Huge games with mediocre graphics

[Yngling]

Honestly, I'm don't hate games made in Honey Select, Koikatsu, The Sims, TK17 or any other "easy" way to create images for games.

I believe they have their place for various reasons.

But, I also notice that a lot of those games are quite huge. A lot of them are over 2-3 GB or more.
This I do not understand.

I mean, the graphics will still be mediocre, regardless of the screen resolution.

If anything, games which such graphics could be compressed much more and therefore be smaller compared to e.g. Daz games.

There must be something I'm missing here, but what?

 

[PrinceOfShades]

Most of the games you're playing show you screenshots of the game. You're not actually in game.
The engine you use to create those screenshots (Koikatsu, Honey Select, DAZ 3D) impacts the visual aspect of the game. But they still remain screenshots, just more beautiful screenshots.
At the end of the day, all screenshots are virtually the same - a bunch of pixels put in a matrix. Resolution matters a lot because it's basically the number of pixels. Apart from that, the pixels just have different colors.
An image you take in Koikatsu is the same as Daz 3D in terms of file size.
Of course, different factors affect this but not by that much.

There can be multiple reasons why a game is big, including:
1. The developers don't care about or aren't capable of properly optimizing them. Using smaller images for a character changing location instead of changing the entire image, using the WEBP format instead of PNG and so on.
2. An engine with real-time rendering such as Koikatsu's CharaStudio allows one to take screenshots and create animations much faster. For Daz 3D, you can be looking at 20 minutes per photo or even more. And for animations it takes way longer to make into a video. Compared to Koikatsu's instant photos, this is a huge amount of time.
This, in turn, results in games that have way more photos and allow the developers to focus on the story. In other words, it's faster to create the game if you can just take a screenshot and be done with it. Bigger games.

 

[Adabelitoo]

To the reasons said above, have in mind that doing animations in Honey Select/Koikatu is much easier (because they are built-in) than even the easier animations on DAZ, so a big part of the size can be because of animations. I make a Koikatu game which is currently at 1,14GB and 660MB are just animations.

For the record, those 660MB are WEBM files done based on PNGs while the other 506MB are WEBP. I could make those PNGs files into WEBP and then into WEBM which would reduce the size, but meh, not for now.

And believe it or not, those game do have a rendering process. It's much simpler and faster than DAZ, but the CGs you see are much more complex than the game hitting the "Impr Pant" key.

 

[Yngling]

The engine you use to create those screenshots (Koikatsu, Honey Select, DAZ 3D) impacts the visual aspect of the game. But they still remain screenshots, just more beautiful screenshots.
At the end of the day, all screenshots are virtually the same - a bunch of pixels put in a matrix. Resolution matters a lot because it's basically the number of pixels. Apart from that, the pixels just have different colors.
An image you take in Koikatsu is the same as Daz 3D in terms of file size.

Yes, but my point is that compression is not going to decrease the subjective image quality too much.

If I were to spend hours rendering a beautiful scene in Daz, then maybe it would be worth it to put in the game at a very high resolution. There are games whose renders are literally breathtaking. There I would not want to reduce image size to end up with a smaller overall game package.

Given Koikatsu, I don't care about the resolution at all. It may be 1280×800 or even smaller with the highest possible lossy compression, the end result would still be more or less the same. So I'd rather take a smaller total game package rather than have those renders in 4K or whatever.

It's a different trade off.

In my very personal opinion, I play Koikatsu games because of their stories and see the images purely as supporting the story. Some Daz games on the other hand I play just for the images even though the story sucks.

To the reasons said above, have in mind that doing animations in Honey Select/Koikatu is much easier (because they are built-in) than even the easier animations on DAZ, so a big part of the size can be because of animations. I make a Koikatu game which is currently at 1,14GB and 660MB are just animations.

That's a very good point but there are also plenty of such haves without animations.

 

[Jofur]

Given Koikatsu, I don't care about the resolution at all. It may be 1280×800 or even smaller with the highest possible lossy compression, the end result would still be more or less the same. So I'd rather take a smaller total game package rather than have those renders in 4K or whatever.

I completely disagree myself. The easiest way to get me to play something made in a game engine is to have a clear and sharp look to the images. Due to the games being forced to use real-time rendering tech they need all the help they can get to not look like a blurry mess.

While I don't know how hard it is to do in Renpy and RPGM, making a low-res version for the people who want is a decent compromise, and at least if you are using something like Unity it would be incredibly painless. Granted I don't know how big that demographic actually is.

 

[Mrsloap]

IMO it's a combination of content output ease provided by using HS and shitty video format support from Renpy.

You see...by using HS as a render source the devs save a lot of time with animations unlike otherwise they would do using DAZ. With HS ideally they would just have to load a premade animation, record their screen and add the video to the game db in renpy. However the latests versions of renpy no longer support less compressed video formats such as mp4, only shitty looking compressed crap like ogg, 3pg, avi and stuff like that. These more compressed video formats generate a very perceptible quality difference between the screenshots/renders and the animations(video). Because of this, Devs are forced to extract individual frames from the recorded video (in a high quality low compression format) and add them to the game db and make a code level renpy animations(forgot the name for it): where the program queries the individual pictures(jpg,png,...) from the game files and display them in sequence. AT this rate, if you want sharp, good looking animations with a high frame count(+30fps) it will consume a whole lot more space than just playing that video. Therefore generating those huge game sizes you speak of. I know the render quality sucks but a perceptible disparity with the animations quality would make it even worse.

Sry for the broken english, cuddos from Brazil

 

[Fatalmasterpiece]

IMO it's a combination of content output ease provided by using HS and shitty video format support from Renpy.

You see...by using HS as a render source the devs save a lot of time with animations unlike otherwise they would do using DAZ. With HS ideally they would just have to load a premade animation, record their screen and add the video to the game db in renpy. However the latests versions of renpy no longer support less compressed video formats such as mp4, only shitty looking compressed crap like ogg, 3pg, avi and stuff like that. These more compressed video formats generate a very perceptible quality difference between the screenshots/renders and the animations(video). Because of this, Devs are forced to extract individual frames from the recorded video (in a high quality low compression format) and add them to the game db and make a code level renpy animations(forgot the name for it): where the program queries the individual pictures(jpg,png,...) from the game files and display them in sequence. AT this rate, if you want sharp, good looking animations with a high frame count(+30fps) it will consume a whole lot more space than just playing that video. Therefore generating those huge game sizes you speak of. I know the render quality sucks but a perceptible disparity with the animations quality would make it even worse.

Sry for the broken english, cuddos from Brazil

Do you mean ATL?
Also a lot of devs use PNG or WEBM for perceived quality but JPEG on the highest settings makes a barely perceptible difference and is only a fraction of the size.
Have also seen users bash releases because of small file sizes. "This game is only 300mb, it must not be very good!"

 

[woody554]

none of the games utilize even the 1080 resolution fully, even the better DAZ renders have nowhere near enough information to saturate a full HD image. I doubt even 720.

the only situation where we ever see resolution problems is when an object in the scene has its texture stretched bigger than half the resolution, but that's really not caused by the screen resolution.

but people look at the number and think they're getting more when its QHD or 4k. or when their shitty tiny phone screen has a ridiculously high resolution when you struggle to see pixelation in a 1080 image on a 40" screen. it's all wasted resolution, but try telling people that.