Irrespective of the abundance of storage we now enjoy, and even though I could rationally understand the reasons, this will always make me raise an eyebrow or sigh.
I understand that 3D textures are large files, but surely there is some hideous bloat occurring to cause the explosion in size.
And outside of games, the same bloat occurs, so it’s not just textures. “Let’s ship an entire browser rendering engine with our app” hasn’t exactly helped.
See https://www.reddit.com/r/HiTMAN/comments/oqb7jc/how_is_hitma...
I am! But even then, imho sizes should correlate to the detail (graphics / sound), complexity & vastness of virtual worlds embodied in a game.
Not the ease with which developers can fill up the available space.
Yes these are related. But some kind of 1:1 correspondence was lost ages ago.
Optimizing for size, to squeeze out every last byte possible: who still does this in 2024?
The ratio has been shifting all this time. There wasn't a one time shift that happened once.
> Optimizing for size, to squeeze out every last byte possible: who still does this in 2024?
You can still find that in the demoscene. A few years ago https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.kkrieger made a big splash. (Well, it's actually been 20 years. How time flies. But they still make small demos and games today.)
For many of us it's an engineer's mindset. We appreciate games for their art and gameplay, and we also appreciate them for their engineering.
So it's a little sad to see that one aspect of game engineering become relatively extinct, even if it's the certainly the correct tradeoff given today's constraints.
The amount of technology and number and size of assets in a game now is just insane, it is in no way at all comparable to the garage projects for 8bit consoles.
Remember, games used to have to be ported - they were so locked into their particular platform/hardware that porting a game was essentially a total rewrite every single time. Nowadays we can write once, run on every single platform with just hooks into platform specific libs swapped out.
Modern day developers aren't stupid; we're just all used to our current environments, but I would bet that if we all needed to, we could just as easily jump back in to writing everything in asm and custom tailoring it for a particular CPU/hardware. But then modern games would be impossible to actually get finished.
> Modern day developers aren't stupid; we're just all used to our current environments, but I would bet that if we all needed to, we could just as easily jump back in to writing everything in asm and custom tailoring it for a particular CPU/hardware.
Some people could jump back in, but not all.
But that's actually progress! You needed to be a wizard to get anything done on eg an Atari 2600 at all. Nowadays, game development is accessible to more and more people.