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by innovati on Wed 23rd Feb 2005 22:51 UTC

Well, as for this article, althougt it was a bit extreme, I feel the same way. We sometimes loose sight of how much bloat there really is. I'd like to show you something, some of you have already seen it I imagine.

A current game right now may take anywhere from 500 MB or 800 MB or even over a GB for a full install. Most game demos run anywhere from 200-400 MB. What happens when somebody makes a goals for themselves, and tries to attain it? This is what:

Now, that game demo is 96k with the readme.txt. Remember when games used to be that small? Only this one has realtime-lighting and shadowing, colour blooms, bumpmapping, and all the other current video game features.

The people that made it had a goal and succeeded in making it. They could have just said, "Well, we'll use this format to make the 3D models in, people have 120 GB HD's now...they can handle it", or maybe "Well, we have broadband, so if some people still use dial-up that isn't our fault". Why should we support that kind of thinking?

If anybody has ever tried MenuetOS, that OS with a GUI that fits on a floppy, they know what I'm talking about when I say that if people set a goal they can do miracles. In KKreiger's case, they used scripts to generate the models and textures instead of saving the actual models temselves - innovation.

In my game, which uses OGRE, Blender, and other amazing software, I can only hope to keep a low size. We are trying our best to keep things small. 96k is a miracle, but 50MB isn't outlandish. Why can't we work together as a community and stop looking at the other's mistakes to justify our own laziness and just do what should be done to show how wrong they are. (my game URL is if you have any suggestions on how I could improve it, I'd be thrilled to hear them, e-mail: