Our demos grew too big!

StyX/HCR

After the MS 2001 I was impatient to see the demos as my groupmate Ctulhu had told me that they were very good. So I checked around scene.org just to see that all the .zip's were far too big. I am a 56k modem user, so I do not even start to download anything bigger than 5mb.

Some time later I finally got them burned on a CD by another groupmate. I realized that some of the demos were unpacked >10mb in size! That's far too much in my eyes.

You shouldn't only think about the fact that not everyone has a superfast DSL internet connection or something like that. You also should remember why demos are so cool: because they show something in very limited size where other people would need many megs. Now we are on the way to fuck up this fascination. One thing already got lost, demos arent't anymore there to show how trickily you can use your hardware, today we have 3d cards, lots of RAM and even more masses of brute MHz power.

But just because we have GB's of HDD space we shouldn't waste it that much. Because when new video-formats are coming up our demos will be as big as videos and we can stop the thing and go home to our mummys.

I also realized that many demos now use a huge MP3 as music. Well, hmm, er, O.K, MP3 and demos are another discussion. But I think that modules can sound equally good and the main thing is that they pack excellently (while MP3 is already packed and often even becomes bigger).

The next thing is: all gfx files today are jpg. You really should think whether this is necessary. It is for your gfx'ers artwork, but do you need all textures in jpg? And do they all need to be that big?

You should consider whether a 8bpp texture wouldn't do the job also. Or why not whacking all your textures in one gfx-file? This can save some mem too. And you have fewer single files, too.

Of course you need to sort out the single textures again, but don't tell me that's very difficult. Every lamer can read out a square.

While designing demos you should never forget the anatomy of the human eye. We all know that it often sucks like hell, that means: it is too slow, can't see many colors, can't realize fast movements, etc etc. I guess if someone examined what of a 3d scene a person really experiences, he'd probably measure that it's less than 50%. And thus that box right there in the gloomy backyard of your cool scene really doesn't need a 512x512 truecolor texture. Wouldn't a 8bpp 128x128 also do the job? Many software have excellent color reduction tools (even the old PSP 3 does it well, maybe better than expensive ones) and your 3d card does filtering on the polygons anyway. And you also can apply some anti-aliasing on your texture during preloading.

Or why not generate textures also in demos? Why not take your old 64k-intro routines and use it for the demo? And it's so easy to make new textures out of one original picture by applying filters, lightmaps, etc.

Yes, of course this is some more work. But I'm sure you could save huge amounts of memory that way. Otherwise soon we need to deliver our demos on CDR by mail. Not that cool.

Apart from that it will be better for the spreading of your demo. Just to tell you about my behaviour: demos bigger than 5mb are ignored by me, even if all people say they're the coolest thing since the introduction of viagra. If I can't get them somehow on CD I won't ever watch them, bad luck. At scene.org I do not look which demos won the compo but which are small enough not to wait 1 hour to download it. And I dare to say I'm not the only one acting that way. Humans are impatient. Studies say that most people press "STOP" in their browser when they see no content after 5 seconds. 45min downloads probably don't make happy, either.


StyX/HCR
cologne has a dome, my hometown not

comments go to: andi.schilling@gmx.de