Game Size?

[McMick]

I'm a first-time poster so I apologize if this is a repeated question or has already been discussed, but I was unable to find anything with a forum search that seemed related.

The current Windows beta version is 297.5MB in size. Compare this with the 1.0.2 version which was 35.2MB. Why has the game gotten 9 times larger since 1.0, and is there any way to shrink it up a bit so it runs faster and uses less disk space?

It seems to me like the game should be something that would run a lot better than it does on older systems, and yet the newer versions can take several seconds to load even on my quad-core system. I feel like people are devoting so much time to adding features to this thing that it's grown into a hulking monster that is in severe need of a code optimization or something to make it smaller and faster.

Ideally (to me) the game shouldn't be larger than 64MB and it should run on a PIII system quite nicely. I see you guys are developing for iphone and stuff like that. Will that require optimization to shrink the size and if so, will these optimizations also be included in Windows builds?

[uncleshelby]

The game is big because of Music and Images. Without many of the images in the game, the terrain would look a lot worse. Also, take "several seconds to load" is normal. I have a system with a 1.4 MHz single-core processor, and as long as I don't run anything else (like a browser, for example), it runs very smoothly. And 600 Mb is not a lot of disk space, unless you have a very small hard drive.

[monochromatic]

For the record, the Battle of Wesnoth Team did not actually create the iOS port. It was done separately by a single developer (who unfortunately has gone MIA, it seems). But the iOS port did require a great deal of optimization so Wesnoth would run on the iPhone/iPad/iPod Touch.

1.9.1+ (not 1.9.0 because it was buggy) ran quite smoothly on my old computer. I had a 2.4 GHz dual-core processor, and I could easily run 4-5 average apps at the same time with Wesnoth included, although I turned off the colored cursor.

[zookeeper]

Music takes up almost half of the download size and most of the rest is images, so really the big increase in download size is almost exclusively due to those two and there's not much that can be done about that.

And yes, the game "should" run better considering the simple visuals, but it doesn't. Simply put, no one with the required time, interest and skills has done it, and that's pretty much the only reason there will ever be for it. Everyone's a volunteer, after all. However, I doubt that new features as such have really lowered performance much; the slowness of the game, as far as I know, is mostly due to 1) the graphics not being hardware accelerated and 2) the intrinsic inefficiency of how and when the game loads the big piles of data it needs. The former really "should" be fixed, while I suspect the latter would require so big engine rewrites that it's unlikely to ever get done, and it's not like the loading times are completely atrocious anyway.

[Caphriel]

Ideally (to me) the game shouldn't be larger than 64MB and it should run on a PIII system quite nicely.

I'm sorry your ideal computer is 10 years old and doesn't have any HDD space, but are you seriously saying that you want the game to never to need a CPU better than one that was already old when the game first came out?

If you really want it to use less disk space, you can delete the music files without (I think) affecting the game any.

In addition to the areas of slowness zookeeper mentioned, sometimes the AI will take a long time if it has a lot of units to move, but I think most players would prefer an AI that takes longer and plays better than one that quickly makes terrible moves.

[Pentarctagon]

You can also delete the campaigns (70+ MB last I looked) if you are only going to do multiplayer.

[Insinuator]

In addition to the areas of slowness zookeeper mentioned, sometimes the AI will take a long time if it has a lot of units to move, but I think most players would prefer an AI that takes longer and plays better than one that quickly makes terrible moves.

Units moving slowing has virtually nothing to do with the intelligence (or lack thereof) of the AI. The AI makes decisions almost instantaneously. The real slow down is the graphical processing of unit movement. That is what takes the AI such a seemingly long time to move. I have never seen the AI hesitate in a move, so the play better vs play slower isn't an issue. Would that it were.

