Wesnoth LITE

Weeksy · Post by **Weeksy** » July 7th, 2007, 8:17 pm

I was just thinking that, as this wonderful game has increased in generation after generation, so has the file size. I know part of the large gap between 1.2.5 and 1.3.4 is the extra campaigns that have become mainline (at least for a while) in 1.3.x, but I think that for those who have slower speeds or just crammed hard drives (I'm at 137/140g) large files can be a pain. I am thinking that as a nice option for those in such conditions, a 'lite' version, without the long text descriptions, less complex animations, only 1 or 2 campaigns, less music, no portraits, and not all those big graphics from the pages before you actually start a scenario. Any ideas?

Post by **CIB** » July 7th, 2007, 8:53 pm

Sounds good, but also like alot of work.

Weeksy · Post by **Weeksy** » July 7th, 2007, 9:16 pm

Of course it's a lot of work. I'd say the first course of action is to decide how slim we want to go, and what we are willing to do to get there... shall we try to get 1.3.4 down to 40 megs?

Post by **Dave** » July 7th, 2007, 9:28 pm

I think this is a reasonable idea, but I'd like to point out that there are some things which really don't take up much space.

In particular, anything purely textual -- like long descriptions -- is likely to compress very well and will take up an insignificant amount of space in the final download.

The things that do take up space are music and images. Especially large storyline images. Removing some music tracks and removing some large storyline images would probably be the best thing to do to cut down on the download size.

David

Post by **Viliam** » July 8th, 2007, 12:15 pm

Yes, before starting the long work it would be useful to make a calculation how many KBs each thing has, and how many will have the remaining compilation.

My rough calculation -- please note that I measured data on my hard disk (windows, 1.2 branch), and this is not the same as in installation file, because the text files compress better and pictures/sounds worse. But as an approximation it could be useful.

I assume that we want to have 2 campaigns: "Two Brothers" (the easiest one) and "Heir to the Throne" (the traditional one); and the tutorial too. And we do not need a map editor. Green = use it; Red = do not use it.

93.1 MB -- Total Wesnoth (without "userdata").

24.4 MB -- Music. Not necessary for gameplay.

25.6 MB -- Translations (messages, manuals). This includes:
0.2 MB - Manuals. Not necessary, especially if we have tutorial.
0.0 MB - Editor.
0.9 MB - Tutorial.
0.4 MB - Campaign: Two Brothers.
1.4 MB - Campaign: The South Guard.
1.4 MB - Campaign: Eastern Invasion.
4.3 MB - Campaign: Heir to the Throne.
2.9 MB - Campaign: The Rise of Wesnoth.
6.4 MB - Campaign: Under the Burning Suns.
7.8 MB - Other translations.

4.3 MB -- Sounds. Not sure about them...

0.2 MB -- Tutorial.
0.2 MB -- Campaign: Two Brothers.
0.9 MB -- Campaign: The South Guard.
0.4 MB -- Campaign: Eastern Invasion.
3.1 MB -- Campaign: Heir to the Throne.
0.6 MB - if story maps and portraits are removed
2.9 MB -- Campaign: The Rise of Wesnoth.
2.9 MB -- Campaign: Under the Burning Suns.
0.1 MB -- Multiplayer scenarios.

0.7 MB -- Fonts.

Now I do not have time to analyze the remaining files, so just shortly:

16.5 MB -- Other images (units, user interface,...).
10.7 MB -- Other (binaries, libraries, configuration files).

So my opinion is that by removing music, 4 campaigns (and their translations!), and editor we can save about 45 MB. That's almost half of the file size without reducing the quality of game -- after completing the 2 campaigns player can later download the full version. (This estimate was made on uncompressed files, maybe the situation with compressed files is different.)

Further removing would reduce the quality, and not have a significant effect on file size. And would require more work. So the selection "without music, without 4 campaigns, without editor" would be relatively easy to do, and reduce the file size to 50%. More reduction would have less quality, require much work by selecting/modifying the files, and it would probably still be impossible to get below 25%. So the decision in my opinion is if the 50% reduction is important enough.

