Reducing size of renders

[OhWee]

Random thoughts:

People usually don't choose to not play games because of a slight/almost imperceptible loss in image quality, especially if it results in a much more reasonable download size.

But a number of people DO pass on games if the download size is too large. Especially if they are on metered connections... I've personally passed on several games because the download size was over 3GB... and of course then you just lost the associated hard drive space for the huge download size of that game...

if you are doing the Patreon thing, well if the download size is huge, that may mean you just lost some potential customers that get turned off by the large download sizes...

Ultra quality is fine if you are doing art for art's sake, but for porn games most people won't even notice the loss in quality. Sure, photography/image editing snobs might, but 95% of your target audience won't, unless you REALLY dial down the quality. And yeah, most people aren't ever going to notice whether it's a .png or a .jpg they are looking at, at any given point in your game. They are more focused on the dialogue and action...

Finally, you can always go with the best of both worlds approach to appease everyone, offering a 'high quality' version as well as a 'regular version'. and maybe charge a tiny bit extra for the higher quality images if you are greedy, i.e. make it a perk for your higher level patrons...

There's a reason that Pepe is so popular around here (he's the one that compresses a number of games for us). He fills a need, because time wasted waiting on downloads is time you could be playing the game already, and hard drive space disappears too fast already...

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- So, short form, if this bothers you, make two versions (regular and high quality) and let your patrons decide which is best for them.
- Otherwise, if you are deciding between one or the other, keep in mind that you may lose more potential patrons due to large download sizes than you will for a slight reduction in image quality that most people won't be able to detect anyways...

 

[gue5t]

@OhWee the whole idea of this thread was to find the balance between the two, the problem is there is a lot of tools that claim to save space without quality loss in the process but in fact they do exactly that. For example @Studio Errilhl claim a few post ago turned out to be false as expected and the example he provided proves it (you have to use the -z 9 parameter when creating the WebP file in order to produce a lossless version resulting in 1 146 930 bytes WebP file made from the beach_morning.png provided):


beach_morning.webp at 5 tolerance ^


beach_morning.webp at 50 tolerance ^ (still a few Red dots, not sure if they'll be viable here)


beach_morning_lossy.png at 5 tolerance ^

P.S. Black means no difference, Blue means at or below tolerance and Red means above tolerance level. Attached is a zip with the original files since the forum is resizing & compressing images uploaded to it.

 

[OhWee]

Yes I understand well what your blue/red pics are showing (i.e. illustrating where the differences in color, etc. are.).

My point still stands though. If adult gaming is a revenue stream for you, IMHO the size of the download will have a greater effect on how much you stand to gain or lose monetarily than slight reductions to quality will, if your game is crossing say the 1 GB threshold (maybe even a little less for some people). 95% of your patrons aren't going to notice the difference, unless the quality loss is huge (say dialing a .jpg down to 30% quality in Photoshop). Even then they may not care, as they simply just want to play your game.

That's not to say that they will forgive bad rendering in general. If you have a significant amount of arms colliding/embedding in each other and similar such, clothing with skin poking through, etc, well that's your laziness for not fixing that, and people may take note...

You can always offer HQ versions as extras/bonuses/etc. as Patreon perks and such. And, as I suggested, it's pretty easy to offer both. Just run your image folder through PNGoo or some other converter to generate your slightly lower quality versions. A number of these will run in the background, so you don't have to edit each pic manually...

This keeps both camps happy.
- Those that are concerned with download size or the amount of time to download can get the 'regular' or 'lite' version.
- And those that actually care about getting the absolute best quality available can grab the HQ version instead... plus it makes them feel extra special.

I think the 'HQ version for higher ranked patrons' thing has merit. People can raise their donation to get the HQ version once the game is complete, if they don't want to donate that amount every month, but are inclined to give you a little extra for the final version...

Of course, if you use .jpgs in the 'lite' version and .pngs in the 'HQ' version, then there may need to be some associated coding changes (i.e. where the pics are defined/called), but you get the idea.

Plus, this being a bucaneer forum and all, a number of people here are locating 'free' versions of your game anyways... but somehow the adult game creaters here are still making some money despite this.

 

[Studio Errilhl]

Jeezus fucking h. christ. Most people won't notice a difference between the PNGs and the WEBPs. Here's another set of images - one is the original PNG (1920x1080, modified with PS, so some artifacts might be present, no transparency).
This file is about 1.5MB

The second one is a lossless WEBP - it's 1.1MB (so about 25% save in size)

The third one is a 95% WEBP - it's 339 KB (ca 75% size saved)

Most people will notice no difference in these images on a FHD screen. If you boost it to 4k, sure, you will probably see some more artifacts. However, the amount of people playing these games on 4k is... well, not really significant.

Yes, there are differences, on a highly tuned monitor with calibrations done. How many people do you know who get that done to their screens? Personally, I can count them on one hand, and they're all working with graphics one way or the other.

As an average save on space, having 400 images at 350 KB instead of 1.5 - 2 MB each is... a significant save, and will probably get you a lot more backers / downloaders than a slight increase in image-quality will.

 

[gue5t]

1 479 805 bytes for beach_morning.png and 1 158 742 bytes for beach_morning.webp so yes about 25%, then we have the lossy WebP file that's average of ~78% of the original image quality (don't confuse program settings with actual image quality) for ~76.5% reduction in size which is not very indicative because the loss of quality is more pronounced in some areas (trees and rocks) and in other it's the same as the original image. Then we have to consider the extra processing power required by WebP and still low adoption rate in comparison to the less than 500kb lossy png file with the same quality and your argument in favor of WebP becomes much more unconvincing ...

As I said in my opinion it's up to the individual authors do decide what to use as long as they use optimized files ...
I'll once more use My Girlfriend's Amnesia by Daniels K as example - the original "Final" version was 5 087 381 255 bytes and after looslesly compressing it's PNG files it went down to 4 532 394 381 bytes that's 554 986 874 bytes (~530MB) saved with no quality lost at all and around 3GB with lossy png compression and less than 3% quality lost. If he used WebP which I don't know if was possible with the game engine it would have probably been around 2GB @ ~75% quality ...