Final EXE size?

#1 The file size is strictly the size of the code. It's not too much of an issue since you typical title will include a lot more than 3.7mb of assets. I seriously question the assertion that small file size is key to the sharware biz. People EXPECT games to be large (or at least larger than 3.7mb).

#2

Quote:I seriously question the assertion that small file size is key to the sharware biz. People EXPECT games to be large (or at least larger than 3.7mb).

Maybe. I believe the smaller the size, more people will want to download the demo, more people will finish downloading it without problems, less bandwidth you'll have to pay for, and so on.

#3 Games are going to be large. There is just no way around it. Theres no way to pack all the code, models, textures, sounds, etc into a package and keep it small.

For example a full release of counter-strike is 121mb... and it is just a mod. The very basic Torque demo app is 38mb.

Games are just going to be big...

#4 Er, what you mean to say is games made with Torque are going to be big. And any game made with any engine with the same types of bells and whistles as Torque is going to be big. Decent games can still be made _very_ small. The reason they're not is due to developer laziness... nobody cares. .oO(Everybody has an 80GB hard drive anyway, right?) Heck, even I don't really care.

#5 Check out UPX - http://upx.sourceforge.net/

It crunched Marble Blast from 3.7 to 1.1 megs.

#6 There are few things you can do to decrease download, here are a few thoughts:

Use as much procedural content as possible.
Use more efficient texture formats (s3tc, dxtc), monochrome,
alpha 8 bit etc).

Crunch the exe file.
Keep the data as a compressed zip and unpack at runtime
Strip out any unwanted linked code? (not too sure about this, never been quite that far).

Its amazing the amount of space things take up though.

Phil.

#7 *Ahem* It's not the size of the EXE that matters, it's how you use it! :o)

#8 I think games created for the download channel should take size into account. Even if everybody in the world had broadband, which is very far from reality, you need to take into account the fact that your demo distributions cost money. In fact, they cost a lot of money, and having a very large demo will probably prohibit you from distributing enough demos to make any money from your game.

Jeff Tunnell GG

#9 Well Torque supports zip files which you can zip up your mod directory and other directories as you see fit and Torque would access them as if they were just normal directories instead of zip files. Also you can use the UPX project to compress not only the EXE file, but also the DLL libraries. I just tried UPX using defaults and man it is great! It really cut down the size of my libraries and the executable. Plus the fact having the game content all zipped up really takes into account. So there are a number of ways to cut down on file size and I bet there are some other ways too.

Note: A word of caution, the bigger the exe or libraries compressed using UPX the more memory it will use on the machine that runs the compressed files. I read about this in the upx's readme file.

#10 Also, bear in mind that debug builds are typically a bit larger and slower than release builds...

If you want to see an example of small, check out the.product - theproduct.de/. It's 64k... but it lasts for 15 minutes. Full 3d, full procedural, animated - and they had to work to fill up the space.

Pretty awesome.

#11

Quote:David "Fulcrum" Wyand : *Ahem* It's not the size of the EXE that matters, it's how you use it! :o)

I agree, but the users won't be able to see what I do with my big, nice, enjoyable... executable until they download it :)

Quote:Ben Garney : Also, bear in mind that debug builds are typically a bit larger and slower than release builds...

I know... the debug version of the test app is more like 29 MB!!

Edit : 'b' tags don't work inside 'quote' tags?

#12 You can also use conditional compilation to factor out parts of the torque that you don't use. This trimmed 1-2MB from the Think Tanks executable (and sped up compile times.)

#13 Anyone remember the game Rick Dangerous? Have a look here:
leonard.oxg.free.fr/rick32/rick32.html
For a 32kb remake of that game.

#14 Is it possible to compile the demo exe without the in game editors as part of it? Either through conditional compiling of the exe or just ripping out those sections of the code? I don't know if it would break torque. I'm just curious if its possible to make a "lite" version of the exe (with little recoding), without the mission, terrain, and gui editors, mainly just for the public release of a game with torque. With an indie game, I don't forsee many wanting access to the tools to make their own levels/missions, but if the demand is high enough, you could always release a new exe. Just another idea for reducing download size.