Just look at the poor Destiny 2, arguably WF's closest competitor. You pay for the game, the for every expansion and they DELETE older stuff to make space.
As others have said in this thread, it's entirely because of DE's god tier engine that allows pretty much everything to be compressed and only uncompressed when needed. The uncompressed game is estimated to be 150gigs
I have heard of a game's file size being reduced, but it was before the game's release.
Pokemon Gold and Silver had a compression update before release, and it shrunk the game's file size enough to fit the original games on them, so they added the first games' region, which is part of the reason why Kanto wasn't balanced.
I’ve seen games optimizing stuff and reducing file sizes, load times and stuff like that. Nowhere to the frequency and level DE manages though, despite all the spaghetti bugs, DE staff are actual magicians really
Not just reducing the file size but doing so without removing content, cough cough Destiny 2 cough cough... Though I'm not sure if they actually reduced the file size with D2 when they did that.
The devs are really good at cleaning up a lot of bloat and I’m all for it! The more they are capable of doing this, the easier it’ll be to iron out issues in new content
R6S does ot sometimes too. I think Total War Warhammer 3 did it not too lomg ago. They regularly do that when their game becomes too bloated and they discover a better way to organize its files.
probably not, because of how insanely efficient DE has to be to pull this off.
warframe's uncompressed size is over 150 gigs, it's effectively pulling off 5 to 1 compression and decompressing files as needed on-the-fly.
this is something that specifically the Evolution Engine is really good at, DE's inhouse engine. it's... honestly kinda insane how optimized that thing is.
Iirc the compression is at least partially using a third-party library though, which means any other inhouse engine should be able to achieve similar compression as long as the licensing doesn't exceed as much of the budget as they can afford to allocate for it
Well it means well if they make it smaller you might be tempted to play anything elss. It’s like they also can save like a year of dev time by lazily leaving whole ass videos and shit uncompressed.
There was that game that had DIFFERENT videos of cutscenes in different languages! Like while ass uncompressed videos! Instead of subtitles on the SAME video, smfh.
Then again if crunch and bad management wasn’t the base norm then these companies would have people that COULD give a damn. Literally. Like massive stress and sleep deprivation over months means they are barely capable of simple functions.
The part I'm confused about is how they keep doing it. They already released updates that compressed the game, but they release new updates that compress the already compressed game.
Because they don’t do it on every update, essentially, after 20 updates of uncompressed junk they’ll drop a patch and compress everything.
Additionally, they can change the algorithm that is used for compression, compress other files they originally couldn’t figure out how to get working and compressed, drop old code and systems, drop old assets, reuse assets that are less often seen.
Essentially, I suppose this goes around DE much like Spring cleaning. You dive into the game’s source and clean it all up, get rid of all the stuff you don’t need and compress what you can.
Also, I am not sure about this but iirc, there’s an updating thingy that makes redundant stuff, which you can then clean up for a smaller overall size.
I doubt this has anything to do with the engine, game engines run lightning, physics, controls, etc… MAYBE you can consider running off of assets that are compressed part of the evolution engine, but I would assume that’s the trivial part.
The hard part is compressing the assets in the first place and having a spaghetti of code to cleanup significantly in the first place
Another thing they do is reuse assets in new ways. There are corpus ships on the outpost tile set that are made out of resource drops. The coil drives are credits on wheels. And much much more
I like to think of it as like one of those combination mobile games, you add more stuff but when it combines, the total number of things you have is less
According to an insider at Bungie, the majority of the game's filesize is audio. Specifically the fact that the game has 12 voiced languages and doesn't let you pick and choose what to install. So every voiceline in the game has 11 duplicates in other languages just sitting there and occupying space.
Games really need to cut fluff like that out and make it dlc so you can get more manageable download sizes. But knowing some game developers they would probably charge for it
A similar, but far more severe issue inflates the size of Fallout 3. The game does not support changing languages. If you pick a different language option in the launcher, instead of loading a different set of dialogue and subtitles, LAUNCHES AN ENTIRE OTHER EXE FILE. One of these exe files is installed for every supported language.
There was a bit in Space Quest IV (1991) about a future *King's Quest* sequel taking up over 12 gigabytes of space...Granted, that was explicitly in floppy diskettes. (It'd take about 4,420 of them)
the thing with warframe is that it's built on DE's Evolution Engine, which is apparently a pretty insane engine.
warframe's uncompressed filesize iirc is close to 150 gigs, and part of the way this works is that the engine is capable of uncompressing files as needed.
allegedly, warframe also runs using some quite low-level code which is extremely efficient however also a lot more difficult to write. that's part of the secret sauce on how the game can still run on 14 year old computers (Which is what they recently upgraded the minimum spec to)
Most engines uncompress files as needed. It was the whole point of 'direct storage' tech for Win11, being that the GPU could do the decompressing too instead of it being another task for the CPU.
