lighter version of vegastrike

ceros · Post by **ceros** » Wed May 07, 2008 7:40 pm

Hello,

The Debian Games Team is packaging vegastrike-0.5.0 at the moment. We were wondering if you would be willing to release a lighter version of vegastrike in terms of size. 500 MB is a lot to place in the Debian archive.

Post by **klauss** » Wed May 07, 2008 7:57 pm

You can try removing per-faction textures. That should reduce the size a lot. Then, you could also remove some music, though I don't think you'll get that much of a reduction there (there is a lot of music yes, but there's just so much you can remove without getting into boring-music land).

Both do have a rather detrimental impact on the game, but if you definitely must reduce the size, then... I guess that's what it takes.

Post by **safemode** » Wed May 07, 2008 8:28 pm

music is actually very significant. I think it's around 100MB or so.

get rid of your /bin dir, that's significant too. 0.5.0 had it in data4.x still.

that should bring you around the 350 range.

Not sure about the faction specific textures. but last i checked i dont think we had many actually. maybe i'm wrong.

The problem with a graphic intensive game is that there are a lot of graphics. Perhaps the deb could pull the data tarball from a mirror somewhere like it pulls the nvidia cg toolkit.

Post by **safemode** » Wed May 07, 2008 8:42 pm

on a side note. We'd like it if the debian games team could provide the /debian dir used to generate the packages so that we can add it upstream to help test the cmake system that with any luck, will be a success.

post 0.5.0 changes to be of significance:
The configure script needs to be modified a bit. It should check system boost-python and boost files and if none are found, check if any in-tree ones exist, if not , cry. After that occurs,the debian pkged source could not pull the external defs of /boost ... not sure how much that reduces the compressed pkg.

Post by **klauss** » Wed May 07, 2008 10:05 pm

I hadn't considered removing music altogether, but that's an option yes.

I remember per-faction textures using up a LOT of ram, and so presumably also a lot of HD

I would have to grep to be sure in any case. But certainly the only way to make the package smaller is remove data (graphics), because the code, although big, is quite compressible.

I believe you could also remove speech for those mods with speech. And that's a big chunk of bytes you'd be saving. Vanilla VS doesn't have any speech last time I checked.

bgaskey · Post by **bgaskey** » Wed May 07, 2008 11:06 pm

There is a fair amount of space to be saved in faction textures, and for most AI ships you don't see the texture much anyway. Also, nobody mentioned the cockpit huds that are still included in SVN but not used in game ATM.

ceros · Post by **ceros** » Wed May 14, 2008 9:25 pm

Here is where the packaging is done for vegastrike and vegastrike-data.
Vcs-Svn: svn://svn.debian.org/svn/pkg-games/packages/trunk/vegastrike/
Vcs-Browser: http://svn.debian.org/wsvn/pkg-games/pa ... ke/?op=log
Vcs-Svn: svn://svn.debian.org/pkg-games/packages/trunk/vegastrike-data
Vcs-Browser: http://svn.debian.org/wsvn/pkg-games/pa ... ta/?op=log

One question, I see that the music is now a part of the package you ship for vegastrike. Is it possible to play vegastrike without any music? What I mean is can vegastrike run without any changes aside from a missing music directory?

bgaskey · Post by **bgaskey** » Wed May 14, 2008 9:31 pm

I think it will run if you hand-edit the config file to disable music. I'll test later on and get back to you.

EDIT: Surprisingly enough, it works fine without the music dir. I just renamed it and it continued to load, other sounds worked, no problem afaik.

Post by **loki1950** » Wed May 14, 2008 11:02 pm

The music can be in a package of it's own which is what fedora did for 0.4.3.

Enjoy the Choice

bgaskey · Post by **bgaskey** » Wed May 14, 2008 11:47 pm

So did Debian, in fact. I was just looking at the VS packages in the Ubuntu repos, and music was separate there.

Post by **ace123** » Thu May 15, 2008 3:49 am

@bgaskey, I believe that was the 0.4.3 version that you were looking at... afaik Ubuntu doesn't have 0.5.0 yet, unless it's in some unstable repository somewhere.

The reason we did it together in the tarballs is that it is often confusing for people to download two tarballs and then extract one of them into a specific place.

For package managers like debian, however, it is trivial to make one package install in a subdirectory of the other... so no good reason not to split up the music into a separate package.

Post by **chuck_starchaser** » Thu May 15, 2008 4:14 pm

This might seem counterintuitive, but you might also save some space by packaging hqtextures with it. JPG's of backgrounds are a lot smaller than DDS's, file-size-wise.

EDIT:
It was only yesterday (or was it the day before?) that Freegamer convinced us (PU) to put out a release.
And we started brainstorming about it, then Dilloh came up with the idea of releasing a *demo* of PU; --namely, only the Troy system, and only the basic ships (Tarsus, Orion, Galaxy, Centurion, Talon and Drayman).
Ironically, we decided to do it this way because a) we'd like our users to use svn, and b) because we thought that a release with a small footprint might be more appealing to distros.

You guys (VS) might care to consider going the same route: Just pick one system, or a few systems that have nice planets and bases, pick the best-looking ships, and the nicest musics, and make that into a demo. We're about to create a demo branch, btw. Just my $0.02.

bgaskey · Post by **bgaskey** » Thu May 15, 2008 8:28 pm

ace123 wrote:@bgaskey, I believe that was the 0.4.3 version that you were looking at... afaik Ubuntu doesn't have 0.5.0 yet, unless it's in some unstable repository somewhere.

Yeah it was indeed 043.

Interesting idea about putting out a demo. VS may be more exploration oriented than PU though so less interesting to play a small demo.

Post by **chuck_starchaser** » Fri May 16, 2008 12:24 am

I'd say, quite the contrary. *Because* it's more exploration-oriented, people would want to get the svn, full version, to continue exploring. Or, maybe we're in full agreement: It IS less interesting to play a demo; but the victims won't know it until they've already played it; and by then it's too late...

bgaskey · Post by **bgaskey** » Fri May 16, 2008 2:36 am

chuck_starchaser wrote:I'd say, quite the contrary. *Because* it's more exploration-oriented, people would want to get the svn, full version, to continue exploring. Or, maybe we're in full agreement: It IS less interesting to play a demo; but the victims won't know it until they've already played it; and by then it's too late...

Yeah... we are agreeing. But on the other hand, people could feel limited by the demo and give up and go play CoD4

I think a demo is something that should be considered, because the full VS has a growing network footprint and makes a serious dent in smaller hard drives.

drinkypoo · Post by **drinkypoo** » Thu May 29, 2008 5:22 pm

bgaskey wrote:I think a demo is something that should be considered, because the full VS has a growing network footprint and makes a serious dent in smaller hard drives.

What about a reduced-quality/lo-fi version? Low-quality textures, low-quality sounds, et cetera? It could run on reduced-capability systems.

I would definitely split music out of the download, though. I recognize how important ambience is, but that's a major portion of the download size. Splitting music, faction textures, and anything else possible out into other packs is of course a potential source of confusion, but at least provides for a smaller download.