The Great Ensmallening

[Desgax]

Always enjoy the optimizations y'all bring, seeing new tech being applied to older systems is always cool especially with a game that's been around as long as Warframe has. Seeing the orbiter textures being updated has my fingers being crossed hoping the the color channels and the rest of the orbiter being brought up to speed with new fancy skyroof orbiter room, but faster loading and less game bloat is more than enough at least.

[Grav_Starstrider]

41 minutes ago, PookieNumnums said:

people still save pr0ns in 2020? i thought thats what the internet was for..

I mean. All of the major social medias and art sites keep trying to censor it off of their websites to remain "family friendly" and attractive to "potential buyers". And then there are countries actively trying to eradicate it as a concept, and prevent access of it via any website, even the ones dedicated to it.

Anyways though, I'm excited for more hard drive space and faster load times!

[Mephane]

1 hour ago, [DE]Glen said:

TLDR: We’re going to free up 6.6GB of space on PC next week but we need a 6.5GB update to do it. Most platforms will see similar improvements.

My memory is hazy about those early days back in 2012 when we launched our Closed Beta but I distinctly remember the entire download being small enough to fit on a CD-ROM. In the 8 years since launch we’ve seen the install image grow over 100 times in size and when you consider all the amazing content that was added over the years it’s easy to see why: that’s three open worlds, over a dozen tile-sets, 28 quests, almost 500 weapons, and over a thousand mods, to say nothing of several remasters that updated older content.

There’s so much content in Warframe now that some people can’t fit it on their smaller SSDs and have to run it off of a slow HDD instead. There’s so many things in the game that even for people with large NVME SSDs the game can’t always load everything as fast as we’d like. Luckily we have found some new technology that is going to help us -- we’re going to make the game smaller and load faster – but there’s a catch: you need to download remastered content.

We mentioned in the summary we’re going to free up 6.6GB of space in but in fact the real number will be much larger than that: we’re probably going to free up at least 15GB by the time we’re done. To reduce the pain for people updating we’re going to break these remaster updates into three parts spread out over the rest of 2020. We’re also taking advantage of these “mini-remasters” to make quality and performance optimizations to formats we have haven’t touched since we launched (back when DirectX 9 was our only supported renderer!).

One of the things we’re doing to reduce our footprint involves changing how our texture data is compressed. Although it isn’t a perfect analogy it’s similar to the trade-off between image-quality and file-size you get with different image formats: PNG is lossless but can mean very large files, JPEG files can be very small but may contain visible artifacts of the compression. The technology we’re using is called Oodle Texture and we’re extremely pleased with the savings we’re getting: our files are roughly half the size on disk and the visual differences are negligible.

In this first update we’re going to change our Lightmaps. We spent a lot of time carefully analyzing the quality of the results and we doubt anyone will even notice anywhere but the harshest of tests. That said, here are some of the most challenging cases we found (we’ve disabled the diffuse textures to further expose the subtle differences between them).

Before

After

Before

After

The nice thing about this solution is that we can easily tweak where needed: the game can default to the compact and fast format and we can increase resolution to preserve the quality of special assets (like that shelf in your quarters).

In the second update we will apply this same technology to the rest of the textures in the game and we expect we’ll see similar if not more savings. Again, we spent time looking carefully at the quality tradeoff and again we’re extremely pleased. Here’s a particularly challenging case: a normal-map:

Before (19 MB)

After (8 MB)

In this case the compression reduced the footprint from approximately 19MB to 8MB and the differences are extremely difficult to discern.

As someone who recently had to attach an external USB drive to my vintage test laptop from 2013 I’m personally very excited to see these changes roll out. I know the download will be inconvenient but getting 15GB of storage back and doubling my effective texture load-bandwidth is going to be awesome!

 

Oh wow for a moment there at the start I was worried you'd pull a Bungie, but then it was actually about better compression algorithms and optimized lightmaps. :D

[Aldrr]

Very negligible change but requires roughly 50% less space. ✅

Not only it takes less storage on the drives but the files are less of a pain to load and handle in memory. ✅

Gotta love tech upgrades. 🙂

[WarriorSoundwave]

Is it possible we could see an option to increase texture quality? It is very frustrating to see soo many newer assets with the low quality textures. It doesn't seem like much but it's enough to actually ruin my experience. I wish more assets were crisp and sharp looking like Mesa Prime instead of like Wukong or Titania Prime.

[Sdarts]

@[DE]Glen,

Thanks for these updates and the detailed explanation. I have a 256 GB SSD and the game's size has become a problem for me for some time now. So much that I kept swapping Warframe's biggest files when wanting to install some games - Red Dead Redemption 2 which takes 130 GB, for example. So I truly appreciate this.