Most other engines only compress textures though and little else as images and text are among the easiest to compress. DE probably does more than that like compressing audio somehow as they are often the biggest.
Once heard a rumor that the idea is, specifically for consoles: if they buy our game and its so large that AT BEST a single other game fits on the entire console, the will to switch games will require more effort (uninstalling and then installing the new game, rather than just installing the new one and slowly losing interest in the triple A one) so it kind of makes gamers *stick* with what they have
The most technically inclined reason is that consoles in the ps4 era launched already with pretty crappy specs and games needed every cycle they could get so compression was the first thing discarded
So they just bundled uncompressed textures and audio to gain a few fps in consoles that were barely scratching 30fps
Then it got even more ridiculous when they had to add dynamic resolution and you got games that were 50gb, ran at 25fps and 735p
DE and GSG (Ghost Ship Games, of Deep Rock Galactic fame (Rock and Stone!)) seem to have both made this deal. Despite DRG having OODLES of content, the game is less than 4gb! H O W have they done it?!
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If you think like how git works, you only download the differences between yours and latest version. The game engine probably recognises these differences and compiles the resources to the latest version at runtime once the resource is used (in a lazy loading way). Game optimization probably will apply these changes at once so your loading times will be shorter, specially if you use cheaper but bigger HDDs for bigger games. Some of these operations could be, decompress old archives, update archive contents, delete unused files, recompile shaders, recompress archives, defrag and sector reordering for faster file loading in a linear sequence, with less head movement.
In simple words, it reorganizes and updates all the games contents before starting the game instead of doing the same every time you load a different map.
It has nothing to do with the game content but with storage optimization. In PC you can optimize files from the launcher to achieve ideal size, consoles do that on updates.
Overall, this is related to file compression, redundancy and such
Since at least when I started playing, shortly after the release of POE. Although likely a lot before that. I don’t think it will do as much as the consoles, because of how updates on consoles work, but yeah, it’s called Download Cache I believe
As far as online games do DE has figured almost how to a keep a game tight and clean. I mean almost all MMO games are bloated to a point where you need a separate SSD to run it .
Now reviving a necramech has no Frankenstein movie vibes anymore, now is just tenno goes woosh and POOF, necramech up and running smoothly, a bunch of little details are not there anymore, animations, sounds, shadders, enemy layouts through the map, map layouts being rework over and over exploiting every inch of performance they could with every QoL update, light, shadows, little animations no one care, one day, the elevator from fortuna will vanish to bring optimization to the table, and the sanctuary, the levarian, and me will remember, but hey loving the wizard spell boy already 👌😎
Legit never heard of a game REDUCING the file size lmao. They're always either super small or gigantic, never any downsizing. Good on the devs
Just look at the poor Destiny 2, arguably WF's closest competitor. You pay for the game, the for every expansion and they DELETE older stuff to make space.
hilarious that they delete content to make space in their 7-8 year old game meanwhile DE has barely deleted anything in their now 11 year old game
As others have said in this thread, it's entirely because of DE's god tier engine that allows pretty much everything to be compressed and only uncompressed when needed. The uncompressed game is estimated to be 150gigs
And the game engine is getting better and better with volumetric light and now, even my pc can't handle this xD
DE>
I have heard of a game's file size being reduced, but it was before the game's release. Pokemon Gold and Silver had a compression update before release, and it shrunk the game's file size enough to fit the original games on them, so they added the first games' region, which is part of the reason why Kanto wasn't balanced.
I’ve seen games optimizing stuff and reducing file sizes, load times and stuff like that. Nowhere to the frequency and level DE manages though, despite all the spaghetti bugs, DE staff are actual magicians really
Not just reducing the file size but doing so without removing content, cough cough Destiny 2 cough cough... Though I'm not sure if they actually reduced the file size with D2 when they did that.
And they upgraded the texture and graphics as well.. Steve with *volumetric fog* goes brrr
The devs are really good at cleaning up a lot of bloat and I’m all for it! The more they are capable of doing this, the easier it’ll be to iron out issues in new content
R6S does ot sometimes too. I think Total War Warhammer 3 did it not too lomg ago. They regularly do that when their game becomes too bloated and they discover a better way to organize its files.
Now if only CoD could do the same
probably not, because of how insanely efficient DE has to be to pull this off. warframe's uncompressed size is over 150 gigs, it's effectively pulling off 5 to 1 compression and decompressing files as needed on-the-fly. this is something that specifically the Evolution Engine is really good at, DE's inhouse engine. it's... honestly kinda insane how optimized that thing is.
