• VerilyFemme@lemmy.blahaj.zone
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    50
    ·
    edit-2
    14 hours ago

    I redownloaded Stardew Valley last night and was amazed to find it’s still less than a Gigabyte.

    I know it’s not the same as a hyperrealistic 3D game, but I’m still amazed at how much stuff he keeps adding, but it hasn’t even scratched a GB.

    • Venator@lemmy.nz
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      21
      arrow-down
      1
      ·
      edit-2
      12 hours ago

      Pixel art is very space efficient. Thats how pixel art originally came about, back when computers/consoles/cabinets didn’t have memory for bigger textures, or the capability to even display the full resolution and colour palette of the monitor/tv within the time of one frame.

        • Allero@lemmy.today
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          7
          ·
          edit-2
          4 hours ago

          In part - the entire game takes only a few hundred megabytes and can be played on anything but a toaster.

          But it’s also the great concept, the simplicity, the legacy, the compatibility, and the insane amount of mods able to significantly alter your gameplay or visuals.

          As a simple but deep and visually appealing sandbox, it managed to capture many audiences - creatives of all kinds, replica makers, casual survival players, automation/industrialization fans, computer enthusiasts, and many more.

          It also helped that Minecraft is extremely easy to pirate and also long-lived, making many enter it as pirates and purchasing a copy later on (or staying pirates and still generating a lot of content for the community).

    • Tarquinn2049@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      4
      arrow-down
      2
      ·
      14 hours ago

      Hehe yeah, the whole game is the size of one objects collection of textures in some other games.

  • ProfessorProteus@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    86
    arrow-down
    1
    ·
    19 hours ago

    I was shocked to find out that Balatro was like 80 MB to download. You don’t need million-poly models and 8k textures to make an really good game. Granted, yeah it’s a 2D game, but it’s a beautifully-presented one.

    • SkaveRat
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      9
      ·
      7 hours ago

      whatever you do, don’t look into its code.

      It’s basically a single lua file with more if/else/switch nesting than god intended

      (unless it was refactored in the last couple months)

      • dinckel@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        45
        arrow-down
        3
        ·
        18 hours ago

        Games like that have nothing to prove. The product speaks for itself.

        Meanwhile, games that take up 300gb of your disk often do this purposefully. In the case of console games, they know it will monopolize your system. The game usually isn’t even enjoyable, but it’s too big to delete randomly, so you gaslight yourself into committing to it

        • affiliate@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          12
          ·
          13 hours ago

          each cod game also costs around 450 million dollars to make, so i can’t help but imagine that some of the file size bloat is caused by a need to “justify” the budget in some way. because as we all know, 300gb games have so much more game when compared to a measly 60gb game. you won’t be getting dynamically sized horse balls in a game that only takes up 60gb.

        • Zahille7@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          4
          ·
          16 hours ago

          Aka: CoD. I honestly still don’t understand how people can justify to themselves the $70 price point for each game, or the sheer ridiculous size of the fucking thing. It’s gotta be mental gymnastics, right? Are they really that good that people will overlook the bullshit like shitty launchers and Warzone bleeding into how the games play nowadays?

      • skulblaka@sh.itjust.works
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        12
        ·
        17 hours ago

        Animal Well is a staggering work of art on multiple fronts, not least of which is the code golf required to keep its size so small. Incredible game.

      • This is fine🔥🐶☕🔥@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        1
        ·
        1 hour ago

        Going against the grain here but I’d like to see a mod or DLC that changes pixel-art to vector art or something. Or maybe something like Windows 7 Solitaire?🤞

      • orbitz@lemmy.ca
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        3
        ·
        11 hours ago

        Liibraries with their dependencies can take up a fair bit of that space easily these days. I dunno how many would be used in a game like that but that’d be my guess for the space needed.

        • Mia@lemmy.blahaj.zone
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          1
          arrow-down
          1
          ·
          edit-2
          30 minutes ago

          Absolutely not. Compiled code is small, really small. I’d be surprised if the engine* itself as a whole was more than a gigabyte in size. It’s all about the assets that are included, how badly they’re compressed and how uselessly detailed some of them are.

