Pretty simple here but why on earth is the devkit more than twice the size of the PC version of the game?
at present, the Steam copy of the game is 90.76GB
The devkit; 226GB.
for contrast, the mod devkit for Skyrim is only 81MB
I honestly just wanted to make a really simple small patch mod to make things easier on me in Singleplayer. why is there such and absurd discrepancy in size between this devkit and others? I’ve been modding for almost 2 decades now and the only other devkit I’ve run into thats equally absurdly sized was Ark: Survival Evolved, and we all know Wildcard are clowns that can barely code, so that was expected of their ability.
is this just an unreal engine thing then? is there anything in the works that may replace this devkit with a more modern and functional version that doesnt eat a quarter of my harddrive?
EDIT: also for the love of god, if a new one IS indeed in the wings, please do not make epiclauncher a requirement this time. D:
I mean… its big and awesome, powerful and has all kinds of exposed mechanics so that modders can do wonderful things. Yeah I’m sure if we were restricted more in our ability to mod it could be smaller but… why limit ourselves for some hard drive space? Hard drive space these days is fairly cheap all things considered.
I tried my hand at modding earlier this year. The dev kit took up all my secondary storage, but even then my pc just wasn’t strong enough to handle the computing power needed to work on a project. I ended up having to uninstall it and gave up on my dream of making a custom map.
EGS I’m pretty certain is a requirement, since the devkit is just a modified version of Epic’s Unreal Engine. Funcom cannot really publish that anywhere. MW5’s modding kit is the same way.
I have a pretty awesome pc and was thinking while making Isle of Men that it would be very tough to do a full map with a normal pc… not impossible, but very tough. Its not the devkit tho that makes it tough per se, its the fact that its an unreal project at its heart and has to do stuff like lighting, streaming, its just very in depth.
Bethesda’s editor is so small because it uses the game’s assets itself and has no separation of editor/runtime formats, converting them to the format it uses upon import to the editor. Unreal’s editor does not do this, the game you distribute contains optimized “cooked” assets and cannot be used by the editor.
As to why the devkit is so much bigger than the game: I believe this is caused by Granite, the texture streaming middleware they use. They distribute both the original imported textures, and the textures generated via Granite, with the devkit. Again, I may be incorrect, but I’m pretty sure most of the textures in the former category end up not being distributed with the actual game itself, just the Granite versions.
SirDaveWolf
To what I know of, it unpacks its assets from the BSA archives that hold the game data. their modding tool lets you sorta play with any variables and load new stuff instancing in a plugin file on top of the BSA asset masters. all its stuff is additive, more or less. Rusty Shackleford explains it far better than I can.
darthphysicist
Ehhhh… more memory isnt exactly in the cards for me. I dont have a lot of spare scratch so I have to make use of what I have in this PC as is. I would need a new MOBO and copy of windows if I wanted to get more harddrive space. I mean, glad you can afford to drop 125+ for an SSD no sweat, but thats food money on an already tight budget for me slick >.o
Taemien
Oof. that sucks.
RustyShackleford
Thank you muchly for that. its nice to understand a bit more under the hood. there feels like theres not much for actual content out there that explains these things? or maybe I’m just rartarded and am bad at research. (distinct possibility)
still though, I do wish they make some efforts to slim and trim that down in the future for overhead sake. I finally have booted the dev kit after work today and its just been sitting stuck at 72% initialization for what seems to be forever (maybe closer to 15 minutes now actually). my pc might be a big seasoned, but its still pretty spry considering I use it for digital rendering and video work on top of a shitload of art stuff for my dayjob. 32GB ram and ryzen 7 cpu with a top end 10 series Nvidia card. my blender, VEGAS, and PS never seem to make my system chug like the UE dev environment seems to.
also apparently I’m not allowed to call myself rartarded?
I mean… I’m not saying anyone should feel guilty for not having a machine capable of running the devkit, but trust me; the time you spend in value compared to a $100 ssd is stark. 300 GB these days is pretty cheap… samsung evo 500 gb ssd is $40… that’s like, 3 latrines…
And luckily, it’s the price of three latrines, not the storage space required for three latrines. Even though the game’s required storage space is getting kinda bloated.
problem is I understand investment in ones own rig and I know HD space is cheap-- its the MOBO issue. I only have support for so many components. I’m maxed out for external USB stuff (work peripherals), and I already run 3 HD’s at once (one being an archive deep storage). if I want to expand onboard storage I need a new MOBO, which at cheapest is another 100 bones, plus 100 for a new version of windows (I’ve migrated this copy through 3 mobos now, M$ wont let you do another as part of DRM) and then I have to buy a new splitter cable, PSU (I built tight on voltage) and then I get to get the new hard drive.
thats $400+ just to get a 500GB bump so I can fill it with a single program that I’m using to make a patch.
