Titanfall's massive PC install explained
Titanfall is out now on PC. However, one required spec has raised a few eyebrows: why does the game require 48GB of space? Especially when the Xbox...
Titanfall is out now on PC. However, one required spec has raised a few eyebrows: why does the game require 48GB of space? Especially when the Xbox One version is only 16GB?
The bloated file size on PC comes from developer Respawn's attempt at making the game compatible with as many machines as possible. Specifically, the game includes 35GB of uncompressed audio. Lead engineer Richard Baker told Eurogamer that "by having uncompressed audio, the game runs faster for those using slower systems." Xbox One includes an audio decoder built into the hardware, which does away with the need for uncompressed audio.
"We were a little worried about min spec and the fact that a two-core machine would dedicate a huge chunk of one core to just decompressing audio," he said.
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Andrew Yoon posted a new article, Titanfall's massive PC install explained.
Titanfall is out now on PC. However, one required spec has raised a few eyebrows: why does the game require 48GB of space? Especially when the Xbox...-
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Those saying well I have a SSD, just get one of these for your Steam games : http://www.amazon.com/Drive-Security-Local-Backup-WDBFJK0020HBK-NESN/dp/B00E3RH5W2/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1394556029&sr=8-3&keywords=wd+external+hard+drive+2tb
I use this now for Steam and it works great, would I love to have a 2TB SSD of course I would but really this is more than enough once you fill your SSDs.
2TB for $99 bones USB3 -
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No, no I have plenty of space, but I have hundreds of games installed from various companies, EA/Origin, Steam, Gamestop. Stardock, Gog, Indies. Guess its OCD but I like to keep my games handy and ready and not have to download them every time. I could make the space, I suppose.
The strategy games take up the most space believe it or not.
Oh and all the early access stuff. To many to mention there.
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Eh, I don't quite buy it. I do music production on PC and it's common to use (lossless) compressed audio for samplers. I can play like 500 voices at the same time without the CPU breaking a sweat. However! The footprint of streaming all those distinct audio voices on either RAM or the HD is much larger than the work for the CPU. It's the IO bottleneck that gives in first. By not compressed audio the IO bottleneck gets worse much earlier.
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I guess quite a bit of CPU power needs to be reserved for prioritizing sound effect processing when suddenly many sound effects need to be played at once, for example when large fights take place. Decompressing and playing a couple of sound files at once probably doesn't require much CPU power, but make it 100 and add sound mutation effects (distance, position, hallway echo, etc.) to each, then it might require a good chunk of spare CPU power to play that all immediately without stuttering or other noticeable delays.
At first I thought it's trivial, but considering a lot of modern games still have audio stuttering bugs (Forza 5, Battlefield 4), I guess it isn't after all.
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It seems the original source that I got that from at The Escapist, didn't paint the full picture when I put that up. While the language files do seem to be there in the final product, they don't take up much space in the grand scheme of things, at least from what I can tell.
Now that I have the game for myself, I went to the same directory and looked at it in detail view instead of "list" as that image was: http://i.imgur.com/sVxbihP.png
So it's a good bit from being uncompressed and including added bloat in the form of the additional audio files. All of which is just unnecessary.
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Run time decompression isn't cheap. DX used to support hardware decompression, but they ditched it a few versions back. Still supports it on Xbox, but not PC. The reason they gave was that CPUs were fast enough. Sadly, like what often happens in the gaming world, they were working off a premise of audio resources staying about the same. These days games often have a lot of DSP going on (see BF4) and add on to that all the streams needed for explosions, guns, UI, voice, etc and it can be a fair chunk of CPU.
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The real reason is that Origin has no good game language management option like Steam has. It's incredibly sloppy and, like GfWL, often ignores user input and goes by IP or OS region settings. So Titanfall has to download all languages just to make sure. And since they went crazy with uncompressed audio, it's exacerbating the problem.
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Good to see you back Fred.
I don't follow you and it's likely we're talking about the same thing. It's definitely an issue within Origin and I would say is what causes Titanfall to be this bloated.
On Steam, developers have the option to handle languages themselves, and most do. So all files are downloaded and languages can be switched on the fly. But they can also let Steam manage it through the language tab under game properties. With this method, only the selected language is downloaded.
This is Origin's biggest flaw for me, it was a nightmare to get all games to speak English. It somehow manages to be worse than Xbox Lice in this regard.-
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You're right that it's an option in the Steam GUI under properties. Look at Left 4 Dead 2, there's a lot of languages in that list and they only download the one your Steam client is set to. If you manually change it, Steam will download the additional language.
Other games let you choose the language in-game or in a launcher because they already downloaded the lot of them.
If Titanfall went with the former, it would've been a lot smaller. Apparently Origin has gotten better with this, but I'm not buying games on there every month to see of they finally fixed it.
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Uncompressed audio can sometimes come at a higher performance penalty than compressed for the reason you state and others too. Even if RAM isn't an issue, you increase load times, buffer sizes, I/O bus utilization, etc. I suppose that they may have tested it out and proved that CPU was the limiting factor for min spec machines. But if so, why is this the first time in a decade that I've heard about games storing so much audio uncompressed?
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10 years ago, Doom 3 released with most of its sounds as Ogg Vorbis. http://www.iddevnet.com/doom3/sounds.php
...and back in 2004, the majority of low-spec gaming PCs had ONE CPU, total.
Half-Life 2, by comparison, supported MP3 as well as WAV. I'm not that versed in the sound directory contents of HL2, but I think it's primarily MP3 for music, and WAV for voiceover. Whereas Doom 3 is mostly Ogg, with WAV for sound effects.
Seriously, WTF, Respawn? PC game developers 10 years ago didn't have excuses like this, and their low-spec target was far slower than yours. -
This compressed audio has always been a pain in the ass for especially Telltale games, they compress their audio so much that the quality is quite low, and it's insane considering especially on pc the space on hard drives is not an issue and also the same low quality compressed audio is also in the disc releases which especially should have uncompressed best quality audio in those.
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