I think a lot fo you need to stop worrying about file size.

[odium]

This post nothing to do with it loaded intro memory, but filesize itself.

Now, a 32,768 x 32,768 iamge takes up around 384meg. This is an uncompressed .TGA file.

Now, remember everybody that since Quake 3, id engines have used compressed zip file archives. Quake 3 used pk2, Doom 3/Quake 4 used pk4. Both the same thing, just a renamed zip file.

Ok. What does this mean? Well, using Winzip, I got a 32,768x32,768 image that was 384meg to compress into 276meg . THATS ALL.

So, with 12 maps (I think?) shipping with the game, that means that 3,312meg is taken up by terrain. ONLY 3,312meg. Not hundreds of gig like you all seem to think it will be.

3,312 meg for terrain texture. Which TBH isn't bad. And thats with a poor compression, nothing amazing, and thats with no extra compression things that they will probably be using.

Add that to the size of the actual game (Which will probably be between 3-4gig) and you have a 6-7gig game size. Thats still ONE DVD.

So stop worrying about filesizes so much. Yeah Terrain will take up quite a bit, but nothing amazing.

[MadMattUK]

We are worried about custom maps, & internet distribution, not the games size on DVD or the space it will occupy on our HD.

It's hard enough for us to keep people on the NW clanserver,even if you only have one custom map that's under 10mb in ET. Most people cant be bothered with the download!!

Let alone 270mb+ that you propose jsut for the terrain texture!!. What's the total map size going to be?.

The custom map scene is pretty hard to support in ET, QW looks a nightmare tbh

[odium]

I downloaded the HD trailer last night for ET, the 300ish meg one, in just under 4mins.

I think people need to either upgrade (net is cheap these days) or just make the jump.

Like I said though, i did this with no fancy compression. You could probably get the filesize down to around 30-40meg easily.

[SniperSteve]

As long as we can still have dedicated map servers I'm happy. ;)

But really, thanks for the info. The other guy must have just pulled the 500MB number out of nowhere. 270MB isn't bad for the map texture. I'm thinking to increase the map loading size we will want to have a way to uncompress them prior to loading the maps.

[jimb0]

Jesus, they already said that each 5gb map texture (diffuse + normals) takes 500mb. Stop kicking the dead horse.

[odium]

Get out much?

[MadMattUK]

Not everyone has the option of fast internet access. I have a 10mbit connection, doesn't bother me to download several GB.

What I was saying, is that most ET maps are a matter of seconds to download, but most people cant be arsed to even let them download at that paltry size, let alone several hundred MB worth.

As soon as a custom map pops on in your server rotation, half the players hop off :(

[McAfee]

Mappers don't need to use megatextures if they don't want to. In addition, the textures themselves could be compressed.

[ayatollah]

As soon as a custom map pops on in your server rotation, half the players hop off :(

Not the Bolthole matey...;) We have championed many a custom map and people stick around! Most notably Decoder!

[Florisjuh]

Mmmh, I hope SD will have some kind of in game lobby, where people can read about new maps for ET:QW and download them on the fly, maybe a list of servers which run the map as well. that would be great.

[B0rsuk]

I won't wait 2.5 + hours just to download one new map, which may or may not be worth the time. And that's assuming maximum transfer.
I may leave my machine ON for a night to download a map or two, but not too often.

[digibob]

Now, a 32,768 x 32,768 iamge takes up around 384meg

:psyduck:

[Domipheus]

:nag:

[Vam]

Lets think about the difference between map size and terrain size. Usually developers differ between what a terrain (map) is and what a mission is. Missions tend to be mostly script which controls AI, spawn points, mission objectives and so on. In most games developers tend to reuse the same terrain in different missions. Most people don't even really realize that the terrain is the same because developers are now starting to script objects on terrains as well which I've seen referred to as maps and missions.

Maps tend to be a combination of terrain and mission elements where developers reuse old terrains by stripping off all of the static objects on the terrain (trees, buildings, etc...) and replacing them with different objects. If there are mission objectives or AI involved then things tend to get even more different. Some guys even change the day/night setting on terrains so a daytime map may look totally different depending on how the shadowing and such works in the night.

[Mordenkainen]

Now, a 32,768 x 32,768 iamge takes up around 384meg. This is an uncompressed .TGA file.

Er... no. If you want colour an uncompressed 32k^2 TGA is AT LEAST 3GB. Even a pure grayscale one would be 1GB. Megatextures have more than just colour and use ~5GB each. As they mentioned in http://www.beyond3d.com/interviews/etqw/ this 5GB file is then compressed to take only 500mb.

[Lanz]

I don't worry about file size, I can easily download stuff up to 2mb/s with my connection and hard disk space is cheap and I've got plenty of already.

Though I do think that the custom map phenomena that where already almost dead will probably be stone cold in QW. I would also like to know how McAfee knows that we do not have to use it for tracktion of wehicles etc. I can also already hear regular players who never touched a game tool in their life complain if the megatexture feature wheren't used in a custom map. "it look ugly", "what a crap map", "this sucks" etc etc.. Even if the reason for not including it is a very valid one.

On the other hand, I haven't played much ET lately but when I did I only had to have around 10 custom maps to play on 95% of all servers. So it's not really that big problem, it will get even harder to get people to try new maps, but you don't have to dl that many in the end.

