"Look at the size of that thing!"

I've been thinking about this recently, and I know a lot of us are going to be making levels and such for Doom 3 when it comes out. But how big are those files going to be? And TC's? I have only the vaguest idea of the size that these files will be, and I wonder if this will turn people away from downloading any user-made levels.

Another question I had along those same lines, will there be any sort of /newstuff for these Doom 3 files? I mean... where will all of the files be hosted, and if that isn't a problem, then will there just be one giant /newstuff or will there be one for classic Doom, and one for Doom 3. I'm sure these are really stupid questions, but ones that I would like to know the answer to, if possible.

Well mods can TCs for todays games are between 100-200 Mo IIRC so it's surely gonna hurt the dial-up connections. I didn't play the leak so I don't know anything about the size of a normal map but I doubt it's under 1-2 Mo.

I hope we keep the /Newstuff but make a separate one from the original Doom/Doom2 to avoid confusion in the Id archives.

Why can't they keep games today small and simple anymore? :P

Probably bigger maps, but you gotta remember, render time only takes 5 minutes for them.

ravage said:

Why can't they keep games today small and simple anymore? :P

Because then they won't look good graphics wise and then a bunch of graphics-hugging kids are gonna whine and bitch.

Most maps will probably be in the 2-3 MiB range.

Hmm. You think? The one user made map I downloaded for Doom 3 (yes, already) is 26MB uncomressed, and ~5.5MB compressed. And that level isn't particularly big...

yeah.. with everything stored in text files, data might get pretty large

AirRaid said:

Hmm. You think? The one user made map I downloaded for Doom 3 (yes, already) is 26MB uncomressed, and ~5.5MB compressed. And that level isn't particularly big...

I can't believe you've already forgotten that we're dealing with a non-optimized Alpha here.
I'm sure that custom maps will be much smaller when made for the final game.

Fredrik said:

Most maps will probably be in the 2-3 MiB range.

I second that.

Bah, I know that, but I wouldn't have thought filesizes would change much, unless they actually implemented compression into the filetypes.

AirRaid said:

Bah, I know that, but I wouldn't have thought filesizes would change much, unless they actually implemented compression into the filetypes.

There was another thread like this a while ago. In that thread, I gave an example of how the Rtc-3057 pre-demo versions had pretty fucked up file sizes compared to the end result.
IIRC, the final demo was a ca. 9 mb download - about three of the different pre-demo versions (betas if you will) had a zipfile size of 20 mb, mind you these zipfiles only contained wadfiles. And all we needed to do to lower the size of this file was to do some "cleaning up" in redundant/unnecessary data in the wadfiles.

So there.

Simple designed Quake3 custom maps usually cost 0.8mb per each, however, most decent looking custom maps in Quake3 are in 2.0mb or above, so go figure.

The actual Doom 3 levels should be probably a couple megs in size each. Remember that since they're just text files they will compress very well. Of course the real bloat comes in making giant new textures with gloss maps and normal maps and whatever else.

Linguica said:
The actual Doom 3 levels should be probably a couple megs in size each. Remember that since they're just text files they will compress very well. Of course the real bloat comes in making giant new textures with gloss maps and normal maps and whatever else.

It's good to hear that the levels will be decently sized... but I had feared that other expansions would be much larger.