          *The embedded one of course. The editors are unruly beasts that’ll guzzle up your disk space, but then again it’s probably a similar situation…

  • andrew_bidlaw@sh.itjust.works
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    29
    ·
    16 hours ago

    Game’s size depends on many factors. Besides devs’ laziness or the abundance of inique assets and dupes, I had a fun ride with Vermintide 2 whose devs were able to cut game’s size from 100gb+ to 60gb+ at once because they added all incrimental updates as additional archives and also prefered to have all assets for one level in one place even if they are shared, so it grew out of proportion over the years before they decided to cause a complete asset restructurement and dublicate hunt before the major update. It made players redownload big chunks of the game but resulted in a way less terrifying size to those players they wanted to start it or return into.

  • Dr_Box@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    34
    ·
    18 hours ago

    Valheim, a massive open world filled with interesting monsters and beautiful stylistic graphics is 1gb

    • Noblesavage@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      3
      ·
      11 hours ago

      I agree. We’re not the first ones to point it out, but theres a strong argument to be made for graphical style over graphical fidelity. Working to achieve a particular stylised choice tends to give a visual medium greater longevity.

      There’s a reason why people remember details about Jurassic Park over something like Avatar; or Star Fox over the latest Call of Duty.

      Technology has made some things look better over the years, but the things that really get remembered visually are the style choices.

      Just because one game takes up a quarter of your hard drive doesn’t make it more impressive than a sub 1 GB game.

    • starchylemming@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      23
      ·
      18 hours ago

      to be fair, the 4k textures etc take up most of the space in large 3d games. valheim has a low poly and low quality textures style with a lot of repeats. it only looks good thanks to lighting.

      with such a design choice you have an unfair advantage over photorealism and large variety.

      we should however compare different games of the same style. did they use the 8k ulta detailed Hamburger models or did they actually think about Ressource and space management ?

      • Zahille7@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        8
        ·
        16 hours ago

        It’s also, as tons of people have said about the Arkham series, about art style. The Valheim style looks really good because they have incredible artists working on the game.

        Just like Arkham Knight is still one of the best looking games I’ve ever seen even though it’s almost 9 years old, Valheim will still probably look just as good the same amount of time later.

  • TwoBeeSan@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    38
    arrow-down
    4
    ·
    19 hours ago

    Downloaded factorio yesterday at a wopping ~1.5 gig

    What game is this?

    Have noticed western devs typically can’t reduce file size for shit. Something like killing floor 2 is 97 gigs and elden ring (last i looked) was under 50

  • 🇰 🌀 🇱 🇦 🇳 🇦 🇰 ℹ️@yiffit.net
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    15
    ·
    16 hours ago

    What’s that FPS someone made to be as small of a file as possible? It’s like a Quake rip-off, but the game runs as a single executable and is small enough to barely take up the space of a floppy disk (like just a few kilobytes)?

  • henfredemars@infosec.pub
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    23
    ·
    19 hours ago

    When games get this big it merely ensures that they get uninstalled the moment I lose a bit of interest.

  • Venator@lemmy.nz
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    13
    ·
    17 hours ago

    8gb is probably a bit too small for most photorealistic style games at maximum settings, but maybe they should introduce optional games asset support to steam. No point downloading the full resolution textures if you’re playing on low texture settings.

    • Tarquinn2049@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      5
      ·
      14 hours ago

      Yeah, alot of games in their own launchers have that option, but bought through steam don’t, steam needs a clean way of supporting multiple install formats, I guess.

  • jmcs
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    21
    arrow-down
    6
    ·
    19 hours ago

    What 8GB. Some of the best games ever fit in a floppy disk (a real life save icon for the gen z people around here).

      • jmcs
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        8
        ·
        19 hours ago

        I need the rest of the space for my humongous demos collection.

        • bstix@feddit.dk
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          5
          ·
          edit-2
          17 hours ago

          The first section of my disc box was for demos. The rest for games. The games sometimes got overwritten, but the demos never got sacrificed, because those were hard to get.

          These days I just go to pouet.net and watch the YouTube clips. I know, it’s a ridiculous procedure to stream megabytes of video to watch a 100kb demo run, but I just can’t be bothered to make my pc run anything by itself anymore.

    • Beardsley@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      8
      arrow-down
      5
      ·
      19 hours ago

      Lmao, I didn’t know someone could be condescending about floppy disc’s, but here we are.

      • jmcs
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        9
        arrow-down
        1
        ·
        19 hours ago

        It’s a joke and I didn’t intend it to be condescending.

    • Retro_unlimited@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      2
      ·
      18 hours ago

      Back in high school i had a floppy with an NES emulator and several games. Was able to play nes game on school computers. Never got caught doing that lol