What happened to optimization?

Actually bigger uncompressed files are a form of optimization in itself. Devs are choosing process optimization over storage.

Didn't The Witness have half its weight as uncompressed audio?

This.
Storage and bandwidth is way cheaper than processing power.

If only today's devs were competent enough to optimize their code for max performance per cycle rather than going, "Performance? More memory will fix it."

What if a game takes up a lot of space and runs like shit?

Except they usually fail at both.
Have you seen how bad ugly modern games run ?

Uncompressed audio. You would think they must have heard about FLAC at least, but nope. Gotta fill all those Blu-Ray discs.

On many DVDs will the PC version come? Because PC Bluray isn't a thing.
Nope, I'm not going to download 130 GB. Good copy protection. :^)

Truly the best copy protection is the one that doesnt even make you want to touch the game.

More than just file sizes. Games run worse these days as well. I can only assume its because of graphics card manufacturers getting the specs inflated so you have to upgrade, despite the game looking OK at best.

I'm in Germany with shitty Internet and I usually order physical PC games from Amazon UK:
But if installing the game even from DVD is already a chore, I might skip it.

This all started back in 2001 when every rapper out there had PS2s and so all the normalfag little kids wanted PS2 as well and such consoles were forced to become popular through that.
1. Consoles (or more specifically the forced popularity of them) meant that games needed to adhere to the console specifications.
2. Computers still became more powerful yet consoles are locked into the same hardware for about 10 years.
3. Hardware stopped growing as much as it used to since consoles were forced to become more popular (and thus games didn't need such strong hardware as could be designed). I'd say the first example of these issues colliding was Crysis. People had stopped buying hardware at the same rate as they usually did, but the developers had not realized this and created a graphically intensive game with optimization enough to let lower end computers play it.
4. With computers now being far stronger than consoles publishers don't want to spend money on optimization that they deem that nobody would care about. This was enhanced by the fact that computers have hard drives with several hundred gigabytes at the time so you didn't even need to compress your games anymore.
5. In this generation where the consoles have finally leaped up to the level of ~2005-2010ish computers, hardware not having grown as dramatically and optimization now being needed for games while the publisher has totally gotten used to skimp out on optimization we now have a melting pot of shitty optimization that is very noticeable because consoles have almost caught up with computer hardware.

Or in short: Its the fault of consoles and greedy publishers. You can get angry all you want and try to correct me (hell I'm sure its not even 100% correct), but this is roughly what has happened.

Basically even toasters are overpowered for most games so why bother optimizing? The only games that bother either have physics systems that force them to or it's an extremely rare case of a dev that cares.

Sometimes I wonder if it was a half-assed attempt at an alternate anti-piracy measure. If something is 130 GB like in theres no way people would be downloading without a 100 mbit/s connection minimum.

This started much earlier in Europe with PSX already. It's all Sony's fault.

You have to download it too, when buying digital. And scene rips are usually much smaller.

Haha holy God no it isn't, bigger filesize = more shit to parse through and nowhere does a bigger filesize translate to neater or more efficient code. New games are notorious for running like hot dogshit because nowadays bruteforcing performance with sheer graphical/processing power is more important than ensuring it runs on anything less than a mid-range GPU. Probably a deliberate squeeze to keep pumping out new hardware like Nvidia pulling that horseshit with one game where they paid the devs to put a fuckton of unnecessary tesselated water under the map so AMD cards would run the game like dick.

You guys have to see Traveller Tales last lego games filesize and that's embracing too.

That game was Crysis 2.

Lots of pirates have seed boxes or high speed broadband.

In the end Pirates provide both a better service and product. For free too.

True. I can pirate a game and put it on a flash drive and keep it around forever without worrying about DRM, having an account, Steam client or online verification.

This.
MGS5 runs on a fucking 760.
But wanna run latest bamham, that looks exactly like previous ones? Buy 1080 goy.

Lets see what the requirements of the original COD4 are shall we?

So that's a 122GB increase in space for a console and I can bet that it won't support LAN play.

Consoles didn't really start becoming the blame until the PS3 honestly. Where consoles became a nightmare to even develop for let alone optimize. And once specs for both consoles and PC's went up the companies never bothered to keep up their optimization practices.
Originally consoles offered something PC's never could. Specialized software that required little to no maintenance or headache to work with also built in gimmicks that mostly would be a pain on pc like local multiplayer. An almost seal of approval for a game to at least run decently.
Now when PC started catching up most companies never bothered to optimize for a system comparatively so complicated…also laziness, force of habit, and popularity like you said. But then consoles instead of sticking to its strengths like offering unique forms of play with little hassle and guarantee of optimization across the board with almost 0 trouble shooting. Tried to emulate PCs…terribly. Becoming glorified locked shitboxes that are objectively worse in almost every way. Only company to maintain the prior philosophy was Nintendo but I feel it's only a matter of time as it is slowly becoming like the other shitty locked pc boxes.
We wouldn't have this problem if the console developers didn't want to compete with PCs for some stupid reason.

