A 2003 complaint about Half-Life

They are out.... They are out before Half-Life 3....

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.
- Uh, source?
- Oh really? I'm assuming not in a consumer form factor? If so that's completely passed me by
- Not in a single drive yet, but very viable in a single server these days.

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.

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
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.
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.
even 60GB is absurd, tons of games get by just fine with like 10GB while having no lack of content and graphics.
- Nah, I understand a AAA game being up to 60GB. Sometimes the amount of content really is that big. Elden Ring, for example. Its a big game with a lot of content, and its pretty close to 60GB I think. And yes, Morrowind has explorable space probably equally as big as Elden Ring for just 1GB. But compared to Elden Ring, Morrowind is like an empty barren wasteland. Maybe Elden Ring's landmass data could have reduced filesize if it used prodecurally generated mesh if it doesn't already, but in the end I think 60GB and under is fine.
  While indie games can easily fit under 10GB because they are tiny or 2D, I get why bigger AAA games can't.

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 hope 100 TB drives are out 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 SSDs and NVMes are cheaper by the time HL3 comes out
I hope not

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.

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.

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!!!
- I miss box games.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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
- 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 :)
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.
Few things more precious
- Why does she look much more asian than in the game?
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.
- 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..
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.
- That bridge level still, to this day, fires every one of my acrophobic neurons.
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 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

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

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

Tech prophet circa 2003.

surprised there hasnt been a linux distro called SiskOS yet.
- You know, I wouldn't be surprised. Space Jesus needs his own OS.
- monkeys paw: it gets released but its named after the thong song guy

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

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.
- I've never been pissed off over a game before i even played it, except for Half Life 2.
  Full game on the disk.
  Requires internet to install.
  Requires Steam.
  This was before broadband, so the awesome game you bought hung over won't be installed until late tonight, instead of the normal 10 minutes off the cd.
Now what sucks is that people are okay with underaged kids gambling because, come on, it's Steam!
I might be hijacking conversations too much...
- wait till you hear about CCGs

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.

Wait until they get to the end of level one and have to turn the tape over and press play.

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

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.

just cause they were out doesnt mean people had them.
Theres 30tb hard drives today.
You'd be hard pressed to find anyone that had them in their gaming rigs.
- I think you've missed the joke where Half-Life 3 is still not released.

I bet they had a raptor hard drive, something about 160 GB ticked my mind.

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.
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

The lack of 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.
- Please stop, you are hurting me with facts
- Barely over quarter-century life by now
- And I still haven't gotten past the crabs suddenly showing up and eating your face. I got as far as the flooded corridor and could never find my way out.
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.
- I don’t understand. Please elaborate

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.

I remember thinking that about a gigabit hard drive that I ordered from Gateway. I specifically thought, "There is no way that I can ever use all of this."

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 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!
Meanwhile I've seen Fortnite literally fail to update with less than 100GB free because it needs to modify so many files in its gigantic install

This is funny on so many levels, also a vit bitter as well...

Damn I miss half-life mods.

New ones are still being made. I can't give specific examples since I don't play Half-Life mods but I'm sure you can find some pretty cool stuff by looking around.
- There are indeed, but the thriving multiplayer mods community is mostly gone. I miss there being dozens of little multiplayer mods with full lobbies. I haven't found anything that hits the same spot but perhaps I'm just unaware of what's out there. I wish I could play a few rounds of HL: Vampire Slayer in a full server.
Action Half-Life represent
- Is it anything like Action Doom?

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.

Fortunately, most 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...

The base 2 pattern for storage is a new thing with solid state. It just used to be a multiple what whatever they could fit reliably on a platter in a given form factor. As media got better and heads got smaller they just increased to roundish numbers.
If the pattern was real 1TB drives would not exist either, since they are about 1.1 TiB.
There never was and neither is that pattern, we now have 1tb, 2, 3, 4, etc, 12, 26tb drives. Whatever size they can fit, they do just as they did before.
I’ve seen weird numbers before like 650 or 520 before.