Question on game size

[Squinky]

Howdy folks.

I haven't made a game in a loooooong time. But back then there seemed to be a stigma with making your game with a large file size. I see AGS now supports even higher resolution, and I am tempted to use it.

So with the passing of time has this standard changed? Is is okay to create large games?

Thanks.

[Technocrat]

I think the issue of large sizes was related to download speeds, but now that more people have a faster connection (and it no longer requires two hours and my phoneline to download), they're probably amenable to larger games these days. My games seem to be getting smaller, as I figure out how to more effectively use lower-colour graphics!

[Andail]

I don't think memory concerns should stop you from using high-res graphics. The only thing that could make a real impact on today's downloading times would be a huge soundtrack (non-midi) or video clips.

[Gilbert]

soundtrack

Also, speeches. TBH if the voice acting sux I'd rather play a game without it (this can also affect professional commercial games, like for example, this is the MAIN REASON the CD-ROM version of KQ5 is 1000000000x worse than the floppy version; and while the quality of the voice acting in LOOM CD is SUPERB, this is also the MAIN REASON the CD-ROM version is not as good as the original floppy version, since they sacrifice TOO MANY things because of that). It would be quite irritating if this adds to a significant portion of a game, especially for those with "full dialogue speeches".

[m0ds]

High res graphics must be the main perpetrator IMO. Rem's game is about 1.5gb in size, 400mb of that is soundtrack and speech, so the other gigabyte must be the high res graphics. File size definitely brings more problems, it certainly doesn't eradicate any - so the lower the size, the less problems you'll face when distributing it!

[Andail]

1 gig of images? That sounds a bit odd... even in a raw state, a 800x600 image can't exceed 2 megs, so that's 500 images, before compression. Is there lots of FMV or something?

[m0ds]

There's a lot of animation going on, many of the backgrounds seem animated (though it's probably just objects) but considering they're fluid animations (not like 4 or 5 frames more like 15-20) I'd presume that bumps up the file size. But you're right Andail, it'd be good to find out where the huge size is coming from, because it's mostly seen in FMV ags games...

[ThreeOhFour]

AGS's image compression is pretty terrible - not sure how much different it is if you select the option to compress the sprite file. The good thing is that the .exe will compress pretty well once you've zipped it up.

Mark/Remi, it'd be interesting to see how big the game is once zipped up compared to the size of the game uncompressed.

[m0ds]

The EXE is 1gb, although I don't have the final vox files, the ones I do make the total file size 1.23gb, and all those zipped up comes to 590mb.

[Squinky]

Cool, I'd figured times had changed

I am wanting to do full speech, hopefully that doesn't bloat up my game size too much.

[MurrayL]

In my experience it's almost definitely going to be down to your audio, especially if you're using WAV.

subAtomic has 13 8-bit-style sound FX (all < 1 sec long) and half a dozen short (< 10 sec) music loops. The sound FX were imported as WAV, and the music as OGG. The AudioCache folder for the game is 2.03MB, and the game came out at 24.5MB.

When I made Plan M, I was a lot more ambitious. It's got 43 individual sound FX and 17 music tracks, between 1 and 3 minutes long. This time I encoded both the FX and the music as OGG at 128kbps. This time around, the AudioCache folder clocked in at 14.6MB. The game itself, including audio.vox, is 20.1MB.

Yes - by including over 300% more sounds and music, I reduced the size of the game by 4.1MB. Somehow, it seems that AGS massively inflates the size of uncompressed audio files when they're built into the final game exe.

In case you're thinking that it must be to do with graphics instead, Plan M has 15 rooms at 640x400@32-bit. subAtomic has only 10. Plan M also has a custom font, more cursors, more animated objects, copious use of gradients (which don't compress well), and a whole boatload more characters doing more animations than subAtomic ever had. The only possibly culprit is audio.

