How do developers do this? Does it just mean the first few levels have been downloaded? What about open world style games? How do they know which bits you will/won’t interact with and what happens if you get to a part that isn’t yet downloaded?
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The overwhelming majority of that data consists of high resolution textures. Even without those you can still play the game using the smaller, low res textures. Some huge games will, basically, allow you to play at low graphics settings while higher quality graphics are still getting downloaded.
Yeah, you will have limited availability until the game becomes fully downloaded, you can still access all of the settings to modify the game to your liking.
Pretty much. Once the beginning of the game is downloaded, it can start running while the rest is downloaded in the background. Things like the splash screens and character creation can eat up your time while the download finishes.
Even open world games are not so open that you can get from the starting point to anywhere in the game in a minute or two.
Depending on their error handling, if you tried to access something that hadn’t been downloaded yet, you might get an error message or the game may behave in unexpected ways, including crashing.
Most of the game you’re downloading are textures (graphics) that probably only exist in a very small part of the game.
When you’re downloading the textures only used in later levels, you can still play the earlier levels.
This is no different from how your compute/console normally plays games. Most of the game isn’t loaded at any given time. The computer will load different parts of the game based on what you are doing.
This is why older games often have long pauses for *load screens* between sections or levels. They need to load up the material for the next section.
Anything that isn’t related to what you are doing *right now* technically doesn’t need to be on your computer to play the game.
Think of it this way, if a game has 10 lvs how many levels do you need downloaded to start playing the game? The answer is only 1 technically.
You don’t need all of a games content downloaded to play it.
With modern games most of the download is textures so if you can play the game at a lower graphics quality then you can run the game without downloading a significant portion of it.
The most common method is to pull out high resolution textures. One really nice thing with this method is that you can actually stack levels of the textures, so you end up just downloading the 4k textures during a later pass, while the 2k textures that were initially downloaded are still used as mipmaps* for objects farther away from the camera.
For some games, audio can also be a huge chunk of the data, and also can be initially provided with a lower quality. Games with lots of voiced lines, especially if they come from customizable characters, tend to have *tons* of audio, and audio has a lot of compression settings options. Unlike textures, you generally end up fully replacing the lower quality data, meaning using this options means increasing the *total* download size of the game.
Some games also still use prerendered videos, though this is much less common now than it used to be. With video, you can both decrease the resolution and increase the compression options, allowing for a massive trade of quality to size.
All three of the above options has the same basic effect: the quality of the game will be lower until the higher resolution content is downloaded. The effect will be very similar to going into the settings and turning down some of the graphics settings.
Occasionally, games will use a method of locking you out of some content. With an RPG, for example, they might download the tutorial level initially, and delay the final level until later. If this option is used, you’ll likely hit an invisible wall, loading screen, or other barrier to prevent you from entering areas you have not yet downloaded. This tends to be a lot harder to implement than the above options, and is basically the same idea as having a DLC or patch that adds new content to the game.
Some types of the content, such as audio or video, may also be optional. You probably wouldn’t notice that your character only says 3 different idle lines instead of 5. Perhaps TVs in the game will be blank until the movies that play on them are downloaded.
Each of the options can also be combined in various ways, depending on the decisions of the developer and nature of the game.
* Games generally use mipmaps of textures for objects farther away for performance. This is the idea of using a lower resolution texture as the object gets farther away. There is no reason to bother trying to render some gigantic texture on an object that takes up just a couple pixels. For many types of textures, such as checkerboards, this can also actually improve the render quality when the object is small on screen as well. At the same time, if you zoom in to an object and have it taking up a lot of your screen, you likely want to use a very high resolution texture so it looks nice.
If it’s a brand new game. Even open world. You’re most likely not exploring the entire world right off the get. If it’s level based you don’t need every level. If it has different modes like call of duty. You can play the campaign but not warzone or multiplayer. All depends.
As many others have said not every thing you download has anything to do with the actual game play. Theres graphics files. Theres probably audio and video on there that you may encounter later. There’s unlockables like characters weapons skins. Etc. there are system files that may govern online play or relate to a later add on. Etc.
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