So for example, videogames are super heavy on disk space. And aparently most of that space is just the sounds, textures, models, etc. But the code takes very little space.
Why can something as complex as a physics system weight less than a bunch of images?
Code takes very little space, media takes more. But an image is just code that tells the computer how to draw something (I think)
So how come some code gets to be so small in size and some code doesn’t?
In: 53
I’ll try to structure this like I would a kids book about this, so enjoy my presentation of
#Abstraction and Me:
We store things in something called binary, it’s a bunch of ones and zeros. One “bit” is one space that we can store a one or a zero, and our computers actually physically store all information by using these spaces for ones and zeros. 8 bits is commonly called a byte, and a million of those is a megabyte.
First we have text. To store text, we store every individual letter, and every letter takes 8 bits to store. If you opened your computer and wrote up a document, the size of it is about how long it is.
Next we have pictures. We store these by using a big grid of pixels, which also take about 8 bits per pixel. To make pictures look better, we can add more pixels, and make the grid have more spaces for its size, but that means more bits and more space.
To make videos, all we need to do is store a bunch of pictures, because a video is just a bunch of pictures one after the other. The frame rate is how smooth the video looks, usually we store 24-60 pictures of a video per second. The higher the frame rate, the more pictures used, and the more bits used, so the more space it takes up.
To make audio, we take a sound and slice it up! It’s like taking a video and creating pictures of each frame. Just like with how many pixels we want in a picture, or how many pictures we want in a video, the amount of cuts we want in audio is called the bitrate. Higher bitrates sound better, but take more cuts, so more bits! Actually storing audio is a bit complicated, so for the sake of the question, I’ll leave it at this.
Now, I kind of lied a little. I told you about some common ways we store data, but in fact for every type of information we store, we have multiple ways of doing it. That’s actually what file formats are. The difference between a .jpg and a .png is the method of how they store the information of the picture.
All of this is possible due to something called Abstraction! It’s the ability to take a very small piece of information, and by using math and logic, we can conveniently store very complicated ideas by building a “factory” to do so. Bits turn into pixels turn into pictures turn into videos, but the video is using the same code for the bits themselves!
#Aterthought
Videos and sounds take up so much space these days because in the past we worried about our space since we didn’t have the technology to store that much stuff in computers.
These days, storage is not a problem for most devices, so instead of worrying about how big things like games or videos are, we care about how complex things look, how detailed graphics are, and how good music sounds. We have the space for it, so people like game devs care less about optimization of space and more about trying to make the game as good looking as possible, with as many unique assets as possible, which is the tradeoff.
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