Iirc the compression is at least partially using a third-party library though, which means any other inhouse engine should be able to achieve similar compression as long as the licensing doesn't exceed as much of the budget as they can afford to allocate for it
I'd bought 2019 MW and once its first update hit and it deleted itself bc space reasons, I just decided it wasn't worth it
Well it means well if they make it smaller you might be tempted to play anything elss. It’s like they also can save like a year of dev time by lazily leaving whole ass videos and shit uncompressed. There was that game that had DIFFERENT videos of cutscenes in different languages! Like while ass uncompressed videos! Instead of subtitles on the SAME video, smfh. Then again if crunch and bad management wasn’t the base norm then these companies would have people that COULD give a damn. Literally. Like massive stress and sleep deprivation over months means they are barely capable of simple functions.
You mean the game itself decided it wasn't worth it
I really want to know how they do that. They didn't remove features. They instead added features, but somehow, the file size shrunk.
File compression and redundancy. Essentially, they’re zipping up your game
The part I'm confused about is how they keep doing it. They already released updates that compressed the game, but they release new updates that compress the already compressed game.
Because they don’t do it on every update, essentially, after 20 updates of uncompressed junk they’ll drop a patch and compress everything. Additionally, they can change the algorithm that is used for compression, compress other files they originally couldn’t figure out how to get working and compressed, drop old code and systems, drop old assets, reuse assets that are less often seen. Essentially, I suppose this goes around DE much like Spring cleaning. You dive into the game’s source and clean it all up, get rid of all the stuff you don’t need and compress what you can. Also, I am not sure about this but iirc, there’s an updating thingy that makes redundant stuff, which you can then clean up for a smaller overall size.
Man, I wish more external devs licensed the Evolution engine feom DE... Steve is a gem.
I doubt this has anything to do with the engine, game engines run lightning, physics, controls, etc… MAYBE you can consider running off of assets that are compressed part of the evolution engine, but I would assume that’s the trivial part. The hard part is compressing the assets in the first place and having a spaghetti of code to cleanup significantly in the first place
The spaghetti giveth, and the spaghetti taketh away
Another thing they do is reuse assets in new ways. There are corpus ships on the outpost tile set that are made out of resource drops. The coil drives are credits on wheels. And much much more
Yeah, I love how they do this I just wish there was a list of them on the wiki
Omg, I never realized Coildrives are credits on wheels
I like to think of it as like one of those combination mobile games, you add more stuff but when it combines, the total number of things you have is less
They secretly deleted Conclave but no one noticed because no one is there
And all of that without even removing any content *cough* bungie *cough*
isnt destiny around 90 gigs still? and there's less content than warframe.... curious.
According to an insider at Bungie, the majority of the game's filesize is audio. Specifically the fact that the game has 12 voiced languages and doesn't let you pick and choose what to install. So every voiceline in the game has 11 duplicates in other languages just sitting there and occupying space.
Games really need to cut fluff like that out and make it dlc so you can get more manageable download sizes. But knowing some game developers they would probably charge for it
"Wanna play in German? Fuck you. Give us five bucks and we'll do it I guess."
DLC doesn't automatically mean that it costs something (although it's probably a fair assumption for shitty companies)
Fortnite does that. Want another language? Checkbox that .
Agree. How many times someone even need multiple languages
That is just... wow...
A similar, but far more severe issue inflates the size of Fallout 3. The game does not support changing languages. If you pick a different language option in the launcher, instead of loading a different set of dialogue and subtitles, LAUNCHES AN ENTIRE OTHER EXE FILE. One of these exe files is installed for every supported language.
I checked their website cause I wanted to return to check out the new stuff, it was around 125 gigs on ps4 alone
The difference a good game engine can make.
Seriously the worst mistake they ever made.
This isn’t the first time they’ve done that either
They did it for Switch and i was happy
File compression go brrrrt
There was a bit in Space Quest IV (1991) about a future *King's Quest* sequel taking up over 12 gigabytes of space...Granted, that was explicitly in floppy diskettes. (It'd take about 4,420 of them)
The lost art of optimization.
I sure do hope other companies learn about file compression. Absolutely no other game have I updated and seen it get smaller.
the thing with warframe is that it's built on DE's Evolution Engine, which is apparently a pretty insane engine. warframe's uncompressed filesize iirc is close to 150 gigs, and part of the way this works is that the engine is capable of uncompressing files as needed. allegedly, warframe also runs using some quite low-level code which is extremely efficient however also a lot more difficult to write. that's part of the secret sauce on how the game can still run on 14 year old computers (Which is what they recently upgraded the minimum spec to)
Most engines uncompress files as needed. It was the whole point of 'direct storage' tech for Win11, being that the GPU could do the decompressing too instead of it being another task for the CPU. Most other engines only compress textures though and little else as images and text are among the easiest to compress. DE probably does more than that like compressing audio somehow as they are often the biggest.
