What Size Games Should Be Compressed?

[bas]

For those users who download the "compressed" versions of games (mine or anyone else's); what's the minimum size where you want to see a compressed version?

Normally I'll compress a game when the original game zipped is around 1GB or more.

By "compressing a game" I mean:

• Re-encode the assets (images/audio/video) using more efficient codecs
  
• Using "lossy" compression decreasing the quality slightly to reduce file-size
• Using very aggressive 7zip compression to make the download archive as small as possible.

Would appreciate responses to the poll and any comments below. Thanks

 

[uradamus]

I feel I should ask for some clarification here. Are you just talking about putting the game into an archive with compression. Or do you mean actively going into a game's assets and optimizing them where possible?

 

[ThanatosX]

Anything over 2GB and it's inconvenient to download with MEGA. When you hit around 4-5GB+ torrents are usually better than trying to direct download.
Got 50/20 unlimited, so bandwidth is not a restriction, less compression the better usually.

 

[bas]

I feel I should ask for some clarification here. Are you just talking about putting the game into an archive with compression. Or do you mean actively going into a game's assets and optimizing them where possible?

Clarification added

 

[Pretentious Goblin]

At least for me, with MEGA, it tends to decrease in speed down to 50KB/s every 400-600 MB downloaded. Then I have to pause it for 15-20 minutes to ''reset'' it. So a 2GB download can take a while. How okay that is depends on how much time/patience I have. I was happy to play the compressed version of The Tyrant while waiting for the full version to finish, though when I extracted the images with Unren, I couldn't open them using any program I have.

 

[bas]

At least for me, with MEGA, it tends to decrease in speed down to 50KB/s every 400-600 MB downloaded. Then I have to pause it for 15-20 minutes to ''reset'' it. So a 2GB download can take a while. How okay that is depends on how much time/patience I have. I was happy to play the compressed version of The Tyrant while waiting for the full version to finish, though when I extracted the images with Unren, I couldn't open them using any program I have.

If it's my version, check that spoiler I put in all the posts for the crunched versions as it has links to the codecs you need to be able to view those images and videos in normal Windows viewers.

 

[Oiz]

I don't think anything below 1GB is worth the time and effort, tbh.
That's why I voted for 1GB, imho 2GB is viable to though.

 

[baneini]

I don't understand why ANY game is released with uncompressed images that results in 2gb+ filesizes. Why do devs do that? Every game should be compressed by default.
When a game goes beyond 1.5gb I tend to wait either a compressed version or torrent.

 

[MrGhostRider]

Yes, most of the games here are needlessly big. Every non-optimized games should be optimized. It would be even better if the dev is informed about this optimization.

 

[the66]

i also believe, that a size of below 1gb isn't really worth the effort for pc-ish games
but android ports are a completely different case
with the somewhat limited space in these devices i always "optimize" the assets
and because most android users won't use the ports on 4k tv-screens, i use a more agressive/lossy conversion

 

[bas]

i also believe, that a size of below 1gb isn't really worth the effort for pc-ish games
but android ports are a completely different case
with the somewhat limited space in these devices i always "optimize" the assets
and because most android users won't use the ports on 4k tv-screens, i use a more agressive/lossy conversion

I think the concern for most users isn't storage, but the actual downloading. Many who download the compressed versions have slow/unreliable/metered internet connections. Some users get online by tethering through their mobile phones.

 

[VNON]

i would like to say thank you to anyone who compressing any games in here, its really helpful

i don't know how internet work in another country, but in here we bought a quota from the phone card provider and we get limited quota, like 20gb / month

so. we are really trying to save internet quota
and in my case, its reallunreliable connections, only in midnight i can downloading huge files.

 

[morbius31]

I use compressed to save time while downloading many games at once.

But I have unrelated question : how do you open compressed images to open when you unrened the game? every compressed game files can't be open. wich codec should I get?

Thanks for all the work put in the forum.

