Game Size

[mjmjr25]

I might be missing the boat on this one, but why would a developer care how much hard-drive space you are using, particularly if we're referring to downloading for emulation purposes. If your referring to say downloading on a PS3/XBox/PC, I suppose it could play some small role, but not to the point of sacrificing graphics/audio or other facets of gameplay. Considering the relatively low cost of a 1TB EHD, these numbers seem fairly low anyways.

[DinnerX]

wii is 1gb nand

The NAND is only 512 MB.

[RyaNtheSlayA]

As you know I just downloaded RAGE which is a 700mb+ game for iOS. You do realize thats bigger than any N64 game, same as all psx games, and close to most Dreamcast games like Code Veronica and more.

I think developers do not care to make games in reasonable size any more. When you look back at games on SNES and NES you can't believe that such huge games like Final Fantasy is like 4mb or that Mario 64 is like 30mb! Metroid Prime on GC is 900mb, compared ti RAGE!

What went wrong? Does developers not care about size any more? I mean we still have bandwidth limit, and our devices are limited too(iphone+ipad=64Gb max!) also early xbox is 20GB. Wii has none I think...

its funny how you download a simple platformer's demo and its 80mb, while its just one level or so. Any one care to add to this subject?

Nothing went wrong. It's just developers using the extra space for things that we appreciate today. Lots of dialog, high resolution textures, and awesome music take up lots of space. It's not like space is hard to come by either, dual layer BluRays are 50gb and you can easily find 1tb hard drives for a very affordable price.

[RCBH928]

I must say hard drives are very affordable, but they cant go in my android or ipad.
I feel like they make games bloated in size. I think they can get same results for less size if they gave it a little thought. If we remember how games got cramped into weak consoles back then, we know how smart they used to program them. To prove my point, they dont even care to clear glitches before shipping a product. They just released 500mb patches to fix it later on.

I am amazed no one took my side and thought developers should take care to make games smaller in size, especially downloaded ones. I dont care about ones on disc, because its already stored on its own storage(unless we think about future emulation )

Deus Ex exe file at 14mb is pretty amazing. Is that all the programing code without the graphics?

[RyaNtheSlayA]

I must say hard drives are very affordable, but they cant go in my android or ipad.
I feel like they make games bloated in size. I think they can get same results for less size if they gave it a little thought. If we remember how games got cramped into weak consoles back then, we know how smart they used to program them. To prove my point, they dont even care to clear glitches before shipping a product. They just released 500mb patches to fix it later on.

I am amazed no one took my side and thought developers should take care to make games smaller in size, especially downloaded ones. I dont care about ones on disc, because its already stored on its own storage(unless we think about future emulation )

Deus Ex exe file at 14mb is pretty amazing. Is that all the programing code without the graphics?

That's just the .exe. Everything else including scripts, and code are elsewhere.

They do take steps to make things smaller, iOS games typically have highly compressed audio, and developers compress many things to get them to fit on DVDs. (Rage for instance will be using 3 DVDs on the 360.)

[Jrecee]

I believe rom file sizes are not directly comparable to the actual size of the original game. I don't have an answer to why that is, it's just what I've come to understand.

[vlame]

space needed to fill the rom size for the emu to read the game correctly.

[RCBH928]

so the rom is larger or smaller than the original game?

[Hobie-wan]

Another thing to think about is how much repetition there is in graphics on older games. Having a bunch of different clouds that move and look realistic in the sky takes a lot more space for data than the same little 3 color cloud repeated over and over in the sky in SMB.

[MrPopo]

so the rom is larger or smaller than the original game?

Well, essentially what happens is that the size of a chip is in distinct powers of 2. Because of how computer architecture works the console expects games to be of a size in a power of 2. So a game might only take up a little over half of the ROM chip but the full ROM file is bigger, as you need to pad it up to make it appear like the original chip.

Comparing 2D with 3D games is very misleading, because with sprites you can more easily use repetition. Frequently with textures you need a lot more textures for a given class of object because different varients (different shapes of rocks) need different textures to look good. Early 3D games didn't even use textures a lot of the time; instead they'd just use shading. A good example is Mario 64; most of the game is done just using shading and gradients instead of textures, which saves a ton of space.

Compression is also tricky to use, because it takes time to uncompress a texture/sound file. So you need to create a balance of uncompressed high-frequency assets with compressed low-frequency assets that yhou hopefully preload.