Game Total Size Reduction Using Engines

[jordanecmusic]

Ok, so recently I have uncovered that:

Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas= 5 Gb
Grand Theft Auto 4: 16 Gb
Just Cause 2: 5 Gb
Homefront: 10 Gb
Batman Arkham City: 16 Gb

Know these numbers.

How the hell is Just Cause 2 only 5 Gb and have an extremely vast terrain to scale, with all those trees moving and really good physics...

Such a beautiful game and its only 5Gb. HOW?

I think eidos found out how to time travel or something to code an engine that well.

 

[Arkadrel]

Im guessing it comes down to smart use of textures....?
Maybe those open "vast" terrains take up less, than crammed city like enviroments do?

Skyrim doesnt take up much space, but look how huge the world in that is.
Im guessing its a matter of texture quality ect. and smart use of textures.

 

[jordanecmusic]

Im guessing it comes down to smart use of textures....?
Maybe those open "vast" terrains take up less, than crammed city like enviroments do?

Skyrim doesnt take up much space, but look how huge the world in that is.
Im guessing its a matter of texture quality ect. and smart use of textures.

Good point, but would you say that just cause 2 has more textures in it than gta4? I would say so.

 

[Red Storm]

Just Cause 2 ran pretty well on PC. GTA was a lazy port job.

 

[jordanecmusic]

Just Cause 2 ran pretty well on PC. GTA was a lazy port job.

That could be true.

Also.
Crysis 1: 7 Gb
Halflife 2: 5 Gb
Crysis 2*: 10 Gb
Dead Space 2*: 9 Gb
Call of Duty WaW*: 8 Gb

*=proven console port

I mean what could they have possibly put in to get the file size bigger than crysis 1. Crysis 1 has higher resolution textures, the engine in the background of course has size.

Couldn't be the number of textures, because halflife 2 has a great amount of textures going on. Couldn't be texture resolution because Crysis 1 has a great amount of high resolution textures going on.

Also I noticed that in Unreal Tournament 3 (console port might I add, but I still love the game to death) Ps3 config files were left included inside the games files. Could it be that developers do not remove the crap from the consoles and then add the pc counter parts coded to run instead of the console stuff? If they do...then that is just lazy.

Devs are getting lazier and lazier by the minute...

 

[PhatoseAlpha]

Good point, but would you say that just cause 2 has more textures in it than gta4? I would say so.

I'd actually strongly favor the opposite. Huge quantities of JC2 are jungle environments - mostly trees and dirt. Both are very easily covered with tiled textures, and players simply won't notice the tiling. Nor will they ever notice that every tree in the world uses 1 of 5 possible textures - players simply don't look at trees in any depth.

Compare this to the urban environment of GTA, where textures are definitely noticeable and one of the few effective ways to differentiate between building A and building B, C, D, ect, and you need a lot more textures for the GTA environment to be believable.

 

[BallaTheFeared]

My Crysis 2 folder is 14.3GB, my skyrim folder was quite large too since it contained tons of mods.

 

[jordanecmusic]

I'd actually strongly favor the opposite. Huge quantities of JC2 are jungle environments - mostly trees and dirt. Both are very easily covered with tiled textures, and players simply won't notice the tiling. Nor will they ever notice that every tree in the world uses 1 of 5 possible textures - players simply don't look at trees in any depth.

Compare this to the urban environment of GTA, where textures are definitely noticeable and one of the few effective ways to differentiate between building A and building B, C, D, ect, and you need a lot more textures for the GTA environment to be believable.

GTA 3: 1.7 Gb
GTA VC: 1.5 Gb
GTA SA: 5 Gb

San Andreas was much larger than GTA4 and used much much more textures. Again, there is no reason why GTA4 is 15 Gb

 

[jordanecmusic]

ALSO Rage 24Gb.

Looks like this at MAX (-image belongs to jmorton6 of this site)

 

[KentState]

The engine and type of environment have a lot to do with it. Some are better at scaling high resolution textures and others have multiple versions of the same texture. What level of compression are they using and how well does the engine handle high levels. There are also factors like sound track and voice. Do they contain multiple languages or just English? Is there FMV clips or are they done directly in the engine?

 

[jordanecmusic]

The engine and type of environment have a lot to do with it. Some are better at scaling high resolution textures and others have multiple versions of the same texture. What level of compression are they using and how well does the engine handle high levels. There are also factors like sound track and voice. Do they contain multiple languages or just English? Is there FMV clips or are they done directly in the engine?

if it was naturally a pc game, there would be no fmv clips. It would be done with the ingame engine. Its past the time of using fmv clips to do movie parts in a game. No clue why arkham city did it like that either. Having to see a clip at 30 fps 720p then the game switches to 60fps native resolution is extremly akward and would have been avoided without using fmv clips.

Left 4 Dead uses WAV audio files. 0 Compression there on audio files. Left 4 Dead 2 is 7.4 Gb. Rage is still 24gb in my discussion. No way that many audio files can bring it up to that loud of a gb file size.

 

[BD231]

Just cause 2 is an OK looking game at best, the repeating textures get old fast though.

