Comment on [deleted]
BartyDeCanter@piefed.social 6 days ago
As others have said, it’s mostly audio and textures, with some of it being the choice of engine. Lossless CD quality audio and ultra high resolution textures and bump maps for a jillion triangle models take up a lot of space. The actual executables are relatively small, though certainly the layers and layers of frameworks that make up modern software development are somewhat to blame.
DahGangalang@infosec.pub 6 days ago
So it sounds like its an exchange of size for customizability.
If you had a different installer for each language and/or video quality, then each installation could be much smaller. But since we (gamers) want to be able to change texture quality “on the fly” via the settings menu, we have to deal with all the possible textures coming in the game files.
Does that sound like I have it right?
BartyDeCanter@piefed.social 6 days ago
That is definitely part of it, but there’s also just plain more textures and models because people complain if they see the same texture or models reused a lot, and they want ever increasing visual quality. An uncompressed 256x256 RGBA texture takes 256 kilobytes to store. A 4k version takes 16 megabytes.