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Primarily, texture size has increased, texture count has increased, audio quality has increased, and the amount of audio files in a game has also typically increased.
Its not really a deadlines or optimization problem. Compression always decreases fidelity, and many developers choose to compress as little as possible in order to achieve the highest fidelity. Since RAM and storage capacities have increased, the compromise of compressing everything at a great sacrifice to fidelity is not as obvious of a tradeoff anymore. Developers don’t have to choose between voicing an entire game with nearly unintelligible voice compression or only voicing important cutscenes. They can voice the entire game with minimal compression at the cost of a bigger install size, which is free for developers.
It sort of is an optimization problem though because excess textures and audio files could be separated off into their own DLC packages (see Age of Empire II High-Res texture DLC and Steam’s Language Selection feature)
The really big problem is people being riddled with 4K textures on 1080p monitors and 20 audio tracks for different languages when they only need one.
I agree with the audio files for languages the player never plays, but 4k textures at a 1080p rendering resolution is not a problem.
Texture map size depends priparily on how the UV maps of models make use of the texture, and how close the camera is to the objects using that texture on average. A large wall texture will have more noticeable detail with a 4k texture than a distant tree in the skybox. The details will be visible on the wall whether the player plays in 720p or 8k, depending on how close the camera gets to it. You may be fine with environments looking like they were made for the Nintendo64’s 4kb of texture RAM, but 1080p players still gain massive benefits in graphics quality with 4k textures.
Being unable to uninstall/choose not to install the 4k textures tied to ultra/very high settings that you will never use so they clutter up your storage space is a problem. If they aren’t installed then the highest settings can be disabled until they are installed.
A skybox using a 4k texture on low is fine, we are talking about the textures that are only used when the settings are set to 4k or ultra or whatever.
Data compression is not inherently lossy.
And even lossy compression is not inherently bad. AAC is completely indistinguishable from lossless for most people and hardware setups, and very close anyway when it’s not. It uses a fraction of the space, though. (Not a comment on game dev practices, more a comment on compression.)
I think I’ve been told that AAC uses just enough CPU to decode that developers don’t want it. Even that assessment could be wrong.
This will get better as NN/AI chips become the norm in gaming. Compression gains, on the fly generation of textures, voice generation when needed, etc.
I envision a future dev using rough shitty textures to conceptualise a game, and then an NN to bring it to life during runtime.
You might even be able to load your own NN interpreter to make the world more cartoony, or change the intended setting entirely, or unlock the nsfw filter on the vanilla interpreter.
I feel like the issue could be largely resolved if developers would just make a lot of the downloads optional. For as long as I remember, installers for PC applications have given the user options for which parts of the applications they want to install. Yet for games these days, they just take an all or nothing approach. Let me skip the ultra textures, and all the extra choices in languages I don’t need. It seems like it should be such an easy thing to implement!
It’s crazy that if you pirate a game you can only install the things you want. At least for the few games i tried in the past few years
No one properly optimizes games anymore. Devs used to have to work with extreme limitations, and make the absolute best of what little they had.
Now with tech advancing quicker than people can keep up with and get accustomed to, and megacorporations like Microsoft prioritizing deadlines rather than overall quality (or the mental health of their developers), that doesn’t really happen any more.
Far too reductive of an assessment. We simultaneously had a massive leap in resolution (higher quality textures needed) and a massive step back in dollar per gigabyte for storage, as we could no longer get acceptable read speeds from hard drive technology. At the same time, for better or worse, open world games are what a lot of these developers are making, which compounds that texture problem. Massive file sizes are what you get when games are optimized; they’re just optimizing for performance and not storage space.
I have a problem with that last sentence. Because larger files do take longer to load from storage into main memory, and then longer to load into VRAM from main memory. Also, with larger files, you can’t keep them cached and ready to be reused, because you have to free that memory for other large files.
Your argument might be true if computers generally had RAM and/or VRAM larger than the entire game. But when games are 200+GB and typical main memory is 16-32GB for most folks, and only 64-128GB at the higher end, you know data will have to be shuffled around. VRAM situation is more dire: typical is 6-8GB, high end is 12-16GB and absolute max is 20-24GB.
Yes, faster storage and faster RAM help, but all those loads and unloads of huge chunks of data do take up time, cause stutters, or absurdly long loading screens despite the high performance components.
OPTIMIZE YOUR GAMES. Lossy compression is fine, and uncompressed assets should be optional downloads.
Decompressing an asset so that it can be used is an operation that takes processor cycles as well. It’s why Titanfall 1 came in so high on storage requirements at the time, because in order to meet CPU performance targets, they had to leave audio uncompressed. In this case, huge texture asset files are often LODs, high detail versions for when you’re up close and low detail versions for when you’re far away, so that the machine is always loading the right size version of the asset rather than just always using the best quality one in a worst case like you seem to be implying. This takes up a lot of storage space, but it means they aren’t wastefully using high detail assets for a mountain a mile and a half away.
Uncompressed WAV files, lol I’ll never get over that
Uncompressed WAV files, lol I’ll never get over that
It doesn’t even make sense. Simple compression algorithms like in use by FLAC or AAC are pretty much free to decompress on CPUs from this century and the cpu cycles you save by not doing wasteful IO of huge files from storage easily makes up for that.
I’m sure game devs can make some argument to not use ‘expensive’ compression, but not using any is just wasteful.
…sounds good though, i guess??
Every complaining gaming article should end with: "…or, just play indie games. Problem solved!’
Why are microtransactions…-
Just play indie games.
Why this horrible bundle deal…-
Just play indie games.
Here’s 45 reasons why this game misinterpreted gender issues…-
Just play indie games
This remaster could’ve just been DLC…-
Just play indie games
Nvidia…-
Just play indie games
I get what you are getting at but “misinterpretation of gender” can also happen in indie games and so can micro transactions. They are much more rare but they do still on occasion happen
This is such a weird take. Of course, for the things you mentioned, yes.
But in the case of storage, it’s not like the devs purposefully increase the sizes of their game for some reason. If indie devs had the resources to easily make graphics as advanced and voice every little thing in their games, they would, and their games would become as big.
The only reason it doesn’t happen is because they literally can’t do that with their resources, which are better spent elsewhere. But this is not an inherent advantage of indie games, in fact, it’s quite the disadvantage. I’d love if my indie games at least had the possibility of cutting edge graphics and voice for everything.
simply stop gaming. you can run tetris in your web browser. what more can you need?
I wish not all content was voice acted.
The eight main heroes are receiving an alert about the empire starting its invasion, and the hero’s cousin is leading the charge? That scene deserves good VA. It’s dramatic, plot important, and can get you invested in characters.
A farmer is giving you a radiant quest to kill an optional boss? That kind of thing absolutely doesn’t need VA. It even means that people cycling through content can speed-read his introduction, and aren’t forced to listen to horrendous voice acting.
