So. 1 TB drives indeed were out before Half-Life 3.
But I’m nostalgic over a simpler time when 1 GB for a game was a lot.
Submitted 1 day ago by The_Picard_Maneuver@lemmy.world to retrogaming@lemmy.world
https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/ffaa22c5-d500-4b77-8507-8133e803ca05.png
So. 1 TB drives indeed were out before Half-Life 3.
But I’m nostalgic over a simpler time when 1 GB for a game was a lot.
Not many people these days understand that Steam used to suck bad.
I have heard that people used to be super PISSED that steam is required for valve games. I guess it makes sense now considering hdd sizes back then.
Now what sucks is that people are okay with underaged kids gambling because, come on, it’s Steam!
Lol those were the days. I remember Simcity 4 releasing back then and how quickly my mod folder blue up. Then by the time that game was old it was only 2.15gb and that was nothing. The jump from >10gb to 50gb games was insane. Now the jump to 100+ Gb hurts a lot. Any time a game is iN MB I do a little happy dance.
how quickly my mod folder blue up
Mine was green.
I remember clearing drive space on my first computer once, I went off of install size and anything other than a couple of key games that took up multiple hundreds of Mb got the boot and anything less than 100 Mb stayed installed for a bit longer. When you’ve only got a 40GB drive, thems the choices you have to make!
They are out… They are out before Half-Life 3…
Fun fact:
There was actually 4 games planned with the fourth one being an epic End Game style cross over finally of Portal, TF, Left for Dead, CS, and Half Life all coming together to fight the combined But unfortunately the series only had a Half Life and decayed down to 2 games in each series.
I want this to be real
When I die, I’m gonna close my eyes and dream of this.
People getting whoosed by this is hilarious. Nicely done.
Narrator: Then while Casey sips his tea, dozen of lemmy users think for themselves “heh… stupid casey made me chucke…”. As he puts down his tea he winks, and everyone had a moment there…
When I was young, I was not allowed to install anything on the family PC whatsoever. I had a 100MB Zip disk and was told anything that I wanted to keep, I could keep on there. That disk got a big workout. Had Duke 3D and the Half-Life Uplink demo on there, plus about 30MB to spare! Great days man.
Man I was jelly green over classmates that could afford zip drives. They’d bring it to school retiring computer class, whip it out, both showing off and fake-lamenting that oh they didn’t know the school didn’t have zip drives.
Zip drives filled such a small tech window between floppies & CD-Rs.
I was the ubernerd with the Zip 250, lol
Hah I was the same. Downloaded demos (happypuppy.com, gamesdomain.com), installed on a Jaz drive.
Those iomega devices had a pretty awesome design.
Oh, maaaan. HappyPuppy. I haven’t thought of that in ages.
Oh man I forgot about those site! Back in the day my mom couldn’t afford to get me many new video games, so I’d download tons of demos.
Looks at 500 gb New Vegas install
Yeah I don’t see the problem here.
How is that even possible? Even with 8k retextures of every single asset of the game I can’t imagine it being half that size.
Uncompressed audio and way too many mods with unique assets, also I think something duplicated a bunch of random assets. I’ve tried to fix it but noooo apparently duped ruble13 is load bearing. But hey at least it doesn’t CTD so there’s that, ignore NPCs just not spawning and some terrain just not appearing note this is not due to conflicts it fits when I restart the game and I don’t know if it’s the SSD or not.
Lol we got affordable multi terabyte SSDs before HL3
I haven’t bought a non-NVMe drive in the last 5 years.
Me neither, haven’t bought any drives
Well, Petabyte drives are out there for a while. I think their price drop is imminent.
Not in a single drive yet, but very viable in a single server these days.
Oh really? I’m assuming not in a consumer form factor? If so that’s completely passed me by
Gone are the days when a game delivered on seven floppy disks was considered “overblown”.
I installed HL2 from five CDs back in the day
I can’t be certain but I seem to recall installing Unreal Tournament 2004 from seven CDs
Saaaame
Lol next thing you know they'll sneak HL3 into a VR game
... oh
HL:A isn’t bad though
Yell that to everyone that refuses to recognize it's HL:3
This is as much of a valid complaint now as it was back then.
There is absolutely no excuse for games now to be over 100GB in storage space. Unless you have the longest game ever that span across like 1 and a half “normal” game lengths. The biggest games now should be 60GB or less. So many developers refuse to do.press things that could be compressed with zero noticeable loss in quality except for maybe a camera being really close to an object with an 8k display resolution.
At the absolute worst, do what games used to do for like 6 months before not caring: make the game for 1080p players, compression and all, then offer a free DLC with all the uncompressed stuff. At least make the storage feast optional.
The most annoying thing is there is a trivial to implement way to close to halve these stupidly inflated sizes: make the highest resolution of textures a free DLC that you optionally install
/c/YourCommentButStroke
A lot of that is shadows and lighting data, sometimes in unusual data structures without readily available compression methods. Compressing textures also impacts load times, obviously decompressing 10gb of jpgs could take a while. Still probably there are good compression methods and good tradeoffs to make, if any AAA studios actually cared about storage space (They do care a lot about GPU memory, just not storage space).
