• Doorknob@lemmy.worldEnglish
    15·
    2 hours ago

    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.

    • icelimit@lemmy.mlEnglish
      3·
      1 hour ago

      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.

      • ouRKaoS@lemmy.todayEnglish
        1·
        10 minutes ago

        Zip drives filled such a small tech window between floppies & CD-Rs.

        I was the ubernerd with the Zip 250, lol

    • PraiseTheSoup@midwest.socialEnglish
      2·
      15 minutes ago

      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.

      • vaultdweller013@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        1·
        8 minutes ago

        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.

  • Treczoks@lemmy.worldEnglish
    28·
    9 hours ago

    Gone are the days when a game delivered on seven floppy disks was considered “overblown”.

  • WereCat@lemmy.worldEnglish
    20·
    11 hours ago

    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

  • npdean@lemmy.todayEnglish
    14·
    9 hours ago

    The lack of any comment saying “Half life is not retro gaming” is concerning to me.

    • Chingzilla@lemmy.worldEnglish
      3·
      5 hours ago

      Man, I remember lusting over getting a WD Raptor back in the day. They were so much more expensive and lower data density it I couldn’t justify for my low budget.

      As was already said, 160 was pretty common, think increments of 20 or 40 is what i remember. Raptor drives had kinda odd size increments compared to other consumer drives. Looks like it would be 36Gb circa 2003.

      I once got some retired scsi drives. Man 10,000rpm drives were loud and hot…

      Thanks for bringing back some old memories

    • boonhet@sopuli.xyzEnglish
      3·
      8 hours ago

      Increments of 80 GB were fairly common. My desktop had an 80 GB Maxtor and my laptop later had 320 GB.

      In hindsight, I do not remember if the Maxtor was definitely 80 GB, or if Windows was showing it as 80-something GB. But the laptop was definitely 320. I googled it. Google AI of course said “Based on Ebay listings it seems to be 1 TB”, very useful. Spec sheet says 320 GB.

    • unphazed@lemmy.worldEnglish
      7·
      13 hours ago

      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.

      • nyctre@lemmy.worldEnglish
        6·
        8 hours ago

        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.

          • MrMcGasion@lemmy.worldEnglish
            2·
            2 hours ago

            I’m still holding out hope that Valve becomes a worker-owned coop when Gaben goes. Internally they’ve been structured that way for years, without traditional “management,” everyone having moving desks where they work on whatever they feel motivated by and most useful at, etc.

          • Gloomy@mander.xyzEnglish
            6·
            8 hours ago

            Yeah, fully expecting that to happen. I wish that guy a long and healthy life and there isn’t an ounce of altruism in that statement.

            Any containment plans for when Steam joins the club of shit eventually?

      • yermaw@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        4·
        9 hours ago

        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 Cast Fist@programming.devEnglish
          1·
          3 hours ago

          Its pretty neat now while its still new and shiny

          The current crop of VR tech dates back to 2012, not exactly what I’d consider new and shiny

  • A_Random_Idiot@lemmy.worldEnglish
    37·
    18 hours ago

    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.

    now THAT was some bullshit.

    This was too, cause I remember steam games bloating with temp files back in the day and regularly having to clear out the folder so you had HDD space.

    • theangryseal@lemmy.worldEnglish
      43·
      13 hours ago

      Me too. I still have it.

      Edit:

      HOLY SHIT!! I’ve been missing my civ II disc for 20 years. It was in my half life 2 box!!!

          • A_Random_Idiot@lemmy.worldEnglish
            1·
            2 hours ago

            Same.

            And this spurs me to bring up the lie of digital purchases… Which was sold to us on the promise of cheap games. We were promised that if we gave up on physical games, then the devs/publishers wouldnt have to pay for printing manuals/boxes, packaging of games, warehouses to store them, and the cost of shipping to get them to the stores/consumers… Which meant they could sell games for lower costs, that game prices would plumet to 25-30 dollars for brand new day 1 releases… and devs/publishers would still get a bigger chunk of revenue/more money from that, than from the old 50 dollar physical big box games with all the feelies, delicious manuals, disks that meant you can install the game however you want, whenever you want, etc etc.

            Instead, what digital purchases have gotten us is… a total lack of ownership, that our games can be taken away from us at any time, for any reason, because buried in all the legalese we don’t “own” anything, we just have a “lease”…and for that, we’ve been given the right to pay 10-20 dollars more for games than what they cost during the physical game era, and the risk of the platform disappearing and taking our or games with it (which I’ve already ran afoul of and drastically altered how i buy games)

    • BodilessGaze@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      20·
      15 hours ago

      I remember when Steam came out and everyone hated it because of how slow and buggy it was. Crazy how times have changed.

      • Gloomy@mander.xyzEnglish
        4·
        8 hours ago

        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 :)

      • toddestan@lemmy.worldEnglish
        11·
        14 hours ago

        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.

      • A_Random_Idiot@lemmy.worldEnglish
        111·
        15 hours ago

        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… also wish it had a simplified legacy version so people could still run it on older OSes to run the games they own that only run on older OSes. but apparently thats a super controversial topic that makes people unhinged

    • LifeInMultipleChoice@lemmy.worldEnglish
      3·
      13 hours ago

      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 Cast Fist@programming.devEnglish
        1·
        3 hours ago

        I don’t personally remember any game retailing with 5 CDs, 4 was the limit, anything over that and they’d just go for a DVD instead

    • katy ✨@piefed.blahaj.zoneEnglish
      41·
      16 hours ago

      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.

      • A_Random_Idiot@lemmy.worldEnglish
        6·
        15 hours ago

        No, Counterstrike 2 came out a couple years ago.

        before that was global offensive.

        the counter strike that came with HL2 was Counterstrike Source.

        CS:S was such a phenominal game… So many years of nights spent staying up till 2am playing on the same server, with the same guys… and all of them gone now, like tears in the rain…

    • G4Z@feddit.ukEnglish
      4·
      17 hours ago

      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.

  • RightHandOfIkaros@lemmy.worldEnglish
    862·
    21 hours ago

    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 compress 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.

    • AdrianTheFrog@lemmy.worldEnglish
      10·
      11 hours ago

      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 Cast Fist@programming.devEnglish
        2·
        3 hours ago

        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

    • Womble@piefed.worldEnglish
      351·
      20 hours ago

      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

    • qarbone@lemmy.worldEnglish
      10·
      20 hours ago

      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.

      Edit: I did misread the bit about the original game size.

      • finitebanjo@lemmy.worldEnglish
        7·
        15 hours ago

        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.

    • PalmTreeIsBestTree@lemmy.worldEnglish
      8·
      21 hours ago

      Reminds of the those shitty Battlefront Remasters with upscaled 8 or 4k textures or whatever it was. Games went from being less than 5gbs to being 60 gb or something like that.

  • neidu3@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    33·
    19 hours ago

    The reason why HL3 is not out yet is because valve is waiting for consumer adoption of 10TB drives

    • stupidcasey@lemmy.worldEnglish
      995·
      1 day ago

      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 combine But unfortunately the series only had a Half Life and decayed down to 2 games in each series.

  • KingOfTheCouch@lemmy.caEnglish
    62·
    22 hours ago

    I was about to say, I recognize that name… Then I saw forum name and the year…

    I was there Gandalf, 3000 years ago…