 

[bas]

I use compressed to save time while downloading many games at once.

But I have unrelated question : how do you open compressed images to open when you unrened the game? every compressed game files can't be open. wich codec should I get?

Thanks for all the work put in the forum.

If they're mine and you're on Windows, this:

You must be registered to see the links

 

[GuyFreely]

Not sure about saying games shouldn't be a certain size. Speaking about Renpy, which is a large chunk of what's here, it's mostly just the number of HD renders that determines the size. There might be some animations, etc. sure. The size is almost entirely down to the art. I have a project I'm working on it's 245MB zipped, 290MB unzipped. That's 193MB of renders and 23MB of music (I used 320kbps, just cuz). I mean, you could probably do a 720 version of a 1080 game and save 40-50% of the size without having to change anything else. Whether a dev should do that or just let someone else do it, I dunno. I agree that the limits are mostly about Mega, the most common file host used.

 

[skazy]

compressing is good, but i do prefer if devs make every update as patch, i mean, i have a game that has over 2k renders. and after a month dev updates the game, adds 250+ new renders on it. and if i want to see the new content, i have to download the game again, even though i already have 2k renders.
i can understand if there is a difference in coding, but it is sad.

 

[thecardinal]

compressing is good, but i do prefer if devs make every update as patch, i mean, i have a game that has over 2k renders. and after a month dev updates the game, adds 250+ new renders on it. and if i want to see the new content, i have to download the game again, even though i already have 2k renders.
i can understand if there is a difference in coding, but it is sad.

In theory it works great. But to bug test, you need to try the whole game (unless it is a strictly linear vn with 0 variables) and then once you get it working, just strip away the new content. Then every player would have to unpack the game ( this would be a nightmare FYI, some people, including devs, are clueless when it comes to this) and insert the files themselves into the game.

I would love to do that for my game, but you'd really have to hold some people's hands for installing the update.

 

[bas]

Not sure about saying games shouldn't be a certain size. Speaking about Renpy, which is a large chunk of what's here, it's mostly just the number of HD renders that determines the size. There might be some animations, etc. sure. The size is almost entirely down to the art. I have a project I'm working on it's 245MB zipped, 290MB unzipped. That's 193MB of renders and 23MB of music (I used 320kbps, just cuz). I mean, you could probably do a 720 version of a 1080 game and save 40-50% of the size without having to change anything else. Whether a dev should do that or just let someone else do it, I dunno. I agree that the limits are mostly about Mega, the most common file host used.

No one is saying that games shouldn't be a certain size. Many game developers use uncompressed assets for their games and many of our users have metered/slow/unreliable internet connections. It's not uncommon for me to take a 2GB Ren'Py game and by converting the images to lossy webp without changing the resolution of the images, that game becomes ~100MB zipped.

compressing is good, but i do prefer if devs make every update as patch, i mean, i have a game that has over 2k renders. and after a month dev updates the game, adds 250+ new renders on it. and if i want to see the new content, i have to download the game again, even though i already have 2k renders.
i can understand if there is a difference in coding, but it is sad.

This has it's own set of drawbacks. Some users get very confused by the process of patching games with each update, so not a lot of developers do this. See the "Wicked Choices" thread for examples; every time an update comes out there are pages and pages of posts not about new content of the update, but from people who don't understand how to patch the game to the newest update.

 

[samwayne]

@bossapplesauce your compressed are best 2gb 100/200mb you a frking god, plz do more complete versions and if you got time plz make this games repack 1.Milf's Control Unofficial Ren'Py 2.Incest Story 1-2 Unofficial Ren'py plz

 

[Volta]

I think what may help is a guide to optimisation for devs, no dev wants to inconvenience the user with large files if they don't need to and plenty of devs circulate on here for feedback, rather than having @bossapplesauce work his ass off why not point the devs in the right direction? Yes i know the devs should do it and learn to do it themselves but a lot of them are first timers with no real idea what they are doing.