As always, your own mileage may vary, but it's definitely something worth looking into. I've found that you can easily get away with 128kbps OGG for almost every audio file in the game, including most music. In fact I'd go a step further and say most sound effects lose nothing in the transition to 96kbps, or perhaps even less. Speech also compresses excellently without loss of fidelity. Compress, compress, compress.

[ThreeOhFour]

In the interests of testing, I just tried my current game, compiled with and without audio. 15 sound effects, all in .wav format, and 11 backgrounds at 32 bit, 320x240, and 272 sprites. With audio the compiled file was 9.8MB, without it it's 8MB.

After being zipped up, the game files (including music) are 4.7 MB with the sound included. Without the sound, it zips up to 3.6MB. (I can pull the sound files out easily because I'm using 3.1.2 at the moment for conversion reasons). This suggests that the graphics are being a lot more compressed when it's zipped up than when it's simply compiled into an .exe, surely?

My backgrounds average somewhere around 20,000 colours each, for interests sake (lots of gradiented shades).

[Vince Twelve]

Resonance clocks in at over 1GB uncompressed.  About 275MB of that is audio/video.  The rest is lots and lots of 320x240 graphics.

And to answer the original question, I also don't think there's any problem with large file sizes nowadays.

[Nikolas]

Hem...

It's not the music that's at fault. 50 minutes of music (Resonance had a bit less than that) should be at medium quality around 70 MBs total. SFX seem a bit more problematic, because some of them are so small that you are FORCED to use WAV (1 sec mp3/ogg doesn't work too well), so they raise up considerably. Plus you may need tens of sfx for a single BG, let alone a whole game the size of Resonance.

But the real hog is the voice acting. If music was 43-47 minutes long, the voice acting must've been some 4 hours or so (didn't get ALL the files, so I'm not too sure). Quality can be reduces with voice acting, and it doesn't show, but it still adds up considerably.

That's from the audio part.

[Andail]

Resonance clocks in at over 1GB uncompressed.  About 275MB of that is audio/video.  The rest is lots and lots of 320x240 graphics.

And to answer the original question, I also don't think there's any problem with large file sizes nowadays.

725MB of 320x240 graphics? This is quite astounding. I simply can't wrap my head around it. Does AGS inflate the file size instead of compressing it? Back in the day, adventure games with similar graphics came on a couple of floppies.
I reckon Monkey Island 2 weighed in on some 25MB... has Resonance got 30 times the amount of graphics? What am I missing?

Okay, colour depth plays a big part, and surely our backgrounds contain much more colours, but still...

[Radiant]

725MB of 320x240 graphics? This is quite astounding. I simply can't wrap my head around it. Does AGS inflate the file size instead of compressing it? Back in the day, adventure games with similar graphics came on a couple of floppies.
I reckon Monkey Island 2 weighed in on some 25MB... has Resonance got 30 times the amount of graphics? What am I missing?

More sprites, easily. Heroine's Quest already clocks in at 30 Mb on the sprite file alone.

Also, I'm pretty sure that AGS's sprite compression is something simple like RLE instead of a ZIP algorhythm. And, of course, 16 bit color depth doubles the size of everything.

[Vince Twelve]

Yeah, color depth definitely plays a part.  Also my liberal application of animations.

A lot of the file size in Resonance is from some 100-frame (or more) full-screen animations.  Explosions, fire, smoke.  There would be some days when I was working where I'd finish an animation, import it, and watch the file size jump 50-100 megs.  Some of the sprites/animations are larger than 320x240 because they'd be in a scrolling room and be across the whole thing.

We wound up with 9000 sprites.  I don't know exactly how many of those are smaller in file size (character sprites, inventory items) or larger (full-screen animations, GUI overlays, room background effects), but that comes to an average of ~85kb per sprite.  It adds up.

I posted this elsewhere before, but:



Some other stats:

Rooms: 77
Lines of code (including white space and commented out lines because I can't be arsed to figure it out otherwise): 106368 (ish)
Lines of recorded speech: 5167
Non-speech Audio tracks (sound fx and music): 304