We got faster hardware. Optimization is hard so why do it when what you get is good enough to market to casuals?

Because muh piracy.

I'd believe you, if these modern 50gig games didn't run like garbage.

That's a fucking retarded thing to say. Consoles have been the bane of games for fucking ages before. See examples like Deus Ex: Invisible War. Take a hike.

My theory is that since both the Xbone and PS4 use Blu-Ray, devs no longer have a reason to use file compression.

Before, the 360 used HD-DVDs, which had a smaller capacity than Blu-Ray. Therefor, you had to either make a smaller game or use file compression to fit the game on one disk (or in the case of LA Noire and GTA5, have multiple disks but install most of the game onto the console's hard drive). Now that both main consoles use Blu-Ray, Blu-Ray technology has gotten better, and a 1 TB internal HDD is fifty dollars on Amazon amazon.com/Blue-Cache-Desktop-Drive-WD10EZEX/dp/B0088PUEPK/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1475688021&sr=8-1&keywords=1 terabyte hard drive, why bother wasting precious dev time making the game smaller when you can shit out useless content no one will care about?

captcha: lagcrt

oh all those poor franchises made on consoles before

I can agree however when a PC franchise is being consolized in order to gather a bigger audience, that shit is stupid

I don't think rappers had anything to do with it, consoles were already popular with normalfags because they're (used to be) simple to use.

Then you never saw anything related to popular culture. Did you think the PS2 got big because it was a good piece of hardware? It was the worst piece of hardware for its generation for gods sake. At this point in time you should have learned that marketing/visibility is everything and quality doesn't matter.

publisher greed takes more of the blame than a piece of electronic hardware

it's perfectly possible to have a PC focused game with a good console port. Command and conquer for PS1 is a good example. It's supports mouse controls, but the regular controller interface is also good, supports system link multiplayer.(only need one copy since there's 2 discs, just like the PC) It's a 16MB RAM game running on 2MB so graphics and speed are bit downgraded, but interestingly the fog of war effect is better than the PC version. Regular sounds are compressed but music takes advantage of CD quality. Game is 100% the same gameplay wise.

A successful quality game is always ported to every platform possible, see DooM.

Your post has nothing to do with the post that you were replying to. Consoleization was a word that was used prominently around 2000s to describe the problems of games suffering from being multiplatform. Your example is not relevant to this discussion. See Unreal 2: The Awakening.

wew rood
Nah fam that's just a company being an idiot and not understanding the system they are dealing with.

Consoles have their own advantages and weaknesses. Seperate from the PC. At least at first. Once the ps3 came around it became clear they wanted to compete with PC for some reason. Before it was merely to capitalize on a consoles strength. And the original Xbox while a precursor to the problem only expanded the functionality and interactivity of consoles usefulness. Like Xbox letting you import custom tracks to videogames which was a GODSEND for some games. Or the Dreamcast giving the glory that is the internet let them have local net and lAN play easier and more convenient.

It was best when it was in its own little bubble of development. Once the too many wires began to cross companies began taking the lazy/money making way out which only hurt both PC and Consoles in the long run. Now we have companies consolizing PC and PC'ing Consoles. Which is just dumb.

Stop being an asshurt faggot. It was a case of sony being a shit and having to redo its console once before it nailed it with the slim. Being able to make a game function in lots of environments is a mark of a good and competent company.

PC and Consoles have different strengths and corperations became less willing to properly port shit or learn when NOT to port something.

Oh, I know, but some rappers saying they have PS2s when they aren't muh diking is only a fraction of the problem.

For all the shit Gaben does, at least once he was right.

You have made it very clear you don't want to talk about why games lack optimisation and that you're butthurt due to the reasons why the lack of optimisation exists. Especially after projecting your own anger unto others. Bye.

Well that is partially due to the fact that Fox Engine has dank as fuck optimisation, which is why fags are still butthurt over pachinko machines. When I played Ground Zeroes I was actually surprised that my computer handled it just fine even on high settings, from the graphics I expected it to go at 5 FPS.

It's a good thing he completely failed to deliver on that statement then

Then you don't understand anything about how normalfags and popularity works.

Are you implying steam isn't anti-piracy itself? How thick was your overweight lord's cum?

A retailer is anti-piracy? I'm shocked! Someone get CNN on the line we've got the scoop of the century! Yes Steam is anti-piracy you fucking sperg.

...

You're retarded.

W-what?
Why are you so mean user. I just wanted a discussion. I have no personal investment since I had discovered the glory that is PC gaming and the problems of Consoles long ago. I just wanted to test my personal ill informed opinions against someone more informed about PC's than me.
I just see PC's and Consoles as different and not exactly worthy of comparison…at least it shouldn't be but the trends happening in the gaming scenes have sullied this prospect. And consoles just turned into shitty PC's. And PC's slowly turning into glorified Consoles.

There's nothing wrong with seeing the merit in both.

