How much HDD space will SB take after 500 visited planets????

Starbound is based on procedural generation (Type a seed and get a world thing).
Planets and other places that we can go to like spacestations and asteroids, are procedurally generated only after we visit them the first time.
I assume that after the visits, the changes are saved so when we go back to that world after X amount of time, we'll find it how we left it.
Fact is that all saved modifications take up hdd space(more or less)

So my question is: How much HDD space will SB take after 500 visited planets????

I'm asking this beacuse i would not like to see Starbound using twenty times the space it needs on my hdd after one month of gameplay.
But even if it does i'll still play the heck out of it!

 

Worst case scenario, prolly 50mb [size of Terraria large world?] x 500? I don't know, Starbound could have a better way of handling this, so it can be a lot smaller.

 

You are right. But you didn't consider the fact that Starbound will have much bigger worlds than Terraria had.
So one SB world could take well over 50mb.

 

Hence the keyword 'prolly', because we don't have an average.

 

Hahaha. Yea with that logic it's 50x500=25GB! That would have been hilarious for a few moments.

Unlike Terraria, Starbound generates data on the fly, so you won't have those issues, can't give you estimates though.

 

I guess we'll see it when we'll have it...
But i am still curious.

 

Terraria saved the whole world as it was, fully loaded, starbound generates things as needed, cell based just like minecraft.

Hmm...now I see that I made no sense! World generation has nothing to do with how that data is saved, or maybe it does and I'm being silly.

 

Tiy's said that Starbound saves only the differences to the base world, and not the entire world (or something like that).

 

The worlds in minecraft are saved as a whole, it just unloads the terrain it doesn't need loaded from your memory, not your hard drive.

 

This could save a lot of hdd space for sure.

 

Aye, I've seen this too.

I wonder though. Would going to 500 planets and removing one block from each require more space than going to a single planet and breaking 500 blocks? I figure the game would need some extra bits of data to tell which planet the tile diffs belong to.

 

Well, I think the base game alone is going to be a few hundred megabytes when you consider it has lots more content than Terraria does AND there is a LOT MORE music (considering that songs will likely be 256-320 kbps = 10-20 MBs per song and there are many). Now, I don't think the worlds themselves will be too big, but still larger than what Terraria's were depending on how much you explore if it's infinite.

But really, if anyone was worried about the space that a 2D indie game with pixel sprites is going to take up on your HDD, I think they might do well to look around for useless crap to delete...or run CC Cleaner or a Disk Cleanup utility.

 

IDK if I'm right but I think Tiy mentioned that if you found something unique on a planet you could save the co-ordinates and send them to your friends so they can check this thing out on their game. Would that mean that there's the codes for all of the planets/other stuff? If so that could mean they have a way of making the universe into sections and they're so big that by the time you got to the edge of one you would have spent an entire day so you would sleep and then the next morning your section loads and the one near you does as well so you can go into it and not notice a shange or get a loading screen? Kind of like Minecraft where it doesn't load the parts you don't need, Starbound would do that on a massive scale and if they could do that then how big (Not in Bytes but in-game) would the universe be? They could release the game and then when the most adventurous players seem to be getting to the edge of their generated worlds then they would release an update that would extend the universe? Thereby rendering the universe you start in already made planetwise but not alien and loot/treasure wise?

 

There'll be much more content than Minecraft and Terraria, and much more HQ music than both as well. It'll likely be bigger than both of those previously mentioned games combined, but that's only about what, less than 100MB? However, I feel that it'll be bigger than 100 MB but will probably not be over a GB. That being said, this is an Indie 2D game and won't be anywhere near as big as most AAA titles that are 5+ gigs. You won't be hard up on HDD space after installing Starbound, trust me. This isn't PS2 or TSW, which take up 10GB and 33GB respectively.

 

Not sure if I understood correctly what you said. But if you're suggesting that they generate the worlds themselves and then will deliver the "universe" pieces by pieces through update, the answere is no. They have a tool that will handle the procedural generation so your own computer will produce the planets and stuffs when you reach them, using the tool included in the game.

 

Ok, currently the dev build of Starbound, with symbols enabled, without any save files, config files or logs, player, planet or otherwise, but with all assets weighs in at 487MB. This doesn't include most music assets, as we haven't actually gotten around to adding most music assets to the dist folder and the game.

In Release mode, without symbols or debugging code and with unit tests removed, it weighs 302MB

A player save file runs 4741 bytes, it doesn't get much bigger.

The ship save file starts at 327KB, an empty world with a dungeon added runs 81KB.

I took the dev fishaxe and went hog wild on a world for about 10 minutes, the new world file (with a different dungeon) grew from 124KB to 576KB, which is probably about as much damage that any one player would be able to inflict upon a planet in the normal course of business within about probably 4-5 hours.

 

So probably it won't get above 1 GB then.

 

Sounds manageable even for my crappy computer

 

From what OE said, it sounds like save files will barely even scratch more than a couple MB. And it sounds like definitely less than one gig of space for storing the actual game. Nice!

 

I didn't quite say that. Just as it sits right now it's weighing in at 302MB. We're still adding in lots of assets and we haven't really even started adding the largest of files. I have no idea how big the final game will be.