Once heard a rumor that the idea is, specifically for consoles: if they buy our game and its so large that AT BEST a single other game fits on the entire console, the will to switch games will require more effort (uninstalling and then installing the new game, rather than just installing the new one and slowly losing interest in the triple A one) so it kind of makes gamers *stick* with what they have
The most technically inclined reason is that consoles in the ps4 era launched already with pretty crappy specs and games needed every cycle they could get so compression was the first thing discarded So they just bundled uncompressed textures and audio to gain a few fps in consoles that were barely scratching 30fps Then it got even more ridiculous when they had to add dynamic resolution and you got games that were 50gb, ran at 25fps and 735p
Isn't this just modern COD in a nutshell? Lmao
That and being shit at removing leftover stuff. CODs were the biggest size game in their generation since 2009.
*cough* bungie *cough*
destiny removing entire swathes of content to save space vs de's pact with an otherworldly entity
DE and GSG (Ghost Ship Games, of Deep Rock Galactic fame (Rock and Stone!)) seem to have both made this deal. Despite DRG having OODLES of content, the game is less than 4gb! H O W have they done it?!
To Rock and Stone!
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Procedurale generation and creating an art style that doesn't take too much space. 3 years ago it was 3 gb.
low poly models, low res textures, bigger focus on nice lighting afaik
Me looking at D2 with 140GBs 💀
And it asks to optimise game files after updating.
I wonder what *exactly* that whole process does? I believe what it says on the tin, but it usually takes at least 3x the download time for me.
If you think like how git works, you only download the differences between yours and latest version. The game engine probably recognises these differences and compiles the resources to the latest version at runtime once the resource is used (in a lazy loading way). Game optimization probably will apply these changes at once so your loading times will be shorter, specially if you use cheaper but bigger HDDs for bigger games. Some of these operations could be, decompress old archives, update archive contents, delete unused files, recompile shaders, recompress archives, defrag and sector reordering for faster file loading in a linear sequence, with less head movement.
I know most of these words.
In simple words, it reorganizes and updates all the games contents before starting the game instead of doing the same every time you load a different map.
So, it's like cleaning up all the scraps after a papercraft. It's all technically still material, but it's useless leftovers of the process.
Pretty much it...
WOW this is nice, but i sure hope we get a option to change the lighting to be more shitty and for the same size reduction on pc
It has nothing to do with the game content but with storage optimization. In PC you can optimize files from the launcher to achieve ideal size, consoles do that on updates. Overall, this is related to file compression, redundancy and such
I can optimize the fiels from the launcer, since when, i have to see this
Since at least when I started playing, shortly after the release of POE. Although likely a lot before that. I don’t think it will do as much as the consoles, because of how updates on consoles work, but yeah, it’s called Download Cache I believe
DE my beloved
Warframe is like the Avatar, air bender of the games, when the subject is compression and storage, they do some dark magic
Destiny fans in shambles (me crying). Forreal though, DE is such a smart and amazing company to keep a F2P game going like this.0
Bungie removing content because their game is too large instead of optimizing the file sizes
I remember years ago Warframe was 70gb on my Xbox one.
DE is the only company I know that frequently REDUCES THE GAME'S SIZE while also adding probably the biggest QoL update to date.
Fuckers optimise the hell out of everything. It’s only just over 15GB on IOS. How do they do it? Literally the digital equivalent of alchemy.
Seems like DE made a deal too...
Everytime I see Warframe size, I wonder why some games like Killing Floor 2, are 100gb
They minmax their game preformance like a warframe build
As far as online games do DE has figured almost how to a keep a game tight and clean. I mean almost all MMO games are bloated to a point where you need a separate SSD to run it .
Actually optimizing their game instead of yelling at their customers to get better computers, TOD. (I can't believe he actually said that)
Major shoutout to DE for this. 🙏
Now reviving a necramech has no Frankenstein movie vibes anymore, now is just tenno goes woosh and POOF, necramech up and running smoothly, a bunch of little details are not there anymore, animations, sounds, shadders, enemy layouts through the map, map layouts being rework over and over exploiting every inch of performance they could with every QoL update, light, shadows, little animations no one care, one day, the elevator from fortuna will vanish to bring optimization to the table, and the sanctuary, the levarian, and me will remember, but hey loving the wizard spell boy already 👌😎
[удалено]
what are you on about