Are you quoting the right person, numbnuts? I know it's anti-piracy.

That isn't what I said, you nigger.

Its literally what you typed.

Did you notice the >?

I've noticed a lot of retards and mentally ill hyperactive faggots in these boards lately. Did something happen in the pharmacy industry or did leddit/halfcuck go down?

Considering I had implied no such thing and there was no other person saying it had no marketing you clearly made a mistake in putting that there. The fact that you were retarded enough to write that would also mean that you think Xbox and Gamecube had no marketing for the same reason, making you even more retarded. Nobody mentioned marketing previously because any retard can assume that all 3 companies marketed their games while only 1 had pop culture presence through celebrities.

Thus only you could be saying/implying that the PS2 had no marketing. Because you are a retard.

Fixed.

The latter. Hiroyuki's having a hard time keeping 4chan afloat, so now there's /vip/ board for those who bought the 4chan Pass. We're currently in the middle of another exodus.

Hang on… 40 gigs for CoD4? How big was the original game? Couldn't have been much bigger than 10 gb. How did they manage to quadruple the size?

Uncompressed audio, probably some pre rendered cutscenes also uncompressed and textures made giant but probably still lacking detail matching the increased size.

According to Steam, the original requires 8GB

I also had this idea, but then I realized pirates would ten optimize a game and reduce it's size. So once again pirating gets you a better product then what you would pay for

Does anyone here know how a game is "optimaized"? Of all the workflows I've seen on how to do stuff for video games, never have I seen that position on the team who "optimizes" things. Even the credits never show "Optimizers".

Optimization is better than it's ever been. They're pulling off really good results for the PS4's low end hardware. Amazing results for that hardware.

Yeah, I thought about this too. I mean, why the fuck would I want to buy an inferior product that literally wastes hard-drive space I paid for.

Usually in development optimisation is what you do when the computer you are playtesting on shows that you are exceeding what the console's hardware is capable of. That is why console devs are always cancer, they only do something about flaws when it causes the game to crash. And besides, who would optimise it if not the people that were programming it already?

Yeah but WHAT CHANGES? Like, does the playtester actually has to go and tell the artist to make a shittier texture because the shitty console can't handle it?

All I'm saying is that there was a lot more to the PS2's marketing than some niggers bragging.

Been here for a little over two years but alright.

...

No you weren't.

Optimization is a vast and complicated topic. A lot of it boils down to making limits for yourself and doing as much as possible within those limits, making optimization the artist's responsibility as much as it is the level designer's and the engine programmer's. For example, baking the lightmaps/global illumination if the sun isn't going to move instead of a realtime GI algorithm, good LoD systems, geometry instancing, using CPU/GPU cache-friendly algorithms instead of fancier ones with more overhead, and so on.

If you have to compress something you also have to decompress it, this is happening all the time throughout the game, even outside of loading screens. It gives you more processing time but larger file sizes. The main issue is everything else.

I can guarantee all that space is going towards pre-rendered cinematics and multi-language audio.

not really, you can just compress it in a lossy way, where you lose precision and use it like that. Have you ever heard of jpeg or mp3?

I'm more concerned that you apparently want to install COD and MW remaster on your harddrive user.

Learn to read mate.
Gaben said one thing once and he was right about it.
If you provide a service good enough, people are more inclined to buy then to pirate.
If you shit on your customers, they will shit on you in return.
Look at fucking Steam. It's a prime example of it.
Had a good service, people flocked over to it and started to buy games.
Then they started to go to shit more and more over time and people started to pirate again.

Have they filled MW with porn or something? That was was like 4GBs

The way Steam is offering a superior service is with shit that I don't care about. Steam is basically videogame Facebook.

So I see no reason to stop pirating. I have the internet speed to do it.

Games cost a lot of money to make. Ofcourse publishers want to port their games to consoles or PCs.

PC is always done as a secondary option due to the fact that it takes way less marketing to sell a product on a console with no games

Most optimization is done at a engine-level. One of the prime benefits of utilizing an existing game engine for your game is easy optimization across platforms. Because it provides an abstraction layer between the hardware and high level game assets like models, scripts, maps, and so on… If a game is unoptimized its a problem with the game engine itself

The problem with modern games is storage space is less of an issue now so devs like using uncompressed textures and cinematics

Its only going to get worse as game resolutions get higher with shit like 4k textures

Dark Souls 3 barely has cinematics, it only comes with english audio and it's still 20GB.

So it can't be that.

I bet it's textures.

Gotta sell those $1000 graphics cards somehow.

Oh wait we're talking compression. Disregard this post except for its digits.

It must be some retarded new practice about textures, it's ridiculous that linear scripted shooters take so much space.

For example a typical FPS like nuDOOM is 60GB while a fuckhuge open world game with tons of cinematics and voiced dialog like The Witcher 3 is 45GB counting all the DLC.

List all the games

Every game nowadays is a multi system release every game gets a PlayStation port.

