Skyrim - 6Gb HDD Space Explained

I don't expect a miracle in terms of PC textures, and this sounds both reasonable and plausible.

When Oblivion was released 5 years ago, it has been made with Xbox 360 in mind. At that time X360 was new, and way ahead of average PC hardware. I personally think, Bethesda's long years of experience with the same engine must really enable them to push the boundries of it without stressing the systems.

I think 6 gb hard disc space is more than enough if you know what you're doing as a developer. Skyrim's Xbox360centric development forces the developers to the limited double-size DVD (8,5 gb). So they are using new compression methods to use this limited space effectively. When Morrowind was released in 2002, I bought the game and was surprised that installation took only one CD. I was worried about the content then, but the result was a real open world experience with hundred hours of fun.

I was a bit surprised that a lot of people here in this forum see the low resolution textures (if there will be any) really a problem. From what I have seen in youtube preview videos I was pretty impressed. I didn't count the poligons but art style definitely took my interest. Apart from graphics we really have to concern about the role playing aspects of the game. My main concern is the level scaling system, they didn't talk much about it apart from saying it will be dynamic and I fear the result would be similar to Oblivion. I sincerely hope it won't.

Certainly there's one thing about consolcentric development. I can still play new games at high graphic settings without my two years old system breaking out a sweat.

6GB's fine - means I will probably stick it on the SSD rather than HDD.

Most games package their textures and models but there isn't any compression on those packages. A good indication of this (besides having tools to extract the packages) is the size of the installed games being a good deal larger then what is on the dvd.

Well, it makes sense that they'd focus on compression - as the problem with streaming content is often the HDD access (and the much worse DVD access for consoles). So, if they can reduce the size of textures and offload the work to the CPU/GPU instead of the HDD/DVD, they'd likely get much better streaming out of it.

I still wouldn't expect "PC textures" as such, but likely something a bit better than for consoles.

Everyone uses some type of texture compression most use DXT. I really doubt they found some magic way to dramatically reduce texture sizes.

I am quite sure we'll see the console textures in there. Hopefully they'll release a texture pack at the time of or soon after release, as usual let us not believe their hype.

GothicGothicness said:

Everyone uses some type of texture compression most use DXT. I really doubt they found some magic way to dramatically reduce texture sizes.

I am quite sure we'll see the console textures in there. Hopefully they'll release a texture pack at the time of or soon after release, as usual let us not believe their hype.

Click to expand...

Are you saying that using more/different compression has to be magical?

The price is obviously the workload of decompressing textures, whatever method they employ. That doesn't necessarily make sense in games with closed levels that don't depend as much on dynamically loading textures.

They used to handle streaming very clumsily with their "cell" world structure - and though they probably still do that - they already improved it significantly from Morrowind to Oblivion to Fallout 3. I see no reason they couldn't have come up with a smart way of dynamically loading content that includes more/better use of compression technology.

guenthar said:

Most games package their textures and models but there isn't any compression on those packages. A good indication of this (besides having tools to extract the packages) is the size of the installed games being a good deal larger then what is on the dvd.

Click to expand...

Of course most games use texture compression. It improves performance. You can fit more textures into memory and have fewer cache misses. Also, decompression is fast and done by hardware.

So I wonder what Bethesda is talking about. Using existing methods, could they have optimized this much by doctoring the textures so that they compressed better? I know the gaming industry are hardcore when it comes to fitting as much stuff as they can on a disc.

Are you saying that using more/different compression has to be magical?

Click to expand...

Well, DXT textures which is again what most games use for compressing the textures is already very heavily compressed. If they have a method which compresses much more than that I will be extremely impressed, but I sincerely doubt it. Besides the hardware has built in support for these kinds of compression if they made their own ones they'll not be able to take advantage of that. So, either we'll see a whole lot of repeating textures, or we'll see console size ones. That's my bet.

We’ve seen plenty of comments relating to the game only requiring six gigs of HDD space. Don’t worry… there’s still a ton of game in there. The total HDD space relates more to the compression opitmizations we’re able to do with The Creation Engine. Not only are do we think you’ll be impressed with how the game looks, but also how much faster it runs..

Click to expand...

Well, it seems Bethesda themselves think they're doing something they haven't done before with compression.

AFAIK, there are several ways to handle texture compression, and even DXT can be done in several ways.

Who knows what they've done - but I don't know why it would be particularly unlikely that they've managed to get decent looking textures down to a managable size.

From what I've seen of Skyrim - even the console textures look great.