You and no one else will believe this, but just today I was thinking of asking a question for the next Devstream about if it was possible to reduce the size of the game. At the time, I was thinking of asking if it would be possible to divide the game in sections/parts, where if there's a content someone doesn't play, they wouldn't need to have it installed. The idea here would be something like if you only play the PvE content, then you don't need to have the PvP assets installed, for example. Another example is that if you're done with the Plains of Eidolon and/or Fortuna, you could uninstall those assets to free space.

This might raise concerns of what if you wanted to play that content, then you could just download it again. This might not be practical for people with slow download speeds, but for people with better download speeds, this wouldn't be a problem. I understand a lot of things are integrated into the game, so this might not be feasible, but any space saving and optimizations you all can make will always be greatly appreciated.

Another thing, Microsoft announced that DirectStorage from their Xbox Velocity Architecture will come to PC next year (link below) - early next year for developers, later for consumers. Their aim is to both decrease storage space and increase loading times, the same goals as these updates you just announced. Since they've said they have been talking with developers for a few months now, I hope Digital Extremes is one of the developers or hopefully you can get in touch with them and say you're interested in joining the effort.

Microsoft's DirectX Developer Blog - DirectStorage is coming to PC: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/directx/directstorage-is-coming-to-pc/

Once again, thanks for this and I hope we get more things like this and the netcode optimizations you all did in the past. I don't know if people say this enough to you all, but:

Thank you very much!

[tennomantra]

But... Big things good!

[Bhao]

This is the opportunity to improve the operator faces.

The blocky artifacts around the lips are really quite ugly with dark lip colors. Every time I'm in the chair-menu I'm thinking, this could be nicer.

[Captain_Rocket505]

I'll be fully honest, I didnt notice a difference in the pictures, but hey if you say it's gonna help then it will. But can I ask about a forums QoL fix? On mobile its a pain to use, and there's a lot of issues with it. 

Also we need a 6.66 gig update to clear up 6.5 gigs of space. Sounds normal

 

(To the 1 guy who thinks I'm being serious, I'm not)

[MIS5IGNO]

hopefully no FPS drops on lower end machines

[taiiat]

2 hours ago, D1videdByZer0 said:

Could also lead to FPS increases across the board, hopefully.

loading speed benefits, but runtime performance probably won't change.

1 hour ago, MaraWuti said:

...then what does she use?

think of it as a separate second set of Mapping that's created by interpretation of a human.

[ReaverKane]

The title brings great promise!
@[DE]Glen will this maybe, perhaps, please, reduce the need for what's basically a defrag on our SSD's? In other words, will these smaller textures and different processes also reduce the need for those "cache optimizations" at the end of each relatively bigger patch?

[DrivaMain]

That’s cool, faster loading across the board. Since you are compressing the light maps and textures maybe it’s a good time to fix some texture resolution on some frame models, you get clean and smooth Mesa Prime textures but you get something like Chroma with terrible blurriness on the little button thingy on his shoulder. Can you guys fix that?

[Chopper201]

Nice! I´m my 120gb ssd will thank you :D

[Sohaya-]

First update I've been hyped for in awhile.

[Jolyne_]

Wow, cutting the game's download size in half is quite the downsize especially considering there is no real visible difference between the before and after textures. 

 

Amazing work as always DE. 

[DeweySalt]

This won't affect CPU overhead, will it? That's the only problem I have on my rig. Load times are blazing fast already, but I usually get CPU limited in open worlds.

[dorukayhan]

Holy. Hecking. Flaming. Meteors.

I downloaded Warframe instead of Destiny 2 six months ago partly because I thought D2 is too thicc for my PC. And now this happens. The only update that can possibly make me Pog harder in the near future is Ember getting buffed or Ember Prime hitching a ride in the other fire frame's Prime Access.

[gauxel]

Aye, thank you very much, looking forward to this! :)

 

[(PSN)phelan_1988]

interesting, sounds cool!

[epidaleacalamita]

lot of this technical stuff is going way over my head but. if this whole thing is about redoing textures does that mean we might finally get pbr on older frames like ash and vauban and zephyr? i don't want to get my hopes up but i do so wish their non-prime skins and alt helmets would finally become something i can stand to look at after years of looking like melted plastic

[NoSpax]

How's the GPU load on Oodle Textures? 

How's the Graphics Card compatibility on this?

If my puny Geforce 750 Ti can't handle that, I am officially out because my hardware will fail to render that.

[moondog548]

Warframe has been one of the most amazingly optimized games ever since launch.  I need to stand and applaud your diligence and innovation!

[Proscriptor]

23 minutes ago, NoSpax said:

How's the GPU load on Oodle Textures? 

How's the Graphics Card compatibility on this?

If my puny Geforce 750 Ti can't handle that, I am officially out because my hardware will fail to render that.

the textures are loaded just the same, it doesn't affect compatibility or performance

[BaronCandy]

Cause of some bug I had to keep the whole game on reinstall to download from mobile data this will certainly help a lot thanks for this wonderful update😁