I didn't mention the Playstation a single time, fam

Optomization for PC never really existed the only reason why shit ran on toasters before was because they also had to run on the PS3 or 360. Same goes for file sizes before shit had to fit on a DVD-DL for the 360 now they only have to fit on a BL-DL. So as long as the game is under 50GB the they don't really give a fuck. PC ports will also have ludicrous requirements to run on max for the next year or 2 at least. Even more if the Scorpio/PS4pro are successful and become the new target.

Someone will reply to you with serious sam screenshots and expect you to be impressed in 3…2…

Not cost effective. Normalfags will buy it regardless.

Optimization on console has always been impressive, especially with Naughty Dog. Their games are shit nowadays but their technical expertise is high and it shows. PS4 Shouldn't look that good.

Everybody focuses on console because that's where the money is. PC has their free to play klondike where everyone tries to strike gold but if you're not going for that dollar, then you want to be focusing hard on consoles to make money.

So yeah normalfags are where the money is. Specifically normalfags on console.

But Serious Sam is a PC only game that doesn't go with my argument at all. I mean just looks at Deus Ex and Tomb Raider which both had "great" PC ports for their previous gen games. They ran great and actually had some "extra features" for the PC versions. Now the PC ports this time around run like absolute shit even though they were ported by the same devs and have similar "extra features" for the PC ports.

Even on consoles optimization has gone to shit. It used to be that 60FPS was the target for video games but once HD came about it became 30. Now it's perfectly accepted (the game sells fine or even well) and for games to regularly drop below 30FPS.

Audio is usually fucking huge in games now-a-days with devs thinking it's perfectly fine to throw in raw files. Story heavy games like new CoD have it even worse too.

Either that or it's the new anti-piracy method because who the fuck is going to torrent 90gb for one fucking game.

The ports are about the same in quality as they were last gen. I can play them just fine with a GPU from 2010 that cost me 250 at the time.

There was the same amount of 60 and 30 fps games back then as there are now. That hasn't changed.

It's always been that way.

Several reasons which i will list here

Specially with today's DLC systems allowing devs to ship free audio DLCs so people can pick what audio tracks they need and even if they want lossy/lossless compressed/uncompressed. They really only do it to fuck with people

Maybe during the Mega Drive era, but that shit was already a memory when the PS1 and N64 came around.

What I don't get about the "hueg size is an anti-piracy measure" is how easy it is circumvented. Uploaders just compress shit with specialized tools (textures separately, audio separately etc.) before making a torrent. So, as is the norm in this never-ending retarded war, the only ones to suffer are the paying customers.

The game is like 8GB and the other 122GB is a porn folder that's been added just for keks.

Last I knew, most GCN games were 60fps

We're living in an era where half finished product is the fucking standard. Dlc, abusive practices and every single major negative you can dream up are okay, developers don't try and finish games they try and hammer them out as quickly as possible in the hopes that they'll grab an audience. Once the auidence is grabbed the abusive practices of continuing to release things for them at a charge go on and on and onward till the sequel comes out.

We live in an era of season passes, mandatory dlc, and little kids and casuals driving the market. Don't be suprised if in 10 years you have a bigger phone game market than pc or console market.

That's not how it works for compressed media.

He never implied that.

please only talk about subjects you know about

Naw during the PS2 era it started back up again.

it is optimization retard, using uncompressed or atleast less compressed files saves on CPU demand for a storage trade off.

the CPU / memory trade off for your various methods of processing and compression are classic programming basics.

Nigger it would probably run on a 260
I had a 570 and the only thing I couldn't max was shadows and post processing garbage

That quote was a long time ago, user. Before Steam you had monstrosities like starforce.

I think they're inflating the game sizes to bring back memory cards for $100 a pop. It's a government sham.

Even Rage and nuDoom with their ridiculous texture sizes were less than half of that.

Those 2K texture mods for games like Skyrim are ~2GB and I doubt this COD game has textures beyond 512px

You can download a 20GB game in a 2 or 3 hours on 20mb/s.

Leave a 50mb/s connection on overnight and it will download almost the whole game. Also, how the fuck do they expect Steam users to play the game?

Except the games run like shit.

...

I thought the world had faster internet now. I'm in Canada and we can get Gigabit internet now in some places and we're under a duoply.

Just think that 10years ago most if not all games were somewhere under 10gb's big.

Hell games with graphics and gameplay that have aged well like Max Payne is less than 1 fucking gigabyte!

Shit nigger.

19GB of that is the artificial difficulty.

...

Depends on the area. Mostly pozzed cities have the fast stuff, even so it's really expensive and most people don't want to pay more than 20/30 bucks for their internet.

Some countries don't even have internet beyond 20mbs available to the public.

Pretty sure most of the US uses DSL, and even then it's only for things like Rebox Kiosks and remote business locations that only have a telecom line but no fiber. Business DSL actually gets much much higher speeds than residential.

That can't be fucking real. Then again, all the commercials for cable internet still advertise it as "X% faster than DSL"

kek but you gotta live in Romania though.

