What's the best balance between game file size and image compression?

[ツSisterSexualシ]

Hello, I wondered what is the sacrifice we make when we download a compressed version of our favorite Game/VN?

Is it sound?, are scenes removed/shortened?
are there animations removed?
is the quality reduced in the renders?

Thanks for the help!

It's just a little image compression, there are many free tools that allow you to reduce the size of your files, like from 10gb to 4-5gb

cannot see the difference.

THIS!

 

[cynist]

Hello, I wondered what is the sacrifice we make when we download a compressed version of our favorite Game/VN?

Is it sound?, are scenes removed/shortened?
are there animations removed?
is the quality reduced in the renders?

Thanks for the help!

It can be everything you list.

With YAC Crunch, it will compress images, videos/animations, music/sounds, and anything else that can be lowered/reduced. It's mainly used for Android due to space limitations on some devices. Images will get their quality reduced. Same with videos. Music/sounds get bitrate reduction.

Devs normally downgrade their images prior to release. With 1080p, a reduction of up to about 20% is barely noticeable for most people. This can take a WEBP image from 400kb down to 200 or lower. Saves vast amount of space. If you download an early (0.1, 0.2) and it's 800MB+ in size, they likely used PNG/JPG for images or didn't lower their WEBP resolution.

 

[kikomascado]

It is mainly visual compressions, downscaling the resolution and using some technological shenanigans like limiting colors, splitting channels in quadrants or whatever.

If you have a good monitor, you'd probably see te difference, because since the image is smaller, in fullscreen it would be stretched and maybe a little blurry, along with some noise (random dots of different colors).

If you're like me, who have a shitty monitor and a shitty headphone, the difference isn't noticeable at all, so I always dowloaded the compressed versions to finish it faster and to have less space occupied on my hard drive.

 

[Ribaso]

I'm always afraid of compatibility issues for some reason.

 

[misaki002]

Can be anything... depends on the compression alone. And the way it was compressed, if I remember correctly there are some alogorithms that compress in a way that u dont lose anything - but the size difference isn't very different so they are not used most of the times. Then there are those which reduce the quality of renders. I don't think I have ever seen cases where author removed sound or animations from game for compression

 

[kikomascado]

Can be anything... depends on the compression alone. And the way it was compressed, if I remember correctly there are some alogorithms that compress in a way that u dont lose anything - but the size difference isn't very different so they are not used most of the times. Then there are those which reduce the quality of renders. I don't think I have ever seen cases where author removed sound or animations from game for compression

Yeah. You indeed could losslessly compress the images, but since compressed games usually are less than half the file size I think the method is more aggressive. Hahaha

 

[Republican Bear]

Compression reduces the amount of data that game assets occupy, making them smaller and faster to load. There are different types of compression, such as
lossless and lossy, that have different effects on the quality and size of your assets. Usually image and sound files get converted and will be of lesser quality.

Modern non-adult games are almost 10x times larger then last gen because developers don't compress files as much.

 

[firagabird]

It is mainly visual compressions, downscaling the resolution and using some technological shenanigans like limiting colors, splitting channels in quadrants or whatever.

If you have a good monitor, you'd probably see te difference, because since the image is smaller, in fullscreen it would be stretched and maybe a little blurry, along with some noise (random dots of different colors).

If you're like me, who have a shitty monitor and a shitty headphone, the difference isn't noticeable at all, so I always dowloaded the compressed versions to finish it faster and to have less space occupied on my hard drive.

Yup. I vastly prefer the bandwidth and storage savings of compressed games. Also, I like using Mega to DL them, and that has an annoying 4GB cap, so the smaller games just get DLed and played more. So few games look good enough for really HQ images to impact my enjoyment anyway.

 

[cepaxo]

I never feel difference

 

[Republican Bear]

Because you wont see a huge a difference unless you take 4k images and compress them to much.

Otherwise it's not noticeable. It just depends on much you compress the quality.

 

[dehydrateddonburi]

What you lose depends heavily on the compression algorithm applied, and each one prioritizes the bits differently. If you can't see a difference between lossless and lossy compression then it totally doesn't matter!

Except that smaller downloads mean you can play games sooner, so maybe that's a good motivation.

 

[blackfyre]

In most cases they don't remove nor shorten any scenes. They don't usually remove sounds either. And they don't re-render the scenes either, so you won't see any difference in the quality of the lighting or any of the 3D stuff itself. All they usually do is take the images and compress them a bit further. This does not mean reducing their resolution (although that might also be something they do in some cases, if the original images are too big). What they usually do is use a different compression format (like webp, which is a more modern and efficient algorithm than png or jepg), and/or a lossier compression. A lossier compression means that more data is technically lost, but the way these algorithms work is that they always try that the lost data is the least noticeable to the human eye. In some specific images, like ones that are too dark, you might end up noticing some of these compression artifacts, but in most cases that should not happen. So yeah, in summary, if the compression is reasonably well done, as is the case in most games I've played, you should not notice any difference, unless you're playing on a very big screen and you put your face right next to it, and you have a particularly keen eye for colors.

 

[daisend]

Likely image or audio quality will be lower but I haven't noticed anything that sticks out.

 

[SennaLv11]

There are some aggressively compressed games where the artifacts in the image are very noticeable and then there are some where you can only tell by really taking your time to look for defects. Though the darker the images, the more obvious it gets, because a lot of space can be saved by just assuming anything in shadows is barely visible anyway, so that can be simplified. That's also why dark scenes in videos (like let's say on YouTube) look really bad way more easily than bright scenes do.

 

[feralchild]

Images would probably look more low res. And any audio would likely be downgraded as well.

 

[feralchild]

I'd prefer uncompressed 1080p.
I've seen some uncompressed 4k but the hassle of downloading those huge files aren't worth it since most games aren't even rendered that well lol

 

[SquirrelMonkey]

Most people won't notice a difference

 

[User_111574]

I prefer the highest possible image quality. The resolution is at least 1080p. At 720p, compression artifacts and various digital noises are already clearly visible (in full screen mode). True, I have a UHD monitor. If the monitor was a simple Full HD, then the requirements for graphics would be reduced. The size of the game file is secondary for me.

 

[darkie]

dont care so much about the size if the content are good

 

[meiistheworst]

I dont mind the huge file size, get the HD all day i say