Game size on hard disk?

[zirkustier]

Again in english, so that the moderation does not delete it again because of the language diversity....

Is the game really only 1.39GB, or is there something added when installing?

It seems so small to me.

[umop-apisdn]

Procedural generation can really cut down on the required assets; there's no built-in "map" or "world", it's all generated when you start the game.

This is why it spends so long on that black "Loading..." screen the first time you start a new world; it's literally building it while you wait.

[zirkustier]

Ok, thanks. I assume the savegame folder won't be several GB in size then either, like Fallout 4's for example?

[umop-apisdn]

Ha! You got me!

I had a moment of panic when I saw my %AppData%/LocalLow/IronGate/Valheim folder contained only 44kb of data, then remembered that cloud saves are the default.

Consequently, I have no idea how big the save files are... but it should be noted that "characters" are saved separately from "worlds"; you can freely enter any world with any character, which has caused me to scratch my head on more than one occasion when I accidentally chose a well-established character to join a well-established world that this character had never been to... spawning at the stone circle in my iron gear and expecting to be greeted with my swamp base, for example, was a particularly unnerving event until I figured out what happened.

[Mharr]

My explored worlds average 50 to 100 Mb each.

[jonnin]

Originally posted by Mharr:

My explored worlds average 50 to 100 Mb each.

PER save, though. It can certainly reach GB in size if you keep backups and have several worlds. Its a TB world now, though. Worrying about a GB or two is like worrying about a MB or two was 10 years ago. If you are working off a small SSD, you can manually move your unused / old worlds off to another disk.

[Empada]

well, I have answered you before, so will get the information again. it will get bigger, because of the worlds save (characters are small saves) with the new updates one of the worlds that I have explored the most was 25 MB, but backups I found to be 75 MB, I have lots of worlds and backups, it added to 1,9GB.

[Sammi79]

The real trick with keeping the base binaries small is the low resolution textures. software routines and main loops etc. (the game code itself) are a tiny amount of the data that ships with most modern titles, with upwards of ~90% being detailed texture files, audio (if there's a lot of spoken dialogue for example) and so on.

Funny I've had a lot of friends commenting that the graphics look poor because of it, the grass looks very pixelated close up etc. but when you play it with all the environmental lighting & fog effects, day/night cycles etc. It's actually one of the most beautiful games I've ever played.

And at the price of having some pixelated textures (that you really don't notice when you're zoned into the game) I'm all for a base game binary of 1.39 GB - hopefully some other developers will cotton on to this principle.

[Crom]

Originally posted by zirkustier:

Again in english, so that the moderation does not delete it again because of the language diversity....

Is the game really only 1.39GB, or is there something added when installing?

It seems so small to me.

I remember huge mega larger games with 20 MB...

Dont forget that majority AAA games are just scam. They cant do programming, thats why games are bigger and bigger.

[zirkustier]

Interesting opinion... I'm not a programmer, so I can't judge. But I am a gamer and I know that many don't play their own games. They only touch them with cheats, if at all, to make it easier for themselves. If they played them properly, I'm sure some gameplay and design decisions would be very different.^^

[rodelis]

Barely explored world, Used for silver mining close to spawn cause I hate mountains (and mistlands is worse). I keep a backup in a separate folder to just delete the use one, and drop in a new one, preset with the massive ladder up the side of said mountain. Total file size: 1800 KB according to windows.

[Mharr]

It's not that people are any worse at programming these days, it's just that squishing things into tiny amounts of space isn't a priority any more when everyone has multi terabyte drives. The time gets spent on things that sell more copies.

[_I_]

the way steam installs, it can take 2-3x the space during the install
steam downloads compressed files that need to be decompressed, and copied, after its installed the temp files are removed

[Zathabar]

Originally posted by Mharr:

It's not that people are any worse at programming these days, it's just that squishing things into tiny amounts of space isn't a priority any more when everyone has multi terabyte drives. The time gets spent on things that sell more copies.

Very true. Do you think "Optimisation" can sometimes be one of those things? Trimming the fat from a bit of code could be seen as a low priority task when we have space to burn but in my observation such accretions of programming deadwood creep up and chock a game like weeds if not regularly pulled up!

[Mharr]

Quite so. For an extreme contrast, look at the original Rollercoaster Tycoon, the game that started the entire sim-business genre. Crafted by hand in 100% assembly code.

In modern terms that's like building your game using only redstone block logic.

[GinsengSamurai]

Originally posted by Mharr:

Crafted by hand in 100% assembly code.

That is crazy. I had no idea some developers made games with Assembly. O_O That's pretty hardcore.