Wtf the fuck happened I remember being jealous of everyone's 100Mbps connections while I had to pay 200$ for 20Mbps with a 100GB cap. Now the companies here that rent the big companies lines just won a case to allow them to start renting their fibre lines. Also even the big shit companies let you pay 30$ a month to remove caps. I guess Canada is doing something fucking right for once. At least until Trudeau starts arresting people for tweeting out the word tranny.

I'm also in canada and my "30mbps" connection can't even exceed an actual 4mbps download rate.

I don't know how the fuck they get away with advertising it as 30mbps. Even accounting for overhead bullshit I should be getting at least 10mbps and more honestly like 20mbps.

These fucking monopolies overcharge and under deliver, always.

That fuckery ruins it for me. Sometimes I buy the game on steam, then install the pirated version and use my key to make it legit.

they get away with it by saying "Upto XXmpbs!"

you can get upto the speed, but never higher.

You know that the advertised speeds are in MegaBITs per second and not MegaBYTEs right? So a 30Mbps connection should get you speeds of ~3-4MBps. Or are you only getting speeds of like 400KBps? It's really shitty thing to do but they technically are not lying.

This isn't a hacking contest, so don't be stupid. You should normalize these to something more meaningful, like money. Like this:

8 GB in 2007 ~= $1.6 of storage

130 GB in 2016 ~= $3.9 of storage

…huh. I didn't expect that. Well, never mind then.

jcmit.com/diskprice.htm

No one likes optimization because it's boring and everyone writes shit in interpreted languages now

Yeah I took an assembly class in Uni and that shit was really annoying. It's also a possibility that the new engines are just crap shoot I guess. Though do AAA still use 3rd party engines like UE anymore?

Too bad modern games run like shit

Uncompressed textures and sound files? It's supposed to make the game run smoother

It takes very little processing power to uncompress these things on the fly.

So unless you're pushing the very limits of your CPU/GPU already, you aren't going to notice a difference.

what haha
There's plenty of 30 and 60fps games on ps2.

That's wrong.

You're going to prison, user.

Why not? Storage capacity has made huge advances, should we still use super compressed shit that takes resources and time to decompress at runtime?

It's an antipiracy method. What's that, your shitty third world/commie internet service only allows you 150GB a month? Well buddy I guess you'd better go out and buy a copy.

It doesn't work, though. Can't work in principle.

No, it's a 50 MB/s unlimited for $4.

But middlemen don't even bother bringing copies here. No one buys that shit. For a while they were able to sell disks with pirated games (3-6 and more repacks on a disk for a pittance), but even that no longer brought enough profit so they all closed shop. It's like the industry is actively trying to stop me from buying.

And the PC version is gimped coming with a single DVD with almost nothing of the game on it.

It's the same for download times.
1.4 hours - still fine.
3.6 hours - and the evening is gone.
and if you're stuck with ADSL2+:
23 hours
That's the same time, it required to pirate a 400 MB game iso over modem dialup. Nobody sane did that, because it was considered ridiculous. Now publisher actually expect that.

i used to do that, using P2P to get a ps2 game took half a day at best

man good times, i bet you were still in diapers

Literally all antipiracy doesn't work but has that ever stopped them?

When user was in diapers, Internet wasn't invented yet.
And nobody pirated PS2 ISOs during the 90s. Inflating PC games to CD-ROM size was some sort of copy protection and scene groups usually removed the Redbook audio or FMV shit, go get it down to manageable download sizes for dialup fags.

they're choosing poorly, there are methods of decompression that use very little processing power.
Shit, even RLE (which just strips "blank" data) would make a significant difference on files this size.
They're also doing things like shipping the game with fully uncompressed audio in four or more languages, which is utterly pointless. Nobody needs to switch audio languages during gameplay without a reload.

PSX games also had huge dummy files and PS2 games too, but the reason i was given was because the laser had more stress trying to read the innermost part of the CD/DVD.

Is that the reason why modchips stress out lasers more I don't remember a lot of the PS2 games I burned taking up the entire disc?

one mistake i often see anons and people in general committing time after time is the assumption that anyone is acting in their best interests, often wondering why some corporation or government entity is making a foolish decision,
they are fully aware of what they are doing, and oftentimes there are deals going on. do you remember when games did not advertise hardware when you booted them up? nowadays you get "runs best on nvidia/intel/etc."
the hardware producers are absolutely 100% in cahoots with video game developers. not only that, but as we are discussing the subject of file size, it also helps to deter pirates. some parts of the world have quite horrible internet service, and even those with a decent service might find that they just do not feel like downloading something so gigantic, either out of fear that it might get them caught easier or even simply due to hard drive space or not wanting to take the time for something theyre quite sure they wont enjoy anyways.

heres one i dont understand. so anti piracy, denuvo and such? i understand that the ones who choose that drm method arent super concerned if it will never be cracked, only caring that the initial sales for the first days, weeks or months are huge, but why is that.
why are overall sales even after years not considered very important?