GothicGothicness said:

Well, DXT textures which is again what most games use for compressing the textures is already very heavily compressed. If they have a method which compresses much more than that I will be extremely impressed, but I sincerely doubt it. Besides the hardware has built in support for these kinds of compression if they made their own ones they'll not be able to take advantage of that. So, either we'll see a whole lot of repeating textures, or we'll see console size ones. That's my bet.

Click to expand...

I know this won't actually be the case, but would be interesting if they had borrowed the texture compression method from Id, given they found DXT far too small a compression for Rage and had to use a much stronger (but lossy and with very high CPU load) one.

I thought about that too, kalniel, but I seem to remember Todd saying that the Creation engine was well under development before Id came along. If my memory is correct, then they wouldn't have had time to redevelop for Id. My CPU is much stronger than my GPU, so I'm hoping the CPU takes more of the strain

I'm really glad they arent using Megatextures, the only time it looks good is when it can use hi-res textures, but that can take hundreds of GB's so it's not really suitable for games yet. You can also forget about user made texture packs when that technique is used.

ID's engine isnt any good for open world games like TES, which Todd has mentioned in some interviews.

What DXT does is throw away information to decrease the size of the texture and if there is any actual compression it is minor. That is why for most games the size it is on disc is much smaller then it is on the hd. If Bethesda used a compression algorithm on the bsa files and had the files decompress as needed then the hd space used by the game would be practically the same as what is on the disc. Since they could decompress the files before they need to be used then they won't need to worry about delays because of the time it takes to decompress. I just wonder which compression algorithm they will use and how much compression there will be.

PS. Pretty much all media is "compressed" in a lossy format which throws away information in order to make the size smaller. The actual compression on these are minor or non-existence since compressed files need to be decompressed to be used which takes time and resources which can't be done with something that needs to work almost instantly with a small amount of resource usage.

Even if they are using some special compression method, wouldn't the game become uncompressed when installed on to your computer? Like turning 6 gb on a disc into 10 gigs on your hard drive. That doesn't explain why you only need 6 gb of hard drive space.

I think the idea people are speaking of is that the files wouldn't just be compressed in the installer files, but that once they are actually installed they would remain compressed until needed and then would be put into RAM or VRAM (or worst case scenario, virtual RAM).

This is already done to an extent, however heavily compressed files are generally not installed since there is a trade off to those of requiring time and cpu cycles to decompress. It's possible they have some methods of dealing with this such as faster decompression algorithms or loading part of the files on the fly.

I will bite my tongue regarding "new compression techniques", if everyone promises to remember what they said, and come back and admit they were wrong if Skyrim turns out to have console textures. I'll certainly be impressed if they invented something new, and I'll enjoy talking about it!

Well when it came to DA2 I don't think it was just the textures they shrank, also the voice audio files according to audiophile's complaints.

crpgnut said:

I thought about that too, kalniel, but I seem to remember Todd saying that the Creation engine was well under development before Id came along. If my memory is correct, then they wouldn't have had time to redevelop for Id.

Click to expand...

Do we have proof that the creation engine is anything but a slightly improved(like ob->fo3 improved) gamebryo engine?

I mean you'd have to applaud them if all it took to address fan's demands of wanting gamebryo gone was a simple name change, made possible by the death of gamebryo's developer.

KapitanUnterhosen said:

I mean you'd have to applaud them if all it took to address fan's demands of wanting gamebryo gone was a simple name change, made possible by the death of gamebryo's developer.

Click to expand...

A name change can do wonders, trust me!

"Gamebryo" did not have a very positive brand image among end users.

What DXT does is throw away information to decrease the size of the texture and if there is any actual compression it is minor. That is why for most games the size it is on disc is much smaller then it is on the hd. If Bethesda used a compression algorithm on the bsa files and had the files decompress as needed then the hd space used by the game would be practically the same as what is on the disc. Since they could decompress the files before they need to be used then they won't need to worry about delays because of the time it takes to decompress. I just wonder which compression algorithm they will use and how much compression there will be.

PS. Pretty much all media is "compressed" in a lossy format which throws away information in order to make the size smaller. The actual compression on these are minor or non-existence since compressed files need to be decompressed to be used which takes time and resources which can't be done with something that needs to work almost instantly with a small amount of resource usage.

Click to expand...

Why do you even comment if you don't have any knowledge? This blog explains DXT texture compression in a fairly simple and clear way: http://www.sjbrown.co.uk/2006/01/19/dxt-compression-techniques/ It is not good for normal maps but for that most games uses 3dc. Again I would be extremely impressed if they have developer a completely new texture compression algorithm which is much better than these.