[Great_Mage_Atari]

Slowness is determined by, but not limited to:
RAM (random access memory (512mb RAM is probably where the minimum should be)
Graphics Card (too low of a graphic card can make a difference, even in this game)
Amount of Space in the Computer (the remaining and used space in the computer at the moment. Pretty self-explanatory)
Also depends on what OS your using (if it's Windows, the game will run slowly on anything below XP. I am running XP Pro, and have not had any problems whatsoever with loading speeds and such)

As for optimization of size (and I apologize if this is a down-grade of what zookeeper acknowledged), there is no sure fix at the moment. Code may be able to be lessened (i.e. Having preset codes that are shortcuts to other codes [not sure this would work, but I am working on a formula for it]). Shaving off music would help a bit, yet it also takes away one of the best features of the game. Compression of files may help also, if the coding would be able to access a .zip file without extracting the files, folders, etc., though this is not likely in the near future.
Make sure your total programs running in the background do not add up to ludicrous amounts of RAM. This is a contributing factor of lagging in games. If you come across a campaign you do not like, you may also delete that as well (though I'm not sure if this will create complications further on in the game).

Sorry if this is at all too long, too incomplete, or too confusing. I tried my best to explain this in as short a post as possible.

[zookeeper]

Ideally (to me) the game shouldn't be larger than 64MB and it should run on a PIII system quite nicely.

I'm sorry your ideal computer is 10 years old and doesn't have any HDD space, but are you seriously saying that you want the game to never to need a CPU better than one that was already old when the game first came out?

I'm fairly sure the point here is that it can be quite puzzling as to why Wesnoth doesn't run decently on a 10 years old computer considering that the same computer can run games which seem a lot flashier than Wesnoth.

I'd agree that Wesnoth seems a whole lot more CPU-hungry than the gameplay and graphical detail would imply, but I think the disk space requirement is quite modest even by 10 year old standards.

Sorry if this is at all too long, too incomplete, or too confusing. I tried my best to explain this in as short a post as possible.

Well, frankly most of that was misleading at best and plain wrong at worst.

[Caphriel]

Insinuator: With animations off, I've seen the AI take a while to move in certain scenarios where potentially hundreds of units are on the field, on my older computer. A while being "a second or two" which is a long time for AI.

zookeeper: You might be right about his point. On the other hand, Wesnoth does lack a team of full-time developers with rigorous (Rigor-ous? Sorry) optimization planned in from the start... Also, the disk space requirement is quite modest. Disks with over 100GB of space were available in 2002.

[Insinuator]

Insinuator: With animations off, I've seen the AI take a while to move in certain scenarios where potentially hundreds of units are on the field, on my older computer. A while being "a second or two" which is a long time for AI.

I am curious what the stats are on your "older computer". My brother runs Wesnoth 1.9.4 on a 1.6 GHz Pentium Celeron with 128 MB of RAM and onboard video and even on his computer the AI doesn't delay anywhere near a second for single unit move!

[Caphriel]

I'd have to boot it up to check, which I can't do right now (it's in storage!) It is comparable to the P3 scenario, though. Old, old computer that was old when I first started playing Wesnoth. Has he ever played a scenario where the AI has to move a LOT of units, though?

[Iris]

Wesnoth does lack a team of full-time developers with rigorous optimization planned in from the start

Perhaps because “rigorous optimization” can easily make people stray from the real task at hand.

Also by the way:

Guideline 1: Don’t prematurely optimize

[artisticdude]

It's worth noting that if and when Wesnoth gets support for sprite sheets instead of having to rely on hundreds of individual .png's, the size of the download will be significantly reduced (although I can't say by how much approximately). Currently the combined total size of the 'Wesnoth/Resources/data/core/images' folder (not including portraits, story images, or the maps, although portraits could theoretically also be combined into sheets instead of individual images) is 52.1 MB. This doesn't include the images in the directory 'Wesnoth/Resources/images' (another 5.1 MB). The music folder is a whopping 143.7 MB for 38 items, but music files (especially for songs that are 4-5 minutes long or longer) are never small. In fact, take away all images, music and sound effects from the game, and you're probably going to have a package that is approximately 100 MB or less. [citation needed]

Although I have often wondered: does anyone know why both the .ogg and .wav formats are used for sound files? The standard seems to be .ogg, but there are 40 sound files in the directory 'data/core/sounds' that are in the .wav format, plus the 13 .wav multiplayer lobby sounds in the directory 'Wesnoth/Resources/sounds'.

[Pentarctagon]

Another weird this about the sounds is that there is a spear.wav and also a spear.ogg