I really didn't care about the hardware advertising think since it probably got the PC version a good chunk of change for doing nothing. Plus you could easily just skip it. Until some devs started making necessary to either edit the launch or delete the intro files to skip shit. Now the new deus ex actually just crashes when you delete the intro files this shit is fucking ridiculous now.

It's this and training people to uninstall shit so they can push us back to an onlive kind of system. It's not about money, it's about controlling what us plebs see. Same reason why there's a billion sites streaming movies in HD but they go after kat.

You just answered your own question. The reason why they don't care about the long term is because all they care about it short term profit like most corps

yes, i just dont understand why.

They have two choices:
- get X US dollars in Y months and maybe 20*X dollars in 5*Y months;
- get 10*X dollars within a month and some trickle as a bonus over the course of Y months.
Which is more attractive for someone planning to spend thousands on drugs and whores as soon as possible?

But for the same reasons I'm not going to buy it:

thats a good point too

why

Collusion. OS dev + game devs + game "journos" + hardware manufacturers.

I think people need to understand that this is the natural progression as technology moves forward.

Think about it, when I was a kid I was playing games on 8mb cartridges. Then as a teen I played games on 4gb to 8gb discs. Now the standard is between 20gb to 40gb.

I won't say that there aren't games that aren't optimized, but for the most part the reason games get bigger is because that's just what happens as tech gets better

That last bit makes zero sense

If someone with bad internet had any interest in buying it, they'd be lead into the same issue. If filesize is meant to deter people, then whether you buy it or pirate it, it makes no difference. If anything I;d argue this at best decreases potential profits and at worst, encourage pirates to dump useless files and upload a more manageable filesaize for said game.

No, that's not "natural progression". Games got fucking huge in comparison to everything else.
In 1990 most games fit on a single floppy disk with 1.44 MB and computers had usually 1 MB of RAM.
In 2000 most games fit on a single CD-ROM and computers had 128-256 MB RAM. So games got already bigger.
Now computers have 8-16 GB RAM while CoD has fucking 130 GB.

That's exactly how I'm going to play this game.

And to illustrate your point better: in the early nineties at least several games fit on a single floppy. At least.

Peacucks happened. Why bother doing such silly things as optimization that waste precious marketing money when the average cuck can just upgrade their prebuilts or PCs, or hell, just do the work for you in some cases.

Now that you mention ram, which cod was it that prevented you from starting the game unless you had 8 gigs of fucking ram, even though it never came close to using that?

I haven't upgraded my gaming PC since 2011. And still see no reason to.
Dunno, last CoD I played was Black Ops 1

That was ghosts I think the first Xbone/PS4 one.

I remember games not launching on non-quadcores, because they faggy devs managed to assume the literal existence of the console CPU.

buy more harddrives goy

False, In the early 90's RAM in that time was in the kilobytes, in fact, as ram reached the 1MB mark in the mid and late 90's, we were using CD's, which as you may or may not know, can store up to 500MB. Most people used floppies for PC still because they were still pretty popular because old people are shit at PC's My mom, despite having a pretty decent modern PC still doesn't quite grasp the concept of flash drives vs floppy.

False, games were using DVD's by that time which allowed bigger games sizes

Basically, games have always had far larger filespace compared to actual RAM. And that's how it logically should be. And if you know even a damn thing about computers and what their parts do, it makes sense why this is the case.

How much harddrives will you need at this point? And more over I can't imagine how much of a juggling act it'll be for consoles at this point, and how long kids will spend on Christmas morning waiting to get past all those patches.

It does on consoles, though. They have extremely weak CPUs. That's why they went to this streaming model, they can use the drive's hardware to get data into place without touching the CPU. When they make the PC release they give no shits and just ship whatever they had working on consoles.

I think the worst optimization seems to be right now that games just fucking devour VRAM. My friend said his 1070 is constantly maxing out his VRAM when playing Deus Ex at 1920x1080.

A 1tb hdd is more than enough for console users. I have a 2tb hdd on my pc and have 250 games installed and I still have 300gb to spare

This is so much bullshit in a single post, I'm not even going to bother.
Here we have to problem.

Check EVERY console from 1990 to 2000

The only exception might be the dreamcast

Old scenefag here. We had 1MB in the '90s, was a pain in the ass to use via EMS and required flipping the A20 highmem gate which was on the keyboard part of the MB for who knows why. We could use DPMI as well but it was shit due to having been heavily designed around the 286 and required using segment selectors per block like banked memory, and as 386s started getting more common we had VCPI which was less shit, closer to modern memory management, but many people chose to roll their own. Ultima 7 went this route in '92. By the mid '90s if you only had 1MB you couldn't run anything modern.

early '90s*
To be anal, we had EMS in the '80s but I didn't have that kind of cash.

I thought the discussion was consoles not PC.

And even if we were talking PC, it's still pretty consistent. Maybe not to the degree of consoles, but filesizes on PC have always been far larger compared to ram.

