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Other Why do modern games require so much storage space?

Discussion in 'Gaming' started by Pete J, 19 Sep 2020.

  1. Bloody_Pete

    Bloody_Pete Technophile

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    I see this as I straddle several engineering teams and the difference in style from Embedded programmers compared to high level coders is stark. Plus a lot of high level coders have never programmed for low power machines, so its never been something they think about. While one team is trying to fight as much data into 64 bytes the other is using 10GB's because they've never thought not to!
     
  2. Gareth Halfacree

    Gareth Halfacree WIIGII! Lover of bit-tech Administrator Super Moderator Moderator

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    All that was old is new again...

    upload_2021-1-18_14-39-45.png

    (Yes, I did fire up DOSbox to grab that. No, I have no idea why it says Drive C has only 262MB of free space, 'cos the drive mapped as Drive C has... 299GB free(!))
     
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  3. wyx087

    wyx087 Homeworld 3 is happening!!

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    Medal of Honor Above and Beyond: 180GB. ~25GB of which are "gallery" videos totally unrelated to gameplay and could have been streamed.
    Didn't Quantum Break stream their TV-show segment? So rather than asking you to download and install multi-gigabytes of file you probably won't watch, they stream the content.

    But then steaming single player game content off internet is a huge No-No. Makes the game unplayable once they turn off the server.

    However, no matter how cheap storage get (6TB HDD £90), there is always more expensive faster storage (1TB NVMe £90) where games need to go. So I would always prefer the games to be as small as possible. Meaning anything that doesn't need quick local access should not be taking up space on my fast drives.

    Here's an idea: when installing, we are given the option to install to 2 locations: frequent assets to NVMe SSD, bulk assets to cavernous HDD.
     
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  4. sandys

    sandys Multimodder

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    Tiered storage does this for you, that's how my daughters machine works with storeMI or what ever it'scalled, fusedrive, it's painless.
     
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  5. Pete J

    Pete J Employed scum

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    Sorry Gareth, medium install for you. Guess you'll be thrashing that CD-ROM drive...
     
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  6. wyx087

    wyx087 Homeworld 3 is happening!!

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    If more games are like MoHAB (180GB), Asgard's Wrath (130GB), RDR2 (115GB), Halo MCC (107GB SP only), GTA5 (100GB). (They are current biggest games I have installed)

    I'll have to make a 128GB partition (its largest supported size, which is tiny IMO) on my NVMe and buy a 8TB HDD. I like having many games installed and rarely play them. :lol:
     
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  7. sandys

    sandys Multimodder

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    Its largest supported size is 256Gb for the free AMD one and 1Tb for the paid one (£20) but even so it seamlessly transfers what is frequently used to fast storage and out of if, so you don't even have to think about it even with 128Gb.

    You can do it all for free with Windows storage spaces if you put the work in with some powershell scripts.

    software raid - Storage spaces on Windows 10 and tiering - Super User
     
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  8. Anfield

    Anfield Multimodder

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    Pre-rendered videos mostly shouldn't exist anymore in games anyway.
    They should do it like the modern Tomb Raider games and program the videos to be rendered in engine using normal game assets.

    Saves a bunch of storage space and has the added benefits of supporting ultrawide and that customized characters can be represented in them.
     
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  9. Pete J

    Pete J Employed scum

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    A man after my own heart! Still have the Homeworld Remastered collection installed? 50GB for reasons...
     
  10. wyx087

    wyx087 Homeworld 3 is happening!!

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    Ha, you know me too well. HW Remastered and HW Desert of Kharak.

    To be fair, the videos for those 2 games cannot be achieved using in-game engine. One is actual WW2 footages or 360 VR video of museums. The other is essentially live action TV-show between missions.

    But yes, totally agree. Luckily most games seems to have done this.