Elvish_Pillager · Post by **Elvish_Pillager** » July 8th, 2007, 1:41 pm

Why remove the editor? You haven't listed it as having any size except for the 0.0 MB of translations.

Xandria · Post by **Xandria** » July 8th, 2007, 5:12 pm

Now - I don't think that the 90 megs of Wesnoth are too much for the fun it provides, especially when compared to commercial titles that use 2 or more gigabytes of space.

If you have to slim down Wesnoth, I suggest to make the download of the music files optional, and that's it.

Post by **Baufo** » July 8th, 2007, 6:22 pm

I think it would make a lot of sense making translations optional. Most of them you will never use anyways (or who knows like 25 languages?) so you are basically downloading a huge amount of unneeded stuff.

Weeksy · Post by **Weeksy** » July 8th, 2007, 8:09 pm

I prefer manuals to a tutorial, and feel that the campaign The South Guard is meant as somewhat of a tutorial, at least on its easiest difficulty (it says so in the campaign description), and so I'm for keeping the manuals, but as a seperate thing I'd say that the South Guard could replace both the Tutorial and a Tale of Two Brothers

Post by **Viliam** » July 8th, 2007, 10:45 pm

Elvish Pillager wrote:Why remove the editor? You haven't listed it as having any size except for the 0.0 MB of translations.

Oh, yes. But the editor binary has 1.4 MB... (under "Other" category). I did not analyze it further, because I do not know which DLL's are necessary for the program / daemon / editor. But probably all are needed by the program. And by the way uninstaller takes 1.1 MB, and we do not really need it (especially if we would not create a Start menu).

Anyway, I have no strong opinion about what should be and what should not be in Wesnoth Lite. (I will not use it.) I suggested what seemed to me reasonable at the moment. Just wanted to provide some numbers, so that others can estimate how many MB would have their favourite selection. For example how many MB have individual campaigns with their translations.

Post by **turin** » July 8th, 2007, 10:57 pm

Translations are 25 MB. How easy would it be to package wesnoth so you only had to download the translation for your language? That would do as much as removing all of the music files, but without any loss of functionality... I'm kind of surprised this hasn't been suggested earlier; I would have done so, but I didn't realize translations took up that much room. I would have guessed a quarter of that.

Hyunjae · Post by **Hyunjae** » July 9th, 2007, 1:20 am

You could remove all the campaigns and make them all add-ons

and if you remove the music from that, it'll be 33 megabytes xD

Post by **Viliam** » July 9th, 2007, 9:35 am

turin wrote:How easy would it be to package wesnoth so you only had to download the translation for your language?

It would be very easy, especially if Windows packager would in addition to installer also provide a "win32-zip" package. The algorithm would be:
* unzip the full package
* make copies for all languages you want to support (35 possible)
* remove the unnecessary translations in each copy
* zip the packages
* upload to SourceForge

We probably would not need to have 35 lite versions... it could be done on-demand ("if you want lite versions for your language, write it in the forum and I will add your language to my script").

Is saving 25 of 93 MBs worth this? But if we remove music too, this together would save 50 of 93 MBs... that's over half.

So now it comes to... is there a volunteer?

Post by **Noyga** » July 9th, 2007, 10:15 am

This is a packaging problem, not something that the Wesnoth team usually directly deal with.
Some packagers (like Debian for example) already deal with this problem by splitting wesnoth into several packages.
Some others (MacOs X IIRC) offer the Lite version as an alternative.
The wesnoth dev team do only release the source code and tell the known packagers a while before the official release announcement, then if necessary host the available packages.
For the source code, i find it more convenient to have only one package :
- it makes the releaser's task easier
- it makes the packager's task easier
By the way, anyone is free to repackage it into several pieces (in accordance to the GPL).

For the Windows version, Yogi Bear would probably appreciate some help in the packaging/installer area.

Tekchip · Post by **Tekchip** » July 9th, 2007, 2:14 pm

This suggestion would probably require some change to the base code but would it be so tough for some of the groovy programmers out there to allow midi play back in game? Then you could provide alternate music in midi format taking your 24 or so mb down to what? 1 or 2mb for music with out sacrificing content much. I mean even mod might be an option for music?