 

[Phynaz]

I'd actually strongly favor the opposite. Huge quantities of JC2 are jungle environments - mostly trees and dirt. Both are very easily covered with tiled textures, and players simply won't notice the tiling. Nor will they ever notice that every tree in the world uses 1 of 5 possible textures - players simply don't look at trees in any depth.

Compare this to the urban environment of GTA, where textures are definitely noticeable and one of the few effective ways to differentiate between building A and building B, C, D, ect, and you need a lot more textures for the GTA environment to be believable.

This is the correct answer.

 

[wuliheron]

Because of the nature of Moore's law, anything that an extremely clever graphics programmer can do at one point can be replicated by a merely competent programmer some number of years later.
John Carmack

Its all about the money these days so you'll have some games that are extremely well optimized to run on wimpy systems (Just Cause 2) and others that are slapped together quick and dirty (Homefront). The original Crysis was a PC killer, but now they're coming out with a version that can play on consoles as old as the game itself. Likewise newer games like Rage can be 22gb on the PC, yet play on something as wimpy as an iPhone making 22gb a meaningless number without a context.

 

[mmntech]

Skyrim wasn't a very big download. I think it was smaller than Fallout 3.

 

[ArchAngel777]

IMO the OP is flawed logic. There are so many reasons why some games might be larger than others and graphically quality is only one small aspect.

Some variables that make this impossible to determine:

1) How many different sizes of the same texture (example: low, medium, high, very high, ultra) does the game have? This is done to allow the game to scale decently on multiple configurations and directly affects how large a game will be.

2) Are the textures compressed? If not the textures themselves, are they compressed in a PAK file? If so, what was the compression method used? Some games might opt for less compression to reduce potential CPU overhead and time needed to uncompress the file. This will affect game loading times potentially other things.

3) Some games can reuse the same texture because of the environment. A game that has many different environments will typically have more textures to use and thus will increase the size.

So... All of these have an impact and is silly to say X game is more efficient because it requires less space than Y game. Waaaaaaaay too many variables to reduce it to something that simplistic.

 

[Nintendesert]

Just cause 2 is an OK looking game at best, the repeating textures get old fast though.

The game is better than OK looking. They used their resources well and created some great views and amazing terrain. More variety is always wanted, but they also made what they had run really good too.

 

[Throckmorton]

Terrain and 3d model data don't take much storage space.

 

[Dankk]

Just cause 2 is an OK looking game at best, the repeating textures get old fast though.

You're kidding, right? Out of all those games listed by the OP, Just Cause 2 is most definitely the most beautiful. In fact, I have yet to see an open-world game that's better-looking than JC2. Not to mention it's also very well-optimized and it runs butter-smooth on any decent gaming rig... unlike GTA4, which was a shitpile of a portjob.

As for why it's HD space requirements are so slim: I'm guessing it's because they use a lot of repeating textures and terrain. Like someone else said, rendering a dense, detailed city environment takes a lot more effort and detail than does large fields of grass and palm trees.

Just Cause 2 is also the biggest game of those listed by OP (in terms of environment size).

 

[DaveSimmons]

Besides reusing textures, there are libraries for dynamically generating things like trees and plants within an area. So a game might store the outline of an area but fill it in on the fly. If another game lacks that, or is an urban setting that must not change, it might store much more fixed data about the area.

 

[coldmeat]

Just Cause 2 is also the biggest game of those listed by OP (in terms of environment size).

I made this before, I'll post it again.

Those are the ships from the Burnout Paradise map. Apparently they are over half a mile long each. That's just one example of the scale being wrong in that image.

 

[Dankk]

I made this before, I'll post it again.

Those are the ships from the Burnout Paradise map. Apparently they are over half a mile long each. That's just one example of the scale being wrong in that image.

Yeah, the Burnout Paradise comparison is probably the fishiest out of all the other games in that image. Apparently a city block is the size of a whole zone in WoW :hmm: (although I've never played WoW, so for all I know maybe the zones really aren't all that big).

And, to a lesser extent, the roads in Burnout Paradise seem a bit out of proportion compared to those in JC2.

 

[Arkadrel]

I'd actually strongly favor the opposite. Huge quantities of JC2 are jungle environments - mostly trees and dirt. Both are very easily covered with tiled textures, and players simply won't notice the tiling. Nor will they ever notice that every tree in the world uses 1 of 5 possible textures - players simply don't look at trees in any depth.

Compare this to the urban environment of GTA, where textures are definitely noticeable and one of the few effective ways to differentiate between building A and building B, C, D, ect, and you need a lot more textures for the GTA environment to be believable.

^ wow that was basically what I wanted to say but much better explanation.

Yes jungles and open world fields are good for games

It sounds like "Just Cause 2" was a well made game....
Ive never played it, but I watched some youtube videos, does look pretty nice actually (gameplay looks well too).

 

[imaheadcase]

I'm just waiting for the day game worlds match planet earth size, actually planet earth rendered in real time with all the major cities. I picture NPCs in stores you can buy loot from. wait i think i'm describing real life. yah i want that, but for a game engine so i can kill that guy at gas station who questions if i really need that snack.

 

[Arkadrel]

@Imaheadcase

woaaah.... that totally blew my mind.

Sadly I dont think you ll ever see a game that vast.... would be totally awesum just for exploration alone,
and random eastereggs ect you could go hunting for.