Lazy developers or real need?

[linkgoron]

Well, DVD exclusive games are now more common, but already game developers say it's not enough and they need hd-dvd and blue ray or whatever format for games... Now I've seen games go from 5 MB games (and maybe KB games, I don't remember, I had a green monitor though if that means something) to 4-6 GB. so my question is have developers become lazy? Instead of optimizing code they use space thanks to the much bigger formats and Hard Drives, or do games really need 5-6 GB of space for games?

 

[MustISO]

I wouldn't say it's bad programming skills. You have high-res video, high res textures, and high res audio, they all take space.

 

[IHateMyJob2004]

Originally posted by: linkgoron
Well, DVD exclusive games are now more common, but already game developers say it's not enough and they need hd-dvd and blue ray or whatever format for games... Now I've seen games go from 5 MB games (and maybe KB games, I don't remember, I had a green monitor though if that means something) to 4-6 GB. so my question is have developers become lazy? Instead of optimizing code they use space thanks to the much bigger formats and Hard Drives, or do games really need 5-6 GB of space for games?

Please tell me you are joking.

 

[Nocturnal]

How about for the consumer's sake? I hate having to install 8 different CDs while installing HL2 and WoW.

 

[linkgoron]

I'm probably an idiot for posting this, but no I'm serius
Oh, I'm not complaining about changing media, I'm talking about the fact that games are getting bigger real fast, but some of them look like games from 3 years ago and take 3 times the space...

 

[Continuity27]

The increase is due to pre-rendered graphics, FMVs, music/sound files, etc. If you actually took the real game programming and isolated it from all the multimedia, you'd see it's still not all that big.

For example, take a PSX game and an N64 game. Because the PSX had CDs going for it, they were able to store files such as pre-rendered movies and wave format audio files. N64 had to limit itself to simpler audio that wasn't pre-rendered, and video was always "in game" simply because there was no space on the cartridge. N64 games could be around 20MB while PSX games were usually 300MB - 1500MB.

It's not that bad.

 

[shortylickens]

Not laziness. And yes they need to use a new format. Playstation 2 uses DVD's and thats kind of an old system. Windows based game companies should have been exclusively DVD a long time ago.

I havent seen any multi-DVD games yet, but I am sure they'll be here soon. Maybe the big publishers will skip over to Blu-Ray directly.

 

[notfred]

Like others have said, it has nothing to do with code. Go look at your games and see how much of them is made up of EXE and DLL files. That's code. The rest is high resolution textures, video, high polygon models, high-quality sound files, etc.

The only game on this machine is warcraft 3, but it's folder is over 600mb. The warcraft 3 executable is less than 15mb. The "movies" folder is 135mb.

 

[rh71]

code is text... even if they doubled or tripled the code, the size it takes up is still irrelevant ... like everyone says.. it's basically everything but the code.

 

[shortylickens]

Originally posted by: notfred
Like others have said, it has nothing to do with code. Go look at your games and see how much of them is made up of EXE and DLL files. That's code. The rest is high resolution textures, video, high polygon models, high-quality sound files, etc.

The only game on this machine is warcraft 3, but it's folder is over 600mb. The warcraft 3 executable is less than 15mb. The "movies" folder is 135mb.

I'm suprised the movies folder is only 135 megs. There were a lot of them and they were pretty high quality.
I installed Act Of War and its about 6 gigs. Mostly movies. The game reminds me of all the multimedia-heavy titles from the DOS and Win95 days.

Actually, 135 megs for a bunch high-rez movies is a good example of how programmers can do something right. So I vote that coding really has improved in recent years.

 

[linkgoron]

Errr... Ok not coding, but movies and all that... There are games that I just can't see how they take so much space... There are games that everything is repetitive, has 5 models and still can take a lot of space...

 

[Genx87]

I am willing to bet that 90+% of the space taken up by todays games are graphics.

 

[Regs]

I think I know what you are trying to say. Implementation. maybe?

Let's just make some far-out comparison. Lets take a file being compressed in win zip or win rar for an example. The actual file is being stripped down of unnecessary code that will be filled in later by formulaic math of some sorts. Algorithms, as they call them, that are able to do the necessary calculations to piece together the compressed files.

Now if they are able to program shaders in a way that could manipulate one single texture into many other textures, then yes, I guess that could save file size. Wouldn't it? However what Im trying to explain now is what is all ready being done in current games. The textures are all ready compressed on the hard drive ready to be uncompressed in the video cards local ram and buffers.

I think the programmers are doing only what they can do on a x86 platform. What else can you ask for them?