Download Size

[shevegen]

Over the years I have noticed that the wesnoth size has increased more and more.

I think a few years ago we were at around 100 MB, now this has exploded to 200 MB.

Since I keep all games in a local directory, and backup all my stuff regularly, every size
increase eventually forces me to rethink the size of certain projects.

In the past I have kept old version of wesnoth etc.. but now I have started to keep only
the latest wesnoth version due to the growing size. My question now is:

- Are there ways to keep the size of the game smaller?
I guess my biggest worry is that the size grow is due to unneeded complexity or a
mismanagement of the graphics. Maybe the engine part could be split from the
graphics package or something - or just kept smaller?

[Dave]

I think that the biggest reason the game has grown in size is simply because we have added a lot more content.

We've added more music, more portraits, more campaigns, more animations, etc. All of these take space up. In particular, our music now takes up 100MB. I think this kind of growth is all natural and expected.

We've tried having various "Wesnoth Lite" packages before, for instance, without music or with only minimal music, but very few people actually downloaded them. I think the vast majority of users just like everything in one nice easy package.

Anyone who wants to is of course welcome to provide things broken up into smaller packages etc.

David

[cool evil]

200 MB isn't that huge compared to some other games. You are probably asking this because wesnoth is 2D based and have no intensive 3D rendering like most other modern games. Granted, it is one of the largest in open-source games, but with any respectable internet speed, you could easily pull this off on a download. (even the old dial-up takes about only 10 hours with the help of a download manager, it also plays just fine in multiplayer)

You could also get all the previous versions of wesnoth from sourceforge. It goes back to 0.1 and that was only a couple megabytes.

[Iris]

I think that the biggest reason the game has grown in size is simply because we have added a lot more content.

We've added more music, more portraits, more campaigns, more animations, etc.

And, besides the number, it is the quality what has significantly increased lately. Now we have long music tracks (the longest being more than 9 minutes) and new high-resolution portraits in a lossless format (400x400 px. PNG files) for the whole elvish race and most loyalist soldiers and commanders.

Imagine if we started distributing music in the lossless FLAC format...

[Thanatos]

Imagine if we started distributing music in the lossless FLAC format...

Better I order a new and much bigger harddrive soon, isn't it?

[LemonTea]

I've downloaded a 2.2 GB torrent when internet was really slow (I might have been capped, can't remember, but it would have been even slower if I was capped :/). Sunday to Thursday.

Did the Wesnoth download take that long?

[Corvvs]

Hmph. I was wondering why it got so big... that would make sense with all the new portraits and stuff. It's weird cuz there's a first person shooter game I used to play that was about 300mb and had _really_ insanely good graphics for an open source mod.

[scienceguy8]

I would like to point out that the Mac version is larger than it could be because it is a Universal application. The program package contains two applications: one that works on the older PowerPC Macs, and another that runs on modern Intel Macs. Depending on which kind of machine you use, one works, the other lounges about wasting hard drive space. There are utilities on the Apple website on their downloads page that can strip out the PowerPC components of a Universal app. Never tried them myself, however, so I cannot tell you how much space you would potentially save or if it would cause any damage.

[Turuk]

I may be mistaken, but I do think the actual amount of PPC code is small, and that messing with removing it could cause corruption.

[anakayub]

how much space you would potentially save or if it would cause any damage.

Not much, a single binary is about 9 MB for 1.5.8 (I compile for personal use (Intel only)), and so a UB would amount to 16-20 MB size. An additional 10 MB wouldn't change too much anyways, as when it's compressed for distribution, it's compressed to at least 40% of the original size. The rest of the big size in Mac downloads come from the use of Python included within the package, amounting to about 90 MB uncompressed, but it's included because 10.4 doesn't come with the minimum Python version required for Wesnoth.

Not sure about damage, but in theory it shouldn't be a problem, as the a UB basically consists of 2 separate programs in one, sharing only the data (which is the majority of the download size anyway along with Python). You can try using those free code/language strippers for the Mac (can't recall the name straight away), but I doubt that it's worth the effort.

[zookeeper]

Hmph. I was wondering why it got so big... that would make sense with all the new portraits and stuff. It's weird cuz there's a first person shooter game I used to play that was about 300mb and had _really_ insanely good graphics for an open source mod.

Presumably it doesn't have over an hour of recorded music. And in a 3D game nothing but textures really take up a lot of space.

[Corvvs]

I always assumed that 3D models were big files... but I suppose not. And you're right, the music was abysmal and repetitive bad techno.

[Mathemagician]

Couldn't you just tell your backup app to ignore dirs called images under the wesnoth dir? Or are you doing manual backups?

[Glass Pearl Player]

I always assumed that 3D models were big files... but I suppose not.

It depends of course on the format used. However (in this laymans opinion), when using a binary format, one could easily get down to 48 bytes per triangle (2 bytes per 3d-coordinate makes 6, 6 more for normals, another 4 for 2 texture coordinates gives 16 bytes per vertex). Formats that store vertices separately and let the triangles refer to them by indices - like the wavefront format does - should beat that handily. And we haven't mentioned tricks like exploiting of symmetries or deliberately reducing the polygon count here.
However, what does tend to be big, of course, are high quality textures and advanced features like bump-mapping, normal mapping, displacement mapping and Xykon knows what those newfangled GFX cards can do besides z-buffering and stenciling.

In all seriousness: It would not surprise me if a BfW remake in 3D would take less disk space even after animating every single mainline unit and require less man-hours for creating all that content. However, getting a graphics engine to work for any number of 3D cards could be quite a maintenance task, to say nothing of writing that thing in the first place.

[SirTheta]

If only I had found a Wesnoth 1.4.7 or 1.5.8 Lite I never really have my speakers turned on anyway, and I wouldn't have had to stay up until 3AM to download it. Is it an excessive amount of work (compared to the number of downloads) to make a Lite version?