Examples: diablo 4 on blizzard client will let you play it before the full game is installed. The ps5 also let’s you do this when installing a new game. But I’ve never seen this option on steam games.

  • homicidalrobot
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    8 months ago

    good breakdown of the system but it has been a while since textures were the issue at large. You can cut ~1/3 the filesize of starfield by uninstalling language packs you aren’t using because lossless audio is HUGE. Most LoD effects are just rendering a distant model with reduced detail and update rate. Even if you look at “good” lod models they often move in a jerky way in practice because they aren’t at the same framerate as things within the “detail” draw distance (easy to observe in every souls title).

    • Tarquinn2049@lemmy.world
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      8 months ago

      Yeah, lots of different games have different ways, I personally have only seen it in games where it was the 4k texture assets with a texture streaming system. I haven’t yet played a computer game where it was done for a different reason. Most computer games don’t have a ton of audio in a ton of languages, that would indeed make for large file sizes.

      I know mobile games generally do it the piecemeal route, but felt that was out of context for this thread.

      I have seen games where the LOD models run at half frame rate, I have a hard time playing those and in my opinion I would not consider it a “good” LOD system. To me a good system is where any performance gain it gives is by only removing stuff as imperceptibly as possible, anything more aggressive than that and it better be possible to toggle that excessive feature in options.

      I have only seen 4 games with play as you download on computer, and in each of those 4 cases it was done due to having implemented texture streaming, and a texture streaming system also coincidentally tends to be implemented to allow much larger textures to be possible without performance drops, so they will indeed be games with much higher texture file sizes than other games. I didn’t even know there was other games that allow play as you finish downloading for different reasons.