Reducing game size (How to)

[Caldor]

I found a way to reduce the size of this game. That is, how to take away sounds you do not need and levels + resource files you do not need.

What I have done is just remove all of the multiplayer stuff, all the snapmap stuff and all the localization that I could find. 24,2 gigabyte. Might be more that can be taken away, but from here it would become less obvious.

So which files can be removed?

In the Doom installation folder there are a folder called "base" and one called "virtualtextures".

In the "base" folder all files starting with "snap_" are SnapMap files you do not need unless you want to play SnapMap maps or make them. Removing these and launching the editor or a SnapMap map will make the game crash though, which should make sense.

Also in the "base" folder all files starting with "mp_" are multiplayer files. You can remove them if you do not want to play multiplayer. I am not certain whether multiplayer or snapmap uses single player resources though, but if not, you should be able to remove all files starting with "sp_" if you only want to play multiplayer or snapmap.

In the "base" folder, you can also find a "sound" folder, which contain other folders. Go into the next two folders, the last one should be a "pc" folder. This is the folder with all the music and sounds for the game. This folder has a folder for each language, so you can delete all the folders with languages you do not use.

In this "pc" folder there are a few more files you can remove. They all contain "_mp", "_dlc" or "_snap" in the filename. You can remove these if you do not play mutliplayer or snap map. If you do play multiplayer, you can just remove the "_snap" files, and if you do play "_snap" you can just remove the "_mp" files. The "_dlc" files are likely used in both MP and Snap.

Now to the "virtualtextures" folder. It has a "maps" folder, which contains a "game" folder. In the game folder there is a "classic", "sp" and "mp" folder. You can remove the "mp" folder if you do not play mutliplayer. If you do not play single player, you can remove the "sp" folder. The mp folder should be 5.3 gb now, and the sp folder is 8,5 gb. If you only play SnapMap I do not think either of these folders are used.

That should help trim down the install size of this game. After every update, if any more DLC are released and such, you can probably repeat this process if any new files gets added. I doubt the game would redownload all the files you removed, but depends on how the updater works.

edit:

Found another thing to remove. In the "virtualtextures" folder there is the "maps" folder and it contains both a "modules" and a "game" folder. Seems you can delete "modules" also. This makes the total data removed 30.7 gb, and the game is now only 46gb total if you only want the single player part of this game.

edit regarding new update in July 2017:
The game now got updated, and this update actually reduced the total game size 10 gb... and all the DLC is now included with the game, so if you bought the DLC I hope you have enjoyed getting it early. Now everyone has the DLC. This guide still works same as before, you will now reduce the game size with about 19gb but since the overall game size is reduced 10gb, this makes it same size you end up with, if you only play Single Player. I think the same thing goes if you just want to delete all the single player files. The DLC was always required for MP anyway.

Update:
Another trick that can be used to reduce the amount of disk space Doom takes up by another 10 GB is to use Windows 8 or Windows 10 NTFS file compression. Majestic Turkey suggested this:

Using the updated ntfs compact feature in win8? win10
compact /c /s /a /i /F /exe:lzx *
at command prompt once in game directory

What this does, is that it compresses all the files in the DOOM installation folder as much as possible. Things to consider when using this method is that if any of these files are changed, they will stop being compressed and return to their original size. Another thing is that if you compress this with Windows 10 you cannot use these files in earlier versions of Windows. I am pretty sure the same goes if you do this in Windows 8, but if you do it in Windows 8 you should be able to run the game in Windows 10... not exactly sure how it will be relevant, since it must be very rare for someone to use the same disk with Windows 8 and Windows 10.

It might increase load times a bit, but should not be by much with todays multi core CPUs. Also, if the game does get updated and you want to make sure all the files that got changed or added also get compressed you just need to run this command next:
compact /c /s /a /i /exe:lzx *
The same command as before, just without the /F. Another thing that is relevant, is that if you measure the size of the Doom game folder, it will still show up as the uncompressed size of the folder, but if you look at the properties of the folder, it will then say the size of the folder AND how much disk space it is using. Its due to how Windows uses this type of NTFS compression. Of course the disk you have installed Doom to needs to be NTFS formattet for this to be possible.