I don't know why buddy even mentioned ram though, but I felt I'd keep with his comparison anyways,

He's probably using MSAA. G-buffers (used in deferred shading and its spinoffs) fucking hate high resolution screens/MSAA and will absolutely rape your GPU cache if given the chance. They were a decent solution for simplifying shaders and increasing the number of lights back when 720p/1080p screens were high-end material, but now that those are standard and people are looking into 2K/4K screens we need to look into a solution that scales better with screen resolution, something like visibility buffers.

Which consoles had floppy drives, Nintentoddler?>By the mid '90s if you only had 1MB you couldn't run anything modern.
By 1993 you couldn't run DOOM if you didn't have a 80386 with with at least 4 MB of 32 Bit RAM.

Actually, 10 years ago most games were around 5 gb.

10 gb was the average size just 5 ~ 6 years ago.

And you're accusing someone else of being incorrect?

Care to "remember" how big they were initially and for how long?

Not really. There was a point where floppy-based games just couldn't go larger because each additional disk increased the odds of one being bad (which was already pretty high). Star Control 2 was about as big as they got at (IIRC) 9 disks and it pissed a lot of people off because of how many were DoA. Ram overtook many games until CDs became popular.

Hmm, maybe it was U7 that was 9.. I forget now.

Funny you should mention Nintendo…

In 2004 games till came out on CD-ROM

Doom3 came on 4 CD-ROMs!

As an aside: at a programming study club (or whatever it's supposed to be called) I was attending some guys managed to get TftD running on a 286 by overwriting some of the original's files with that of the sequel. It had a horribly screwed up gamma, but still.

Look, he found a picture in Wikipedia!

It's not even a real floppy drive kek
Why don't you back to Reddit?

Whats that fam, not real enough for you goalpost moving ass? Well, then good thing dega does what nintendon't

Your memory is really shit, gramps. 1 MB ram was the standard for the late 80s / very early 90s. In the early 90s high end PCs were already using 2 or 4 MB.

I remember quite clearly that in the fucking mid-90s (NOT late 90s) the standard was 4 MB for toasters and 8 or 16 MB for high end machines.

Upgrade these to 32 / 64 - 128 MB for the late 90s.

Better check for Alzheimers, gramps.

First PC sold in a supermarket in 1995 had already 8 MB RAM. That cheap shitbox was the definition of a toaster. It had 8 MB, because Win95 didn't really run with 4 MB.

Depends on where he's from. Ex-USSR countries lagged pretty damn hard when it came to upgrades, for example. I was lucky to have something like 586 or P-133 with 16 or 32 MBs roughly around the time 95 came out.

That's fucked up.

Very few had the pleasure of caressing an 8 inch floppy over these 3.5" stiffies.

Pentium 133 (P54CS) is pretty unlikely, as it was (paper-)launched two months before Win95.

The last part makes perfect sense. It is the same with DRM. Loyal customers deal with DRM wasting their time, even though they paid for the game. Pirates crack DRM and play the game for free and without wasting their time or harming their computers. Only the loyal customer loses, since the company got their hard earned money and is happy.

I don't really understand this because it's easy to integrate compression into your development pipeline. Even algorithms with a relatively low compression ratio (but high decompression throughput a la zstd) are simple to build interfaces for and use. They could easily cut down their final data size by a factor of 2.5 without any measurable
impact towards system performance. In fact it'd probably be more performant because they wouldn't be thrashing their I/O bandwidth so hard.

More judicious size/quality trade-offs could be made elsewhere. There is no reason for lossless audio in a game where the individual sounds are going to bleed into each other as a cacophony of different channels sound off with respect to in-game effects. There need not be a multitude of similar textures that could be distilled into one or two yet aren't because artists feel the need for multiple copies of the same texture whose only noticible differences could be categorized as subtle minutia. Resource budgets should be made and strictly adhered to for the creation of in-game model assets. Et al.

These are tried and true techniques that have all fallen by the wayside as abundant computing power has begotten abundant laziness.

Not strictly true. There are practical limits on real-world throughput on a given data bus such as SATA3. If you spend a ton of time loading your cpu spends a ton of time idling around and wasting free cycles that would otherwise be afforded DMA in order to, ironically, wait on the needed data to transfer over the bus. Remember this, unused cycles are wasted cycles and you'd likely perceive better performance from a convergence of optimizations in both respects. I/O is really fucking slow, even by the standards of solid state devices.

Optimization is inherently meshed with good design. Developers need to be cache aware. They need to be bus aware. And they need to be compute aware. All at the same time.

If you take a look at the advertisements in old PC Magazine issues from early to mid 1995 (they're all available on Google Books), there were lots of companies offering 4 MB desktop PCs as base models (even more so with laptops), at least before Win95 came out later that year.

After Windows 95 was released, then yes, new 4 MB systems really vanished - even in ex-USSR countries and South America. Win95 had relatively steep system requirements when it came out.

