Examples: diablo 4 on blizzard client will let you play it before the full game is installed. The ps5 also let’s you do this when installing a new game. But I’ve never seen this option on steam games.
Examples: diablo 4 on blizzard client will let you play it before the full game is installed. The ps5 also let’s you do this when installing a new game. But I’ve never seen this option on steam games.
About 75% of a games file size are the optional higher res textures for higher graphics settings.(25% for “high” and 50% for “ultra” generally) You can start playing with only the lowest couple of resolution textures to start with in games that use texture streaming. Texture streaming also serves as a LOD system. As in textures further away from you only load the lowest level of detail version until you get closer anyway, then they swap on the fly one by one up to whichever highest degree of fidelity you picked in settings as it gets closer and closer.
The way they stream in sort of hides the transition, at least if the game was well designed. Similar to how a good LOD system for geometry works. It should ideally be imperceptible. The models should look almost identical at the distance they are being swapped at. Same thing with textures, if you notice them change, they likely tried to be too aggressive with it to lower performance cost more than a comfortable/seamless amount.
That’s not how it works at all, what are you even talking about?
Most games that offer this feature download a limited set of the game files. For example the first few areas of the game (but with full quality, no low resolution bullshit). The idea is that as you play it keeps downloading the rest. Though if you play too fast or load in a save you might hit a wall where the game forces you to wait and download the rest.
Other games like Guild Wars 2 (an MMO) does it differently. It downloads all the assets it needs and the starting zones. But you can actually go into end-game zones too with a partial download, but then you have to wait in a loading screen while the game only downloads the zone you want to go to.
The big game sizes are usually sounds and overall content (cinematics, also textures but you don’t have to load all of them, only the ones needed for now), if 99% of players are in the starting area of the game while downloading you can take your sweet time to download endgame areas for example.
I guess we have experienced it in different games, the only ones I have experienced it with have been either phone games that do it your way because of the 100 mb limit Google puts on free apk downloads or computer games that do it my way because of 4k texture file sizes and texture streaming systems. I hadn’t seen it in a computer game before texture streaming.
I have only seen a “play as you finish downloading” in 4 computer games and in those 4 cases it was all due to texture streaming. I had never experienced it for any other reason on a computer game. And of course a game with texture streaming is going to have larger texture files, otherwise they wouldn’t have felt the need to stream them. It’s the whole point of that system. So textures can be much larger without impacting performance.
Oh OK that makes sense. So I would guess that feature caters more towards ppl who have lower end gpus who aren’t going to use the higher res textures anyway.
I think it’s more that you can play the game with low res textures while all the high red ones download.
That and I’m sure they order the download so level 1’s textures download first too so you’ll probably not end up reaching the areas being downloaded until they’re available.
Hmm, that much for textures, really? Did this change in the recent years with the rise of 4K gaming? I always thought raw media files like video/audio were the main culprits.
Audio is still somewhat of a culprit at times, depends on the game and the amount of exposition. Videos are rarely the main share of the game filesize anymore and usually it is mainly textures and likely bloat from really crap usage/optimization of those textures.
Yeah, this is only since 4k textures and the ability to do texture streaming. I had not seen a computer game with the play as it finishes downloading and installing feature before that. I had previously only seen it on phone games, which do it the other way.
good breakdown of the system but it has been a while since textures were the issue at large. You can cut ~1/3 the filesize of starfield by uninstalling language packs you aren’t using because lossless audio is HUGE. Most LoD effects are just rendering a distant model with reduced detail and update rate. Even if you look at “good” lod models they often move in a jerky way in practice because they aren’t at the same framerate as things within the “detail” draw distance (easy to observe in every souls title).
Yeah, lots of different games have different ways, I personally have only seen it in games where it was the 4k texture assets with a texture streaming system. I haven’t yet played a computer game where it was done for a different reason. Most computer games don’t have a ton of audio in a ton of languages, that would indeed make for large file sizes.
I know mobile games generally do it the piecemeal route, but felt that was out of context for this thread.
I have seen games where the LOD models run at half frame rate, I have a hard time playing those and in my opinion I would not consider it a “good” LOD system. To me a good system is where any performance gain it gives is by only removing stuff as imperceptibly as possible, anything more aggressive than that and it better be possible to toggle that excessive feature in options.
I have only seen 4 games with play as you download on computer, and in each of those 4 cases it was done due to having implemented texture streaming, and a texture streaming system also coincidentally tends to be implemented to allow much larger textures to be possible without performance drops, so they will indeed be games with much higher texture file sizes than other games. I didn’t even know there was other games that allow play as you finish downloading for different reasons.