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Comment by landr0id | Hacker News Reader

>The crazy thing he mentioned is that if there was zero compression, the latest COD games genuinely had over 1 terabyte of uncompressed assets.

I think what this shows is there should be smart delivery of assets. Before installing perhaps you should be able to choose your graphical fidelity and only download assets related to that fidelity level and below.

This makes manifest building and delivery more complicated, and probably UX too, but I'm sure it's a problem that the infra/marketplace provider (Valve, Epic, Microsoft, Sony, etc.) could solve and make easy for devs.

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> I think what this shows is there should be smart delivery of assets. Before installing perhaps you should be able to choose your graphical fidelity and only download assets related to that fidelity level and below.

War Thunder does this - in the game launcher you can choose whether you want the highest resolution textures and most detailed models or not. You can even get a minimal client without vehicle interiors as well (only 3rd person camera available).

It makes a lot of sense to me, to the point where it's surprising that all games aren't embracing this approach. I mean, I don't have a lot of storage, nor good hardware - why should I be forced to download high detail assets that I'll never even see because instead all of the models will be at lower LODs and all the textures will be of a lower resolution.

It feels like the game engine developers don't really care about bundling assets by fidelity and each game acts like it just owns your entire disk.

That's precisely why I don't really play AAA titles anymore and mostly go for pixel graphics and indie titles. There are actually surprisingly few well optimized games out there.

CoD itself can download some high-resolution textures during gameplay:

https://www.charlieintel.com/warzone-on-demand-texture-strea...

I've never tested how much bandwidth it uses. It seems a little crazy but also neat.

Microsoft already has something like this for Xbox -- you can mark certain assets as not required or only needed for higher-end xboxes or languages.

The Diablo 4 beta had this option, drastically reducing the download size if you didn't need 4K

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