That topics always made me curious tho…take a sample AAA games back then has smaller size compared to shitty Unity 2D games nowadays and i wonder why ?
Smaller textures, more assets, and worse audio mainly.
Textures used to be like 512 for hero props. Now even random objects you see a few times get a texture 16 times larger. And they get up to 4 of those for each object/group of objects. Thanks to pbr and normals and whatever other masks and lightmaps may be required.
Im sure there are more reasons for size bloat but this is from us artists at least.
Less triangles and smaller textures. Crt monitors had less resolution and practically built-in anti-aliasing so they could get away with (and had to) “worse” assets.
Also since ssd-s have become mainstream unity uses less compression so it would load relatively faster.
Basically because monitors got better, standards got higher, competition got fiercer, storage got bigger and faster, etc.
And it’s not like there weren’t shitty games before, just everybody forgot about them.
I like how the game Banished is made. From a requirenments/looks ratio it is IMO great. One guy made it. Ghosts of Tsushima also looks amazing and is great from a techical perspective, but it is heavy.
Polygons aren’t that costly, they’re just a set of coordinates and pack up well and ultra expensive highpoly stuff is avoided wherever possible by proffessionals. It’s mostly textures and maybe audio that bloats size.
Yea, textures are the biggest thing (unless there’s video). But don’t underestimate vertices, even when using strips. Unity, i think, just ships textures as BCn, meaning 1MB per 1k texture (would be 3-4MB raw). It’s even better for the gpu then raw. Then there’s normal maps, etc.
Another thing is lighting data, be it some textures, probes, or whatever. That can also take up plenty of space.
I’ve mostly been told to use one 512 map max for lighting maps while textures I ship have a casual working file size of 5 gigs and above for substance painter. Idunno how well they get packaged up as since I haven’t played any of the games I’ve worked on for a while.
I can see vertice data taking up a lot but other than some AAA games I don’t see why anyone would need to make super poly dense models.
That topics always made me curious tho…take a sample AAA games back then has smaller size compared to shitty Unity 2D games nowadays and i wonder why ?
Smaller textures, more assets, and worse audio mainly. Textures used to be like 512 for hero props. Now even random objects you see a few times get a texture 16 times larger. And they get up to 4 of those for each object/group of objects. Thanks to pbr and normals and whatever other masks and lightmaps may be required.
Im sure there are more reasons for size bloat but this is from us artists at least.
Less triangles and smaller textures. Crt monitors had less resolution and practically built-in anti-aliasing so they could get away with (and had to) “worse” assets.
Also since ssd-s have become mainstream unity uses less compression so it would load relatively faster.
Basically because monitors got better, standards got higher, competition got fiercer, storage got bigger and faster, etc.
And it’s not like there weren’t shitty games before, just everybody forgot about them.
I like how the game Banished is made. From a requirenments/looks ratio it is IMO great. One guy made it. Ghosts of Tsushima also looks amazing and is great from a techical perspective, but it is heavy.
Polygons aren’t that costly, they’re just a set of coordinates and pack up well and ultra expensive highpoly stuff is avoided wherever possible by proffessionals. It’s mostly textures and maybe audio that bloats size.
Yea, textures are the biggest thing (unless there’s video). But don’t underestimate vertices, even when using strips. Unity, i think, just ships textures as BCn, meaning 1MB per 1k texture (would be 3-4MB raw). It’s even better for the gpu then raw. Then there’s normal maps, etc.
Another thing is lighting data, be it some textures, probes, or whatever. That can also take up plenty of space.
I’ve mostly been told to use one 512 map max for lighting maps while textures I ship have a casual working file size of 5 gigs and above for substance painter. Idunno how well they get packaged up as since I haven’t played any of the games I’ve worked on for a while. I can see vertice data taking up a lot but other than some AAA games I don’t see why anyone would need to make super poly dense models.
Yeah but like, what new features do apps have which weren’t available in those times? Embedded videos maybe? Doesn’t justify the bloat.