Game Size?

[Insinuator]

Has he ever played a scenario where the AI has to move a LOT of units, though?

Those are his favorite kinds, actually. He enjoys eight player matches where he controls four sides against the AI four. The last game I played with him featured six AI sides with approximately 120 units on the map at once.

[McMick]

I figured I'd better add to this thread one more time. I probably came off pretty rude by making an issue out of the size of the game, but I actually know a lot of people I'd like to get to enjoy this game, but their systems are pretty outdated, and the bigger this game gets the slower it gets. But I want to say that in my original post I regret not starting it with how much I have grown to enjoy this game and how I admire the work that people have put into it, and how I do in fact promote it to my friends and people I talk to online. So, sorry about any resentment I might have caused anyone.

[Insinuator]

I can't speak for everyone, but I doubt you offended anyone much. I think that many people would like to see a smaller download size, myself included. Realistically though, as was pointed out by a few people there are two main problems:

1. Wesnoth is a game that is continually being developed. As much as it may have a "retro" feel to it, this game is cutting edge in developmental terms. Those people who put their free time & effort into developing it focus on new features, fixing bugs, and improving the graphics. These things will increase the game size.

2. Larger is where all games are going. Pick ten commercially available games that were released last year and compare them to ten similar games released ten years ago and you will see a huge increase in size across the board. Hard drives are getting larger and cheaper as well, though. Such is the evolution of technology. You really have to keep up with your hardware to keep up with your software. Reverse compatibility & compactness are great and all, but they're not (and shouldn't be) a developer's focus. It is up to you, the consumer, to either take what they offer and make the appropriate adjustments, or to fall behind and deal with it.

Hope I'm not being too blunt.

[shevegen]

He is absolutely right though.

Every new release, Wesnoth grows larger and larger.

At this speed, we hit the 1 Gig size soon enough.

I remember I found Wesnoth in ... 2004 or some such. It was small and sweet back then.

Then things got added over the years ... sure, more and more graphics, but what you guys fail to mention is that you added more and more dependencies on the way just as well.

Nowadays, you require the monster boost for Wesnoth! That wasn't the case years ago.

Nothing can be done about this.

Wesnoth will become a colossal size monster and in 4 years noone will know why it has grown to +1 Gig ...

We used to start simple and elegant ... keep it simple right?

Now we have become HUGE.

There is a term for this.

BLOATED.

[Iris]

At this speed, we hit the 1 Gig size soon enough.

No, we haven’t hit it yet, unless you are compiling from source in debug mode; in such case you’ll certainly need around 2 GiB of free disk space for the build directory alone.

Now I’m not sure what’s the point of posting in this topic saying that you/your game have/has become huge when you are clearly not one of the mainline developers.

If people want to propose non-mainline solutions, then fine, go ahead and see if anyone has the resources to maintain it; the most proposed idea being a “light” version of the source tarball, and possibly platform packages as well, without music or high-resolution content. (Currently this is already done with the Debian and Ubuntu package sets; wesnoth*-music is merely a suggested package for wesnoth*-data which package managers may choose to install by default to not inconvenience users expecting the full experience.)

As for the software dependencies, it is in our best interest to not waste our time reinventing wheels when there are existing libraries implementing functions we need to move forward.

Please, don’t whine about progress just because you cannot afford a new machine capable of running Wesnoth properly, or a new Internet connection that allows you to download it without any extra hassles (Subversion and xdeltas being affordable alternatives otherwise). If you are really stuck in the past, all versions of Wesnoth since 0.7.11 are available in SourceForge.net; we just cannot provide support for those anymore because of our lack of interest and resources; this whole volunteer thing is complicated, after all, and users complaining about things like this don’t make it any more worthwhile.

[Crendgrim]

We used to start simple and elegant ... keep it simple right?

Now we have become HUGE.

There is a term for this.

BLOATED.