While it's true that I never had 8"ers, I still have dozens of 5.25" floppies. It's nothing about the disc itself that is the most pleasing, it's the sound they make in the drive. That gentle sweeping sound.

because the sales drop off like a fucking rock. PC gamers really love to wag around their long term sales, but the reality is they're selling a few thousand extra units at a 70, 80, 90% discount for a game few people even play. It's a tip jar. It's really nothing special. Console sales are usually hundreds of thousands for small games in two weeks, millions for big games in two weeks. PC sales in the first two weeks? At best 100K. Usually less than that for meaningful lifetime sales. There's odd exceptions here and there, but for the most part you don't put big budget releases on PC expecting killer returns, and you NEVER make them exclusive.

Win95 was advertised with having support for 4 MB "base models". That means it booted on those. Then there was no RAM left to do anything with it.
Beside that below 16 MB Win95 didn't really make much sense.

Ofc. Nobody buys shoddy console ports tied to a shitty app store for $60, when the console game is superior in every way (including providing a Bluray) and can be rented, lent and resold.

even good ports. Audience hardly discriminates based on port quality.

This is not about port quality, user.
You can't own/rent/swap/resell PC games because Steam entirely destroyed standalone PC games and turned it into some shitty DLC app store ecosystem with 30 % for Valve, but without app store pricing.
So called "PC games" are shitty deal in all regards and that is the reason nobody buys them, especially not the $60 kind.

Hence "roughly". About 7-10 years ago I could remember any CPU and GPU I've had over the years. Now? I only remember I've gone through something like a 386SX, a 586, a series of Pentiums starting with 133 and ending on 266, then it was a K6-II and a K6-III, then some P2 I think and a Duron. Might've forgotten one or two and I sure as hell don't remember exact years, just a 1-3 year range. Even worse with RAM. I only remember that I got 128 MB upgraded to 192 (mismatched DIMMs suck, don't do that at home, kids) and then finally to 256 on that Duron.

As poorfag I still vividly remember all upgrade steps. And the times when the PC was broken for half a year. :^)

MOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOODS

Ouch. I've had problems with WinME, some due to that fucking Duron overheating and glitching (unsurprisingly the other two AMDs were guilty of problems too), video card-related problems. But half a year? Damn.

I agree, it's just that you said no new PCs were being sold with 4 MB in 1995 and that's factually incorrect.

True. I know Win95 officially supported 4 MB, but I remember I tried installing it on two 4 MB PCs and it didn't boot. It booted and was stable on 8 MB PCs but ran like dog shit. 16 MB was really the actual usable minimum.

Your post reminded me something, maybe the largest officially released floppy game spanned 9 disks.

But in the mid to late 90s there was lots of cd-rip versions of games floating around on floppies, among friends, in clubs, churchs, schools and unis, and some of them were a lot larger than 9 disks, I remember DN3D Atomic Edition took 13 or 14 disks, and Shadow Warrior spanned some 20 disks.

I once tried to copy WarCraft II with around 15 floppies. Bad sectors a shit.

why use something dynamic like money anyway? most people are living off worse even if their wages *adjusted for inflation*(meaningless) are higher.

a Gigabyte is always a Gigabyte.

also the MW remaster isn't on disc, you still have to download it.

Bloated filesize as anti-piracy makes no fucking sense considering that in 99% of cases you still have to download the fucking thing after buying it and it still takes up disc space.
Although that can really be said about any anti-piracy measure. They all are an inconvenience, sure, but only to the fucking customer.

With computers becoming more powerful and spacious, devs become lazier with their coding. Why make games run well when you can make the computer do the work for you as long as you have enough space and memory?

Nothing about the monstrous clicking of the drive heads and motor was gentle.

That has to be the worst and dumbest period to try and lump together and make generalizations about. Beginning 93 to end of 99 is the largest relative difference in PC history.

so much for never again seeing the days of taking whole entire days to download shit

What the fuck, these aren't even open world meme games or multiplayer shooters that have lots of maps. How is a 5 hour linear campaign and 8 multiplayer maps 90 fucking gigabytes? Are all of their textures fucking bitmaps? Are their audio/cutscenes completely uncompressed? I want to pirate this shit just to do a directory scan and see how they fucked up this badly.

I found that Metal Gear Rising has over 20 gigabytes of prerendered cutscenes out of the 25gb installation which is retarded because those cutscenes hardly look any better than the in game graphics, why did they need to prerender that shit and save them as lightly compressed video files?

They never used HD-DVD you fucking dipshit. They used regular DVD and HD-DVD was only used for movies, but that died out because nobody bought a HD-DVD player you fuckwit.

I have my experiences, those of the people I've known back then, and all those correlate with what's written ITT, as was the case whenever such things were discussed in the past. But sure, go ahead.

They're going to be in some sort on in-house containers. You'll have to write an extractor of some kind.

Wait until they shit out the PC port that dips to 20fps on a top-tier PC.

No? Not for games.

...