the game in? It's ridiculous. Even if you accept that there's a noticeable performance increase when using uncompressed files[footnote]Which is something I don't actually accept at all, especially in the case of audio files.[/footnote], there's no reason at all you couldn't just download a compressed version of the files and then unpack them during the install. The minor increase in install time would be more than made up for by the huge decrease in download times even on systems with fast connections.

So basically, I don't get it. There must be some reason PC games suddenly got so huge, I doubt it could just be some kind of mistake, but the explanations I've seen don't make sense.

Well, to be fair, lossless audio compression is difficult.

Anyway, I don't reslly get how uncompressed data can improve loading times. Yes, it lowers cpu usage. But when it comes to performance while loading data, the hard disk (or dvd or blu-ray or whatever) transfer speed generally still dominates. And because compressed files are smaller, they should load more quickly, as long as decompressing them is a simple enough task not to bog down the cpu too much, and the system has enough RAM to keep the decompressed version in memory.

As someone who makes games at times, that choice seems an odd one to make if you're worried about loading times.


Anyway, these huge games take forever to download. I have a 12 megabit (roughly 1.5 megabytes/sec) connection and that would take many hours...

Kind of seems weird that they would be using uncompressed data...

 

[Dansen]

What tales of woe can you share regarding bandwith?

My mobile network sucks in my area and I cannot get above 12Mbps despite getting promised more than that.

trade you, the cap at my home is about 360 kbps.

 

[DoPo]

So saying it's not effective doesn't mean it wasn't intended to do as such. I believe I said I read it somewhere, which basically translates to "take these words with many grains of salt" if I didn't, please add excess salt to what I have said.

I don't understand - am I to not explain how it's a poor idea...because it's a poor idea?

You can say it's a poor idea all ya want but- I didn't create it so don't throw me under the bus haha.

Am I? I said the idea was stupid. Unless you came up with it, and you didn't, I don't see why you were getting so defensive about it. Were I to relay to you the that somebody said (for real) that pirates were infringing on the copyright of sculptors (again, for real), and were you to point out that's probably the stupidest thing you've heard today (or, I'd hazard a guess, this week), I don't think how I'd see it as an attack on me.

 

[NPC009]

When I were a lad, all we had were cassette tapes. You waited almost as long for some games to load then as you do waiting for them to download now. Unless you're the OP. Even tapes didn't take that long. Unless you had a C64 which was slow as fuck. It was also the only computer in history where the cassette deck loaded things faster than the disk drive (5.25" floppies!) could. And all this were fields...

Fun fact: some radiostations broadcasted software. You could 'download' it by recordering it.

A lot has changed and yet nothing has.