So, you really say that including the awesome new graphics, the great new sounds, the implementation of Lua and better WML is only bloating up the package? Ahhh... yes.
All our great artists here just do that to make the game bigger, not to make it look better? To create an even better gaming experience than the previous version?
I really think this is quite a rude strike against all the people who created the great stuff... Instead of complaining about the game size becoming bigger, we should thank them for their work, which makes this game even better and better with every new release. And, of course, this applies as well to the sound developers, and definitely to the developers who created this awesome game.


Crend

[monochromatic]

I really think this is quite a rude strike against all the people who created the great stuff... Instead of complaining about the game size becoming bigger, we should thank them for their work, which makes this game even better and better with every new release. And, of course, this applies as well to the sound developers, and definitely to the developers who created this awesome game.

QFT.
To be honest, whenever I download a game, if it's commercial and it's under ~2GB, I automatically get the impression that it's not going to be a well-thought-out, well-rounded game. The graphics will probably suck. And nowadays, the bar probably even higher, maybe around ~5-7GB now.
For indie/open-source/freeware games, the cut-off point for me is around 100MB.
In other words, many times the size of game tells a lot about the quality of it. Of course there are exceptions.
And for comparison: I just downloaded Total War: Shogun 2 on my computer. It's nearly 19GB (!).

[pauxlo]

To be honest, whenever I download a game, if it's commercial and it's under ~2GB, I automatically get the impression that it's not going to be a well-thought-out, well-rounded game. The graphics will probably suck. And nowadays, the bar probably even higher, maybe around ~5-7GB now.
For indie/open-source/freeware games, the cut-off point for me is around 100MB.
In other words, many times the size of game tells a lot about the quality of it.

Huh, this is a strange criterion. So if I distribute all my game graphics as BMP instead of PNG, and all sounds as WAV instead of whatever compressed format I was using, the game automatically gets better by your metric?

[monochromatic]

To be honest, whenever I download a game, if it's commercial and it's under ~2GB, I automatically get the impression that it's not going to be a well-thought-out, well-rounded game. The graphics will probably suck. And nowadays, the bar probably even higher, maybe around ~5-7GB now.
For indie/open-source/freeware games, the cut-off point for me is around 100MB.
In other words, many times the size of game tells a lot about the quality of it.

Huh, this is a strange criterion. So if I distribute all my game graphics as BMP instead of PNG, and all sounds as WAV instead of whatever compressed format I was using, the game automatically gets better by your metric?

It's not really a criterion, it's more of a benchmark. It's sort of similar to the post count thing a while ago. If someone made a proposal on the forums that is very large and game-changing change, I (at least) would be inclined to brush it off without thinking too much. But if someone with many forum posts and is respected posts something large and game-changing, I'd be more inclined to think it through.
Call it human nature, whatever. For me at least it's something natural, almost like 'judging a book by its cover' thing. I hope I'm not speaking Greek.

[Noy]

He is absolutely right though.

Every new release, Wesnoth grows larger and larger.

At this speed, we hit the 1 Gig size soon enough.

I remember I found Wesnoth in ... 2004 or some such. It was small and sweet back then.

Then things got added over the years ... sure, more and more graphics, but what you guys fail to mention is that you added more and more dependencies on the way just as well.

Nowadays, you require the monster boost for Wesnoth! That wasn't the case years ago.

Nothing can be done about this.

Wesnoth will become a colossal size monster and in 4 years noone will know why it has grown to +1 Gig ...

We used to start simple and elegant ... keep it simple right?

Now we have become HUGE.

There is a term for this.

BLOATED.

I'M WITH YOU COMRADE! LET NOT SHY AWAY FROM THOSE WHO WOULD EXPLOIT OUR GOOD AND NOBLE HARD DRIVES WITH THE FILTH OF THEIR EVIL POORLY PROGRAMMED AND BLOATED WAYS!

VIVA THE REVOLUTION! VIVA THE ONE TRUE VISION OF WESNOTH! VIVA VERSION 0.1!!!!!!!