Nexuiz in only 50 megs? You bet!

[samiam]

I have done a small project to make a usable subset of Nexuiz that is a fraction of the size of the full-blown Nexuiz. My goal was to have all of the fun of Nexuiz, with fewer maps, in something that could be burned to a business card CD.

Ritek's business card CDs can fit an isoimage with 26101 sectors--that's 53,454,848 bytes of data. The ISO filesystem overhead is about 400k, so that leaves us a little over 53,000,000 bytes to fit a reduced Nexuiz.

The reduced Nexuiz I have has only seven Deathmatch maps suitable for 1-on-1 deathmatch play:

* Aggressor
* Blood Prison
* Evil Space
* Farwell
* Final Rage
* Soylent
* Toxic

In addition, there is only room for one 50-second song in the zipfile (the solution to this problem is to add .MOD support to Dark Places, then find or make some free .MODs to use as the "Tiny Nexuiz" music)

I have also removed all of the non-human models.

I have gone to a lot of effort to remove textures not used by any of these seven maps; this work is not complete, but it appears that none of the maps has missing textures (except for the lights on the towers in "Evil Space", but that texture is also missing in the full Nexuiz). I can probably remove some more textures since I tried to fit more maps before realizing I wouldn't hit my target of a little over 50 megs if I did.

This version of Nexuiz is mainly for quickly setting up on your buddy's computer when you're hanging out with him, so the two of you can have some intense 1-on-1 deathmatch action; this version of Nexuiz, notably, is not suitable for Internet play (just download the real Nexuiz).

Anyway, it was a fun little project, and I was wondering if this is something other people are interested in. Maybe there are people out there who are thinking to themselves "I'd love to try out Nexuiz, but 200 megs is just too much of a download for me", but would download a 50 meg "demo" version of Nexuiz.

Thoughts?

- Sam

[[-z-]]

Nexuiz Portable

You should include (at least) a shortcut to download the full version.

Wonderful idea though.

[leileilol]

Well it's no Tiny Nexuiz, mine was 50mb and had all of nexuiz had to offer, but at reduced quality - had broken alphas in most map textures though since the batch process didn't really work with alpha channels well . It's a bit old too, 2.0 I think.

i'll give tinynexuiz another go in 2.4, but I bet I could make a smaller 'demo nexuiz'

[samiam]

The alpha channels and textures took a while to get right. Basically, when a map refers to a texture, it can be any of three things:

* A .tga file with the path in question

* A .png file with the path in question

* A referral to a "shader" in a file in the "scripts" directory, which will refer to one or more textures.

The first two were easy to fetch; the third one was difficult; in particular, I just had to figure out which files belonged to the skyboxes and jumppads so they wouldn't do a "checkerboard flash".

In terms of the items you can pick up, and the models, the names are usually straightforward. "laskin", "lhskin", "mhskin", "saskin", and "shskin" refer to the health and armor pickups. The weapon and ammo names are obvious, with the exception of the rocket launcher, which is called, for whatever reason, "hazardglass". The names of the player models are straightforward.

Some of the skyboxes are not in "texures/", but are in "env/" instead. My reduced version of "env" has only three directories: strale_grey stralenex5, and stralenex8.

The ambient music .ogg files, which eat up *a lot* of space, are in sound/cdtracks. My hack is to only have one minute of music looped; the real solution is to dig in to the Dark Places source, add .mod support, and then find some GPL-compatible MODs to add to the game. This is a non-trivial project.

- Sam

[cortez]

I dont think removing maps is a good a idea. reducing the map details is better in my way and the map size will be much smaller.

I played a bit around.


another thing is removing most of the playermodel (leave one over), this also will make the package smaller and maybe remove all the things which are needed for rune, dom and lms, because those are gamemods which arent played much.

[Ed]

I've done the whole game in 38Mb before.

[iSuck]

Any chance this will make it on to my Palm/DS?

[[-z-]]

I dont think removing maps is a good a idea. reducing the map details is better in my way and the map size will be much smaller.

This is all subjective, you must consider many audiences. I believe different 'flavors' for different people would be the best route to go.

i.e. Something like

Nexuiz with a few maps be good quality
Nexuiz with all maps and low quality
...
etc.

[leileilol]

then find some GPL-compatible MODs to add to the game.

GOOD LUCK. Those are nigh-impossible to come by, and no, modarchive is not 'public domain'. most mods contain copyrighted samples, from licensed sample packs and such

[DeVsh]

Wat about those high compression archive systems I have seen one that compressed Flat OUT (700Meg) into around 100 (!WoW!) it consisted of an unpacker which made a 200mb installer

used to be on www.freeshit.pl but you will find the compressor on google probably (type Flat Out compressed by r sumthink)