    Thanks for that. I resized partitions and cleared 200GB on my faster 1TB OS drive, but after installing StoreMi it tells me need a clean, completely empty drive :grr:

    (fuzedrive FAQ says max supported size is 128GB, guess StoreMi is more evolved version)
     
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  11. sandys

    sandys Multimodder

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    I remember having to do some work with moving data about to install it, don't recall what, put it on my daughters 2400G systems that I built from mostly old crap I had, her system runs off of a 2.5" 1Tb ps4 drive which has to be the slowest spinner known to man :eek: alongside a small ssd from a laptop upgrade, it works well, obviously there will always be those times data has to come from the slow drive but really can't complain with its management certainly better than the old Intel caching setup I used to use back in the day, works with a portion of ram too, its a nice setup, I'm sure your slow drive will be a lot faster than this PoS.

    no storemi



    with storemi



    disk speed test with a bit of RAM disk cache.

    [​IMG]
     
    Last edited: 19 Jan 2021
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  12. Bloody_Pete

    Bloody_Pete Technophile

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    I think the real question on this thread thats emerging is: 'why am I such a data hoarder?' :p
     
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  13. Gareth Halfacree

    Gareth Halfacree WIIGII! Lover of bit-tech Administrator Super Moderator Moderator

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    Pfft. I'm currently ripping old CD-ROMs, and I'm up to 129GB with little more than magazine cover discs and weird OEM bundles like Geoff Hamilton's Garden Designer...

    (Only taking up 113GB of actual disc space, tho', 'cos I'm using btrfs with zstd compression.)
     
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  14. boiled_elephant

    boiled_elephant Merom Celeron 4 lyfe

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    I feel attacked.
     
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  15. TechBuggy

    TechBuggy What's a Dremel?

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    I only buy games that consume too much of my storage if it passes my gaming preferences. Well awesome graphics and stuff are a given to a huge size game so it comes down to how good the gameplay is for me. In short, I buy a game not because everyone wants it but because I want it. This way, it helps me to manage my limited storage space from the console to my external storage.
     
  16. boiled_elephant

    boiled_elephant Merom Celeron 4 lyfe

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    That separates you from like 99% of young gamers today. The number of parents who come to me wringing their hands going "all his friends play Fortnite and he's missing out, I need to buy him a gaming PC apparently!" makes me despair.
     
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  17. Revil0

    Revil0 What's a Dremel?

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  18. satisfiedwimp

    satisfiedwimp Minimodder

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    Storage space is my main issue as well! That's why I prefer to buy physical than digital games. I just leave my storage space for games that only sells digital.
     
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  19. boiled_elephant

    boiled_elephant Merom Celeron 4 lyfe

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    I did have this thought revisit me as I dug out my PS3, XBC and Gamecube games to put under the TV. They still work. They're so hassle-free. They never need updates, installs or new hardware. They don't change. I can come back to them 10 years later and they play just the same: sealed units of functioning offline code.

    In the heat of the 'now', the zeitgeist, we value the experience more than the product's permanence. We don't stop to consider what will happen to Destiny 2, World of Warcraft or Elite Dangerous in 10 years time, when we're buying the latest expansion pack and watching a huge update erase a bunch of content we previously paid for, replacing it with incrementally improved content. We live in the moment, a non-stop table service that refills our plate too quickly for us to get up and leave. But one day the restaurant will close. The cloud servers will go offline, the login will be rejected. The experience will be irretrievably lost.

    It took enthusiasts a decade to get bootleg vanilla WoW working independent of Blizzard's official support, and even then the experience wasn't perfect - and that was a relatively simple (if sprawling) game. They could probably never achieve it for Destiny 2 or any of the dozens of other huge, complex always-online modern games. One day a huge chunk of gaming culture will just cease to exist.

    We probably don't think about that enough. Not just in terms of money spent, but also in terms of art and history lost. DK64 will still boot up and run if you buy a cartridge on eBay. The ROMs are all archived for Amiga, Atari and Master System ii enthusiasts to revisit, study, speedrun and talk about forever. But the content and development history of these modern internet-assisted regularly-updated games will probably never be accessible to future generations of players or game historians.

    Uh... /tangent.
     
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  20. Pete J

    Pete J Employed scum

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    I hear what you're saying @boiled_elephant , but I think it unfortunately goes with the territory of increasing complexity. Off the top of my head, the examples I think of are mobile phones and TVs. When they first came out, they just worked. Now you get software updates for both!

    The luddite in me thinks that certain things should never have to be updated. I dread to think of the day that your toaster downloads the latest version of Windows Toaster Edition that is found to have a bug that leads to...God knows what.
     
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