2010: Year of bloatware

[^Stueh]

This is a subject that got me thinking in college today. Are we just building applications/games etc that are just too big. For example, the game Dirt 2 installs at around 10 gig (from what my mate told me earlier).

10 GIG!!!!

surely thats just baddddd compression and coding? What happened to the days of 60meg games?

I know there are more advanced graphics engines etc, but you can get a whole fully featured VNC client in a 1 meg install :/

Drive space may be getting bigger, but why? because we are putting in more redundant code?

What are your thoughts?

[JazzyJay]

You're way off the mark

Today's games are built for high resolutions using high-res textures, hi-quality (5.1 etc.) sounds, movies clips... Comparing a VNC client with a game is absurd. Some games would most likely require less space if they were built from scratch and not on top of another engine which carries some extra baggage with it. Disk/memory space is very cheap. I was brought up on 60MB games and they gave us 640x480 resolution, terrible graphics and lousy sounds compared to today's standards.

Bad compression and coding? The "code" itself is most likely few megabytes per game, it's the assets that make up the rest. Also, some of them may not be compressing their assets deliberately (or uncompressing them during installation) to save some processing power during execution.

I care not about the size of a game/app anymore unless it's something I need to get over the network.

JJ.

[Inglorious]

To be honest games company's don't want to spend time and money on Optimising games. The bigger the game the more processing required... Time to upgrade your rig....

I can only think of one company that has ever optimized a gaming engine and thats valve... from half life 1 its been there moto to get the best out of whats available.

HL1 was made out of the old quake engine and by this time quake 2 had come out using a new engine but HL1 showed its potential.

Now we have the source engine and its OLD but valve are still getting the most out of it. Granted they have to make some tweaks now and then but damn it still stands up to the rest...

However I did hear of a german company made years ago. It made a full 3d game that used only the windows operating system to generat its graphics, textures and sounds. Which ment that you only needed an install file that you could fit on a floppy disk or even send in an email.

Optimising isn't cheap and it takes time... Optimising doesn't sell new technologies..

[^Stueh]

Granted i think the size of games was a bit of a mistake for an argument in hindsight.

Another example: Visual Studio 2010. 2.18Gig Download as an iso. Essentially it's just a glorified text editor with a compiler stuck on it, is it not? How many other commercial apps has massive of size for no apprent reason?

generally, what im trying to get at is, are we just putting stuff in the applications for the sake of it (features that are never used except for a selling point etc)?

Optimising is only expensive if your code is bad in the first place. Would you want your customers (or gamers) to have something that was fast loading and ran really well, or get it out maybe a week or two maybe a month earlier (depending on size of the project) and have it run like it was built by primary school children?

Maybe an unfair comparison but Crysis vs Arma 2?

I believe Arma 2 was released after crysis, yet crysis' game engine performs a hell of a lot better than arma's in terms of quality/performance, imho. I also think its the best game of the millennia, not in terms of plot/gameplay but because of what it is. How many games are still playable in a firefight @ 20-30fps on high detail? Not many i suspect. CSS dies when you start going below 80 imho (i know its alot older)

Are we in too much of a rush to make a quick buck and forgotten how to make decent programs like crysis?


Disclaimer: Nothing personal towards anyone or any product. It is just my opinion at face value.

[Ftang]

Any commercial software, like Visual Studio 2010, will always be 'bloated' as it has to cover as many potential needs as possible. It's unlikely that there will be one person that uses every function but it's probable that every function is used by someone.

Same goes for game engines. Something like CryEngine 2 or Unreal Engine 3 have been made to be sold on to other developers so they need to cover a wide range of needs and have to be quality products. As a result they'll be bloated but better optimised.

Where as something like Real Virtuality 3 was created specifically for ArmA 2. It's not as bloated as it only contains assets required for that game. However it won't be as optermised as the commercial engines as that's not the developers priority they just want to put out a working game and earn some money to keep going particulary for a developer that's targeting a relatively small market.

That's the way I see it anyway, you get one or the other.

Quick note on game sizes, Mass Effect 2 (uses UE3) is out at the end of the month and that has a system requirement of 15GB HD space. I'd expect PC game to start arriving on Blu Ray disks by the end of the year assuming that they've not all been made digital distribution only...

[shutteh]

sorry for a little bit offtopic: but if you are talking about graifcengines i remember this video about the physx effect: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BGCZtXg5 ... r_embedded

looks really nice. if u blow up an enemy u can see round about 30000 particle.dont know if the information(colour, size, etc.) about the partical are saved in the game or would be calculate on the fly.

[MudShark]

They are calc'ed on the fly by your GPU (or PPU or even GPGPU!)

PPU = physics processing unit.
GPGPU = General purpose Graphics processing unit.

[^Stueh]

Personally im against digital distribution purely for the reason that our infrastructure (as a country) cannot handle it. About the only country in the world that can is South Korea (they have an average net connection of 14.9 mb/sec (yes please)).

Im guessing most gamers have a connection in the region of 8-20mb. But i bet the gamers that don't play a lot don't have a big internet connection (for example i have 1.1mb/sec YES!!!) So downloading 15gb is gonna take me the best part of a couple days.

Going back to my main point, The footprint of technology is huge as well... example, just loaded VS up (without any addons or loaded solutions) 60 meg. Its predeccessor VS08 has ~120meg footprint. Consider this scenario:

Laptop 2ghz dual core, 3gb ram (so about standard for today?)

O/s takes what 512 of that easily. Other applications (itunes and w/e) take up another 256. You also have some sort of VM on there for developing? assign that 1.5gb so it runs properly, the result you have little memory left. Yea, memory is cheaper than it used to be. But unless your tech savy, getting the right ram/speed and installing it into the laptop is quiet difficult.

I know its a shame that you have one or the other, but it would be nice to take a decent commercial engine and strip out all the rubbish and have something that extends the boundaries of what it is capable of. I just dont think companies at the moment are really challenging themselves to make something great, just being "good" is good enough.

Css is a prime example, the engine is now ancient. It is a masterpiece as someone else said (forgotten by now xD)

Can you see my point?

[Schlack]

literally seconds of fun, downloadable in fractions of a second.

[Ftang]

I don't mind digital distribution things like steam and gog.com have giving me a chance to play game that I'd never have looked twice at in a shop. However, I don't want to see the day when it is the only way to buy games as there are some games I'd like to have a tangible copy of so I can play again in years to come. I've always been a bit of a hoarder, I've got a cupboard at home full of the 5 foot boxes PC games used to come in. And what happens if Steam just stops forever?

The guy with the right paddle on pong is clearly hacking...