Textures and Installation Size

[Korell]

So, we know that the upscaling to 4K is what has bloated the installation size, and really, I think they would have been better off just upscaling to 1920x1080 instead, and having an optional download for 4K textures. Other games have optional high res textures, like Fallout 4, Monster Hunter: World, Gears 5, Far Cry New Dawn, Middle-Earth: Shadow of War. etc.

Are the textures baked into the levels themselves, though? Is this why the .lvl files are now 10x bigger than the originals? And does this make it impossible to potentially downgrade them to 1920x1080 via a mod to free up space for those of us that don't need 4K?

[Sean8102]

I'm curious. On steamdb they have 3 depots. One for Windows, one for steam deck, and one for common files for both.

The steam deck depot is just the movie files (and some small dll's and the EXE) encoded at a lower bitrate and or resolution (they are about half the size of the PC videos). But total they are ~8GB.

Do they include both versions of the video files regardless of what platform you download it on?

Obv I don't own the collection but according to steamdb they would be in a directory like data1/_lvl_steamdeck/movies/shell.mvs

[Mblaze]

Originally posted by Korell:

Are the textures baked into the levels themselves, though? Is this why the .lvl files are now 10x bigger than the originals?

Most likely since I did not notice any changes to the meshes.

[Korell]

Originally posted by Sean8102:

Obv I don't own the collection but according to steamdb they would be in a directory like data1/_lvl_steamdeck/movies/shell.mvs

Well, looking at the installed files, for BF2 I have:

\Steam\steamapps\common\Battle\data2\_lvl_pc\movies\

This contains multiple .mvs files per movie name. For example:
fel1ingame.mvs
fel1ingamefr.mvs
fel1ingamegr.mvs

Almost all have three per name, one without a suffix, one with an fr suffix, and one with a gr suffix. I'm going to guess that those are English, French, and German, respectively.

Then there's crawl.mvs which has other files with suffixes ch, fr, gr, it, ru, sp.

And then shell.mvs which is on its own and a huge 1.25 GB.

If I look at the total file size for all those files with a suffix, that's 4.59 GB just there. I wonder if they could have just had one file per movie with different soundtracks for each language, rather than a separate copy of the movies for each language.


BF1 is different, though. \Steam\steamapps\common\Battle\data1\_lvl_pc\movies contains a crawl.mvs with all the various suffixes, one shell.mvs, then ingame1.mvs, ingame2.mvs, ingame3.mvs, and ingame4.mvs. These are much larger, so I imagine they each contain multiple movies.