I wish games would release with low/medium, up to 1024x1024 textures and stuff by default and let people choose to download/install higher res stuff. If I’m not going to use the 4k pack, I don’t need it sitting on my hard drive
I mean, if the base game folder is .8 Gb, then aren’t their 3 mods the 1 Gig culprit? That’s a moddev issues and not many are concerned about optimizations.
You did misread but you’re probably also still correct. The modded game files are 1.82 total while the previous version of the game was 0.837, while I don’t know for sure what the newer version filesize was it was still an odd complaint for them to make.
Reminds of the those shitty Battlefront Remasters with upscaled 8 or 4k texture or whatever it was. Games went from being less than 5gbs to being 60 gb or something like that.
I hope 100 TB drives are out by the time HL3 comes out.
I hope SSDs and NVMes are cheaper by the time HL3 comes out
By the time H3 comes out your great great great grand children will be reminiscing about how games once were about gameplay and plot and not the 100th version of Call of Duty or Assassins Creed. I’d say Madden too but let’s face it no one will play it 150 years from now unless it’s VR.
Nah, I’m willing to bet HL3 will come out (at the latest) 5 years after Gaben’s death. Not because he’s witholding it, obviously, but because whoever comes next will probably try to make as much money as possible and that’s an easy first way to do it.
unless its VR
I thought the same thing about touchscreens when they first came out. I really did think they were the future of gaming. Seemingly limitless buttons in limitless combinations. Touch and drag game pieces directly, action and vision in the same place.
Turns out gaming on mobile is shit. So so shit.
Maybe VR will end up the same way. Its pretty neat now while its still new and shiny, but maybe it never actually reaches potential.
I hope not
I was about to say, I recognize that name… Then I saw forum name and the year…
I was there Gandalf, 3000 years ago…
Kids these days don’t know how to have a proper brick party in forums anymore.
I still remember when I had to reinstall my WindowsXP from the 3GB HDD onto my 1.5GB HDD so I could install The Sims 2
And now 1.5GB RAM won’t even load Windows.
It will. I’ve tried. It’s not a pleasant experience though.
But 2GB on Fedora was pain as well, though definitely more usable.
Not even close to loading it
Wait until they get to the end of level one and have to turn the tape over and press play.
I’m old enough that I got HL2 in a retail box, when it was new.
and the fucking disks installed the game encrypted, and I could not use my computer until the next day, due to it thrashing my HDD and CPU so hard to decrypt the files that my computer was functionally useless that evening, and overnight.
Congrats on finding your Civ2 disc! Do you have a drive to see if it still works?
I remember when Steam came out and everyone hated it because of how slow and buggy it was. Crazy how times have changed.
Steam is still slow and buggy.
The more things change, the more they stay the same.
Steam used to be slick and fast before it changed over to chromium and started trying to become a social media platform
The client is still rather resource intensive, it’s just that computers have gotten so much faster that you don’t notice it.
Now, if Valve would ever deal with the download and sync issues, that would be nice.
I installed Steam during a Lan party back in 2007 (i think to play Left 4 Dead) and remember thinking “Damn, not another bloody useless account”. Little did i know :)
Why does she look much more asian than in the game?
I still have my 3 disk box
I still have my original box/CDs too… i have no idea where they are, but I know i have them…somewhere.
did counter-strike 2 come with half life? i vaguely remember half life but i remember counterstrike 2 being played a lot in the dorm floor in uni. i feel like i remember them being connected some how but i can't recall.
Kinda miss waiting fucking forever for games with multiple CDs. I know I had a game that came retail with 5 discs, I just can’t remember which one. I remember KOTOR had 4.
I got a code with my 9600XT, it was delayed so long the card was pretty much outdated by the time it came out, but I still had the code that came with it!
Pretty sure I was able to pre load it on steam before release day, I remember I took the day off work just to play it.
1.82 GB out of 160 GB and they are worried. Imagine how they feel now with 500 gb and 1 TB drives with some AAA games being 250 GB.
The lack any comment saying “Half life is not retro gaming” is concerning to me.
Half Life came out in 1998 (27 years ago) and this post is from 2003 (22 years ago). Half Life is retro gaming.
I feel like gaming generations are distinct from hardware generations, and we mostly haven’t moved on much from whatever gaming gen Half Life is in.
The reason why HL3 is not out yet is because valve is waiting for consumer adoption of 10TB drives
We’ll have petabyte drives for $50 before HL3 appears.
Most of the people that made half life 1 and 2 are gone I think. Even if they made half life 3 it likely wouldn't be the game we wanted all those decades ago
Reminds me of the time I had checked my TF2 folder after IDK how many years of playing, and the folder was like 500GB because of temp cached files not being deleted.
I remember buying a 100MB hard drive and thinking how hard it was going to be to use all the space. It really was…
Times have changed.
Oh that poor innocent soul. They must not have been old enough to remember needing boot disks because your 90s jalopy couldn’t handle Warcraft or Myst.
This is funny on so many levels, also a vit bitter as well…
Damn I miss half-life mods.
Fortunately, HL2 mods were/are nowhere near that big, even the vast majority of total conversions.
Go play Minerva if you never did.
Why were drives 160GB? This doesn’t really follow the 2^x pattern…
DarkFuture@lemmy.world 2 hours ago
Lol.
I’ve now got Steam games spread across 5 hard drives. One of which is a 5tb old school disk drive for the games I have A LOT of user made content for. I’ve gotta be in the terrabytes range at this point.