>> a chunk of it is probably sound data too.
>
> Didn't think of that, I guess uncompressed CD-quality sound takes up 10
> MB or so per minute, maybe this is used a lot by PC games, IDK. At least
> when using XNA with the xbox, the sounds/music are stored in some
> compressed format, it wouldn't surprise me if they are decompressed
> on-the-fly to avoid using up too much RAM.

Yeah, MP3 or similar seems to be the norm here. (And these days, 
decoding MP3 takes so little CPU power...)

>> Depending on the game,
>> it might also need to store non-trivial amounts of gameplay data.
>
> Yeh, this is the main point I was wondering about, apart from graphics,
> what sort of data might a game need to store that runs in to several
> hundred MBs? I couldn't think of anything straight away.

I know when I looked at the HalfLife 2 engine, you needed to build 
navigation maps to allow the NPC AI to navigate around the map. That's 
not model data as such (it never goes near the GPU), but it's data that 
you do need to run the game. On the other hand, for a typical HL2:DM or 
CS:S map, it's only a dozen MB or so...

Post a reply to this message