What Size Games Should Be Compressed?

What Size Games Should Be Compressed?


  • Total voters
    148

OhWee

Forum Fanatic
Modder
Game Developer
Jun 17, 2017
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28,979
Yeah, anything over 500 MB IMHO. As mentioned above, some people are on slow connections. Also keep in mind that there are some people out there that are on metered connections, and may even be paying by the GB for their Internet usage.

As I've mentioned before, you CAN do both. I.E. offer an uncompressed version as well as a compressed version. And/or a 'patched' full version with each update along with standalone patches, for those that prefer NOT downloading the entire game each time.

As far as compressing your images, well there are software widgets that can do that for you, depending on the 'native' image format. The widget may take a bit of time to complete the compression, but the developer is free to do other things while the image batch runs.

Sure, it takes a bit of extra time on the developer end, but not that much really, since you probably need to test your 'patches' on a new install anyways if you decide to offer patches...
 
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Domiek

In a Scent
Donor
Game Developer
Jun 19, 2018
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Not sure how aggressively I should optimize my game as a dev. I render and edit a png and then save it as jpeg which usually brings each image from a few mbs down to like 100-300kbs. Animations are usually around 2mbs.
 

uradamus

Active Member
Jan 4, 2018
680
752
There are plenty of utilities out there for compressing images; a few that I like a fair bit would include:
* jpeg -
* png -
* webp -

All 3 of these are command line utilities, making them ideal for batch scripting once you find settings that are most ideal for your needs. If you care about the ease of viewing outside of games, or your engine of choice doesn't support webp, then jpeg is the best option in most cases as long as you don't need transparency - for that you generally need to go with png or webp.

In all cases, if you are going to use a second tool to compress your images, make sure you start with the highest quality possible, as they can do a much better job of compressing a raw image than they can with images that have already been altered by inferior compression algorithms that kinda lock them in to settling for the bad choices that were already made.

JPEG-Archive unfortunately only takes jpeg or raw formats as input, so if you want to use that to convert from png, you'll want to use something like to convert the files to either uncompressed jpeg2000 or ppm first before feeding them through that tool. ImageMagick in general is pretty handy, it has an alternative version for batch processing and it can do pretty much any sort of edits you can possibly need done and is fairly easy to integrate with scripts to automate your tasks.