My Doom folder is now only 36.7 GB measured in use of disk space.

[rawWwRrr]

Doesn't solve the issue for people who can't stand waiting for the entire game to download and install. You'd have to clear the space for the whole game first, then delete once all 77 Gb download. And as you mentioned, there's still the possibility that the updater might repopulate the missing files. If anyone is forced to verify the cache to fix a broken file, I'm sure the deleted files will be redownloaded.

[Caldor]

Originally posted by rawWwRrr:

Doesn't solve the issue for people who can't stand waiting for the entire game to download and install. You'd have to clear the space for the whole game first, then delete once all 77 Gb download. And as you mentioned, there's still the possibility that the updater might repopulate the missing files. If anyone is forced to verify the cache to fix a broken file, I'm sure the deleted files will be redownloaded.

True. This would only be something Steam or the devs of this game can fix. Might need both of them, since you download an installation for this game first, with the installation files, a bit more compressed than when installed.

I am pretty sure you should not expect all game files to be redownloaded after each update though.

[Mulder]

Caldor, thank you! It's may be helpfull. Related: http://steamcommunity.com/app/379720/discussions/0/1842367319519014324/

[zboy2106]

The worst thing is waiting for it completely downloaded. Just one time, then make a back up. Don't say to me you not have enough HDD space for the back up. Make no sense to me.

[[57th] AngryHatter]

And when you remove the files any time you have an update or verify the cache you'll be downloading everything you deleted again.

[pila]

the thing is that Steam does not allow the game to be launched if there is an update, it will proceed to start download, unless you launch from the EXE outside of Steam.

and the update will redownload everything costing time and quota for these who have limits.

only selective download if implemented by devs themselves can fix this. otherwise you can play it without updating if you've modified the files.

[Caldor]

If you verify the installation then obviously the files will get redowloaded, but with updates I am pretty sure it actually just install the actual update, would take too long if the game verifies the full installation of the game every update. I have removed the sound files for French, German and other languages that I do not use, so I should be able to confirm that this game does not verify all files during an update soon.

[Taki]

Thanks, i saved around 30gb! :D

[simon]

How is steam going to un-install the installed components you have deleted if you try to un-install the game? It may effect the process of removing the game from your HD when you are finished with it.

[Caldor]

Originally posted by simon:

How is steam going to un-install the installed components you have deleted if you try to un-install the game? It may effect the process of removing the game from your HD when you are finished with it.

I do not think so. Uninstalled fine for me, but not sure if I had restored these files before I did. Pretty sure I only restored some of them since I saw no need for all those language packs.

[UnKn0wN]

Originally posted by simon:

How is steam going to un-install the installed components you have deleted if you try to un-install the game? It may effect the process of removing the game from your HD when you are finished with it.

don´t think so, Steam usually just removes all the game files when you uninstall, plus it changes a few registry key in order to tell Steam and the OS that the game is not installed and this game is just one exe, one application, regardless of MP, Snapmap..

anyway, I did remove the foreign language files already last year, when a big update came out like update 4 or 5 it did redownload all the useless language files (around 6 gb) every time so I think it does an automatic integrity check just before and redownloads every missing files.
that said, it´s rather unlikely at this point that this game is going to receive another big update so it shouldn´t be really an issue.

[Caldor]

Good point... they announced a certain amount of DLC, that amount has now been released and there is not much to indicate that the game will get any more updates now. At least not big updates.

[simon]

Hopefully they dont release any small patches in the future.

[Taki]

Originally posted by simon:

How is steam going to un-install the installed components you have deleted if you try to un-install the game? It may effect the process of removing the game from your HD when you are finished with it.

i dont think so, unistall will say "delete the directory "doom"m, will not manually delete each single file, and even if unistall will find some missinf file, will not interrupt the unistall process, we are in 2017 not 1997, lol.

[UnKn0wN]

you can also remove the _CommonRedist folder, its just a back up folder that contains DX files and visual redist the game needs but once installed during first installation they are not needed anymore.
it´s only 111 MB though so only worth it if you are really that mad/anal about every bit you can give back to your SSD