Packaging for clients

I am assuming a good proportion of users are outputting their arch viz ‘games’ (interactive walkthroughs) for their clients as Windows 64 packages. If that is the case, how are you finding your client’s acceptance of them?

  1. These are quite big files
  2. Do companies really like to open ‘exe’ files?

Outputting for HTML5 is an option I suppose, but I understand that this method is less developed than more typical Windows packages. Also, the files for complex scenes could soon get unwieldy, even with high bandwidth broadband.

What are people generally giving to their clients?

(I am referring to truly interactive presentations, not pre-rendered animation or stills)

I don’t think there is a realistic alternative to deploying a ‘game’.exe file. Just keep that in mind when you are building your project so file size doesn’t get out of hand. Often there is no real visible difference between 2k and 4k textures. And often a lower lightmap size will do just fine. I hardly ever set anything higher than 256 for the lightmap unless its the large building mesh.

What file sizes are you talking about? 1-2 Gb compressed or a lot more?

In early days/research at the moment. Really basic geometry and barely any textures. The size of the WindowsNoEditor folder is already 759MB.

You will find that textures are the biggest contributor. This includes light maps. They may become the biggest junk after all, unless you have fully dynamic lighting. There is an initial big junk for the engine. Static meshes and materials are pretty small in size. Compression (zip) seems to reduce about 2/3 at the end. 5 Gb compressed is not a unusual large size if you don’t pay attention to texture sizes. If you do you should end up under 2Gb for a larger house including a bit of surrounding environment.