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Team: Axis Industries
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Post Re: Smaller Client Download
Even if it was 2d, he'd still complain it's too big.

At least Lazerus doesn't complain about the size. He complains about a bunch other things, but not the actual size. And his computer is the very reason all the minimal specs support Windows 2000.


Tue Mar 14, 2017 8:02 pm
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Post Re: Smaller Client Download
The current size of all the content is 572MiB.

Breakdown:
Code:
  301.5MiB [##########] /Textures
  142.8MiB [####      ] /sound
  103.3MiB [###       ] /Models
   24.4MiB [          ] /UI
  320.0KiB [          ] /game_data
  188.0KiB [          ] /shaders
   56.0KiB [          ] /decls


When you choose to use DDS, the DDS textures are generated on your computer from the normal textures. The reason we use DDS is because it takes up less memory (rather than storage), which means it's faster to do stuff with them and send them to the GPU (as well as we can fit more in). Not all computers support DDS.

When you choose low quality textures, the texture size is just scaled down by 2 (so a quarter of the memory is required) when the texture is loaded.

When you choose the low quality setting, that does a bunch of stuff not really relevant to the amount of storage required by the client. For example, it'll use suns with less polys, turns off all shaders.

Quote:
Coloured-Polygon 3D-Graphics based client

This means either: Making new textures which are appropriately coloured or assigning colours automatically from available information. You're going to struggle to tell what's what and it'll look really bad.

Quote:
plain filled colour GUI

The GUI component is already pretty small, at 24MiB. We could probably get it smaller, though if we really wanted.

Quote:
Seriously, im sick of downloading 750 meg of mega huge textures that I dont use after I choose "DDS" and "LowQuality", every time I quit and decided to come back.

Each time we update the client, instead of forcing you to redownload everything, the patchbot does some math on everything you have to work out what needs to be updated and only that is downloaded. This means that you don't have to download "750 meg of mega huge textures".
Additionally, generating stuff like DDS textures, normal maps, etc on the user's computer means they don't ever need to be downloaded, reducing the download size.


Lastly, most games these days are massive because they contain high quality, pre-computed lightmaps and other textures. Lighting is an expensive thing to do (especially to do it right). In games where the maps are mostly static, e.g., the Halo games, these can be computed once in advanced and then quickly rendered in real time. Remember that for every texture you see in a game, generally there will also be bump/normal maps, possibly glow maps, specular maps, environment maps and light maps. If the game has different textures for different graphic settings, then those extra textures would be duplicated for each one.


TL;DR:
SS is small, the reasons given don't really work and it's mostly a one time thing anyway because we have the patchbot which only downloads that what needs downloading.

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Sun Mar 19, 2017 11:01 am
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Post Re: Smaller Client Download
Pixel wrote:
We have employed compressing textures down from 32bit to 16bit png's and that did compress it from 1.4GB to 600MB~. Could perform the task again on the newer textures to squeeze more compression in.

I do agree some more methods could be employed such as converting all the sound file formats to .ogg format.

Current reading from a Windows machine (Size on Disk):

decls 48KB
game_data 312KB
Models 103MB
shaders 160KB
sound 142MB
Textures 301MB
UI 23.7MB
Star Sonata.exe 6.14MB
patchbot.exe 628KB

When cache (dds) is generated it totals to 918MB on top (use ultra settings on client)


Ah yes Pixel, thankyou for making that information available!

I had assumed it may be something like that (graphics and sound!). Thus my point. Made because I download over insanely expensive "metered connection" ($20.00 a Gig!!!) and was hoping for something smaller maybe.

Glad to hear that you could possibly compress things down some more, it would make the game more (even..) affordable to the less "infrastructure/plan-fortunate" players!

Cheers.

:-)

P.S: Now that I take a closer second look at the numbers you've shown for the sound and graphics, and knowing what I do about such things; it would seem possible to me that the sound could possibly come down to not 15, but say, 30mb, and the graphics could easily come down to about 100mb, which should significantly reduce processor load and increase performance, not to mention playability on lower-texture-ram'ed gpu's (which would allow for more "mc'ing")! I never view a little wingship at the size of my entire monitor-screen, hehe :-O right. Thanks Pixel!

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Mon Aug 20, 2018 1:37 pm
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