This is a place to share greentexts and witness the confounding life of Anon. If you're new to the Greentext community, think of it as a sort of zoo with Anon as the main attraction.
Be warned:
If you find yourself getting angry (or god forbid, agreeing) with something Anon has said, you might be doing it wrong.
It doesn’t actually need 130gb of updates, that’s the fun part. They probably only made a couple gigabytes of changes at most, just their shitty folder/packing structure requires downloading every single ‘unit’ of the game again because they made minor changes
What the hell? Surely someone at their professional game development studio is capable of writing a patcher? It's not black magic.
But hosting and letting everyone download the whole file is cheaper for them.
Surely the bandwidth costs alone should be more expensive, no?
I assume the console / game store pays for the bandwidth, not them. No skin off their back
Depends.
On the hand hosting and bandwidth cost have come down significantly to the point where the price per gigabyte is in the 0.0 cent region. On the other hand, developers are incredibly expensive, especially when they could do something that results in even more value for the company.
At the end of the day, downloading the full file is a reliable and all in all cheap way of providing an update, even if it's annoying and frustrating as hell to download 138GB just because one bit was flipped.
Well, I know this one girl who's really good at repacking shit... maybe she could teach some of their devs!
I'm sure she could teach them to FIT the updates into a much smaller file.
Ark Survival Evolved over in the corner hoping nobody notices its 700GB+ if you download every map.
Ark is total madness. Every map has a copy of every dinosaur. Not just the dinos for that map, but all dinos in the game. That's because you can transfer dinos, so somebody may transfer a dino to your map from a mao that you don't have the DLC for. And you still need to be able to see and interact with that dino.
I wonder if the new Ark Ascended fixed that.
I'm no game dev, but did they not consider saving the dinos once and loading them in to each map as required?
That would be object oriented programming. They took the subject occidented antigramming approach to development.
subject occidented antigramming
I knew there was a cool technical term for what I've been doing all these years.
I've never heard of that phrase, but I like abject oriented programming. In this case, they're using the concept of inheritance, but with assets:
Inheritance is a way to retain features of old code in newer code. The programmer derives from an existing function or block of code by making a copy of the code, then making changes to the copy. The derived code is often specialized by adding features not implemented in the original. In this way the old code is retained but the new code inherits from it.
They probably tried and failed. IIRC the original Ark was build on a pre-release version of Unreal engine 4. There were probably loads of things missing or broken in that engine. When they couldn't make UE load assets from a shared storage location, it was probably just easier to ship all dinos with every map.
I seriously doubt that. Assets handling is one of the most important things in a game engine, and not having to duplicate every asset for every map, including for entitlements reasons (e.g DLC ownership) is an extremely basic feature.
It sounds more like they seriously misused blueprints and/or DataAssets. To be fair, epic games did say a bunch of sightly misleading things about them when they released the engine to the public, but anyone using the engine noticed that blueprints could dramatically bloat your install size and/or memory usage in some situations, and found some workarounds.
Also they really should have been following the engine's updates. Now I wonder if they're the reason why Epic insists that we should really avoid being too far behind the "current" engine version for games that are actively maintained...
Source : been working with UE4 (and 5) professionally since UE4.12
The new ark fixed nothing. Except semi playable frame rates. It's great if you want to run a game at 12fps on a 4090.
Need a fucking server farm to have that one installed because no one on that development team knows what they’re doing. Isn’t there some duplicate remover a fan made that slims it down by a significant margin?
I don't play ark, but if what I read in this thread is to be believed, I'm pretty sure you'd have to repackage the game which is a big copyright nono. Also you would have to redo it with pretty much every content patch. So, probably not.
I struggle to grasp how games can even fill up all of that disk space. Do they store all their textures uncompressed?
Uncompressed textures and uncompressed audio for all languages at once (this started with the 8th gen consoles because their shitty CPUs couldn't handle real-time decompression), so a lot of space is being taken up by audio that's never used in languages you don't understand because at some point in the last 20 years the gaming industry forgot how to create checkbox installers.
Titanfall started that, iirc. I wouldn't mind so much if they let you choose which languages you want installing.
At least some of the PS5 hardware is adding compression back again, so of those games are smaller on PS5 than on PS4.
CoD is an unoptimised piece of shit though. Their business model appears to be snuffing out the competition by filling your drive so you can't play anything else. The last Activision game I installed was the Tony Hawk remaster. I have no interest in CoD at all.
I make VRChat avatars and I've looked at the models for COD characters and weapons before.
The sheer amount of material slots on those things is crazy. Like a whole ass material for a tiny texture that's just like, the walkie talkie on a character. It's so unessciary and while excess materials isn't the only reason the game is unoptimized, it's very telling of how much optimizing they actually do (basically none).
I've played gorgeous indie games that take up less than a gig. Surely we can do better than 100+GB for a shooter.
btw size of wii u/switch games is pretty impressive.
BOTW is 10-15 gb with all dlcs and updates. (depends on console (wiiu/switch) and exact version)
TOTK is ~18gb and is the largest official Nintendo game
Mario Odyssey is just 5gb
And they look fantastic, though the art style certainly helps a ton.
I generally prefer indie games, so anything larger than 20GB feels huge. Most of the games I play are 5-15GB, and then something like RDR2 or Mass Effect Legendary comes along at > 100GB, which is about a dozen other games worth of space. Yeah, space is cheap and all that, but it just seems so unnecessary to have a good time.
I want you all to realize that elden ring, one of the most detailed, intricate, and eye pleasing games we have, is 60 gb. 60. And on consoles pushes it to 45 gb.
one of the most detailed, intricate, and eye pleasing games we have
I would have not thought of Elden Ring with this description. Maybe I played it to early and it got cleaned up a bit?
It is a very pretty game, but because of art direction, not high quality textures, which is what a lot of the space comes down to
I feel blessed I don't like FPS games in general so COD was never my thing.
That's more than half the capacity of the base edition of the new consoles.
Microsoft and Sony need to step in and establish a maximum file size for games. There's no excuse for a remake of a hallway shooter from 12 years ago to be that large.
Tripple A devs making their games not take up your entire hard drive challenge (100% impossible)
Kind of odd that anon wants to play a 130 GB fishing game, must have some really detailed fish...
The real conspiracy is that a big game requires you to delete or limit the number of competitors games. Not only is yhere no incentive to be smaller, there is actually a strategic incentive to be bigger.
"Asshole design"
call of doody just aint worth, there's a billion games just as good
At this point COD should sell a custom physical SSD Drive with their game installed, like game DVD in consoles
Until gamers get sick of it and sales dip it is never going to chaaaaaange 🙃