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lvlrk, posted Sun Mar 05, 2023 8:51 pm (75693)

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why do some companies use the same formats in different games all the time

for example, Namco Bandai uses their proprietary formats ARCV (storer archive) and SSZL (lzss0 compressed) a lot in their games, and some versions of the formats vary

atom0s, posted Mon Mar 06, 2023 8:11 am (75711)

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There are a lot of reasons that a game studio may decide to reuse code, such as archive/file formats.

1. Investments/Costs - If the studio paid a license for the format, or if the studio invested any kind of cost into the development of a format (such as developing their own format, modifying other formats, etc.) then it is in their best interest to reuse the results of those investments as much as possible.

2. Proven Technology - Oftentimes, studios will develop their own tooling and engines. Or, they will take an existing engine and modify it internally to best suit their studios needs. When this happens, it is often the result of a lot of time and effort to ensure that the created tooling works best for the studios needs. For example, if the company focuses on console game development, then optimizations to file formats and archiving has real-world impacts on things like load times, stutters while assets are streamed in/loaded, and so on. If a format proves to perform well, then there is little reason to change.

3. Quick Turnaround Times (Development Crunch) - Studios are given tight deadlines to complete projects. A common thing you hear about in the game industry is crunch times and how that can be entirely demoralizing to a team. It is best for studios to avoid having to redevelop things that have already been created previously. For example, with an archive format, there is no reason for a studio to develop something new for every new project they work on simply just to do it.

4. The Best Option Already Exists - Things like compression algorithms are heavily math and time-dependent. For the best results, things are generally weighed against the ratio in which the data can be compressed along with the time it takes to decompress it. If someone makes an amazing compression ratio algorithm, but it takes 10 minutes to compute, then it is not a viable product for say, an entire archive of game data. This is why well-known algorithms are widely used in most games, because they just work and do the job already. Reinventing the wheel is not always a good option.

There are many other reasons, these are just a few examples.

In regards to why some versions of formats vary, some common causes for that are:

• Change of the compression method used. If the company used an older algorithm but has since moved to something newer or more performant, then it is best to make the archive as being a new version.
• Updates to the compression method used. If a given compression algorithm that was used has been updated with better options/performance, they may need to mark the archive as newer to allow the game to support both the older and newer versions.
• Updates to the archive format. With new technology constantly emerging in the gaming space, changes to the archive format itself may be ideal to improve performance in other areas. (Things like DirectStorage can benefit from different setups to file formats and such.)