[McAfee]

IRT Lanz
I got the info from a Carmack interview posted at PlanetQuake. Megatextures are not just for ground surface, you could use it all over the game, like on walls or models, or you can decide not to use it all.

http://www.gamerwithin.com/?view=article&article=1319&cat=2

About traction, you may have a point, but then again, that should be a simple texture to compress. I wouldn't expect a "traction map" to have a lot of color information. It doesn't need per pixel level of detail, you probably have a lot of pixels with the same data. And they could probably use standard size textures for the same purpose.

[Lanz]

You can not use it on everything in QW, that's what Carmack developed for their next project. Still it doesn't say anything if it can be omitted from the game regarding game play mechanics or not. Maybe we can just use a layer that defines the surface properities and then use trisoped brushes with alpha blends, but that kind of info is really not available afaik.

Well time will tell, it's nothing I worry that much about but it would be nice to have the facts.

[DG]

The 500mb figure comes from this interview with arnout (http://www.beyond3d.com/interviews/etqw/):
nce the Artist or Level Designer has completed the artwork, MegaGen outputs two entirely unique 4GB textures - a diffuse map containing colour data, and a normal map - and then combines them into a single 5GB data file. This data file is then split into unique tiles suitable for streaming, and then compressed to reduce disk space usage.

The resulting unique MegaTexture is around 500MB in size. This represents a reasonable tradeoff between ETQW’s visual quality and disk space usage (maintaining a shippable size for the game).
This does seem to imply the megatexture element of a custom map alone would be around 500mb. However, neither question nor answer are about custom maps so it's a leap of logic inferred from a comment in another context - it's far from confirmed that custom maps will be at least a 500mb download.

Sorry but 500mb for a custom map would kill off custom maps.

Most people on broadband in UK (for example) have a connection in the 512k-2mbit range and that is the best the telecoms company will put on their line, map downloading would be measured in hours, or, perhaps a better way of putting it so those who dont get it can understand: fraction of leisure time taken up. It'd take roughly an entire day's leisure time of a 9-5pm office worker to get 500mb down a typical UK line.

In my experience the ratio of custom maps is generally say 1 in 30* being any fun at all. That is why most players "cant be bothered waiting to download", it's actually more due to the crappy payoff of investigating custom maps to find the few good ones. There's some well known mappers who I think would agree I've spent more than my share of time pimping ET custom maps so dont bother trying to argue I'm being ignorant. Most maps DO suck and it IS a huge problem when trying to encourage use of the good maps.

Further, there's no way I'm going to be downloading and uploading them to mirror, and I doubt you'll be finding many servers offering direct download either. Again, however, the whole thing about custom maps being 500mb is nothing but speculation.



* official statistic from the Office of Pulling Numbers Out of Arses.

[Lanz]

This does seem to imply the megatexture element of a custom map alone would be around 500mb. However, neither question nor answer are about custom maps so it's a leap of logic inferred from a comment in another context - it's far from confirmed that custom maps will be at least a 500mb download.

It's a very small leap of logic then. If the production maps have to use it, then so will the custom ones. Maybe you can lower the resolution, but who would like that?

But you're right it's all speculation until we get more info.

[McAfee]

we could always port the fueldump to quake wars :P

[EB]

I wonder how all of this will play out for custom map (to client) downloads and for the ETQW mapping community on a learning curve.

All very interesting to think about.

@odium, are you going to continue Q2 projects or ..... ?
I have seen the new site, but I am still curious.

[DarkangelUK]

It makes me laugh when people just spew out "upgrade your connection", like it's THAT easy. Yeah gimme a sec and ill go upgrade the exchange myself so i can get more than 2mb, or dig the roads up and lay the cables myself for cable broadband. So tell me, who's going to pay the bandwidth costs on websites when thousands of people all want to download a 300mb map at full speed? Then multiply that by how many custom maps get made and have to be hosted on said website.. so a webmaster has to use up almost 3gb of webspace just to host 10maps , and have to be available to everyone to download. So to keep costs down, webmasters limit transfer speed, so your fancy 10mb connection is useless.. or you get forced to wait in a download queueu for an hour, which again defeats the point of the fast connection.

[MadMattUK]

we could always port the fueldump to quake wars :P

Na, TC Base! :eek:

[Sauron|EFG]

I think people need to either upgrade (net is cheap these days) or just make the jump.

Downloading is just one side of the problem, and it's easily solved if you are lucky enough to live in a country where decent 'net connections are affordable and you (or your parents) are willing to spend the money.

Then there's hosting; even if custom maps are "only" 100 MB you'll easily reach a 100 GB transfer cap, and most of that is wasted on ppl downloading half the map and then getting tired of waiting.

I say we'll wait and see though... :moo:

[kamikazee]

In the worst case, you 'll need to put a link on your site with "Get on CD". :eek3:

[Black_Forky]

QW could support BitTorrent transfers. :D

[corvey]

It's not the file SIZE that matters, it's how you use it!!!
:banana:

[Ragnar_40k]

I remember .kkrieger (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.kkrieger), a FPS where all textures etc. are procedurally generated (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Procedural_textures) - resulting in less than 100kB file size for the entire game.

[Black_Forky]

That's pretty amazing. Procedurally generated MegaTextures? :D

[Zyklon]

Maybe 32000² pixels is just the max. size of the megatexture?

[Senethro]

digibob wrote:

:psyduck:


Come tell us more about ET:QW in SA.

Please :(

[digibob]

digibob wrote:

:psyduck:


Come tell us more about ET:QW in SA.

Please :(Unfortunately, i'm a bit of a lurker on SA, i've only ever made 1 post, I think.