How is 500MB Possible?

[GuyTrance]

Hey Guys.

This game has an amazing graphics engine and not to mention massive terrain and maps and cars etc etc

How this is possible with only 500mb's??

 

[Pritch]

compression

 

[Bram Hengeveld]

It's really impressive. I wondered exactly the same when i first installed the game: how on earth can it be so small compared to other HDD consuming games.

 

[Senad Subasic]

Well, I guess there is a very small amount of graphics stuff, textures and what have you. Roads are the same everywhere, cities look pretty much the same.

Still, it is pretty impressive indeed.

 

[Oscar Sahlin]

same dev made the 18 wheels of steel (18 WoS) series, back then they didn't use more than 200-300MB I think.. and the map then was even bigger, it was all of usa, and parts of canada and mexico

 

[Marco Bijl]

Repetition is indeed the trick they mastered there . By using the same textures and graphics over and over again, they make a sort of jigsaw puzzle of the map. So the map is infact a textual reference to (a relative few) graphics files.
There are a lot of cars around, but not many different ones. Saves in space as well.

It's just a case of decent engineering they did. Very nice job.