Hi All,

I'm looking to perhaps put an in-browser web game on my site that would require no installation ... think along the lines of a popcap game or shockwave.com game.

I've been trying to find out the typical download sizes of these types of games but they load almost instantly on my Cablemodem line, and I don't have any sort of traffic monitor that can tell me how much data has been transfered.

How should I go about finding this information out? Does anyone know how large the average popcap game is? how large is the new Zuma in-browser game? What is considered small, and large?

Any help is appreciated.

~Hanford

That's a tricky question. With shockwave, you can run parts of the application while content is still downloading.

This is what I like about shockwave, if you're a little creative with your programming, you can hide a lot of the download time with your demo.

I don't know how big popcap games are, but I recently did a concept demo, which I ported to shockwave. It was about 1.8MB. When I demonstrated it to a few people, the longest I saw it take to download was 10 seconds. Granted, most of them were on broadband connections, but still that's fast. I imagine I could easily get away with a 2-3MB shockwave demo. If the content justifies it, I could probably do even a little more.

You have to remember to think internationally as well. American broadband means much more than European broadband. In America, broadband speeds are massive. You can get something like a 10-Mbit connect for ~$30 a month. Here in Blighty, I get a 0.6Mbit connection for £25 a month. A lot of Europe is still very far behind when it comes to broadband speeds.

Assuming maximum speed, I would download a meg in about 20 seconds. Usually it's about 30-45 seconds. It's not much time, but as the file size gorws, so does download time. Then there'ss erver load to consider. Sometimes on busy servers or at peak times I'm lucky to get a download rate of 30k a second.

Basically, make the game as small as possible. Shockwave is very good at compressing data and streaming the data in the background. Make the most of this and anyone should be able to enjoy your game up to about 3-4MB in size. If however you don't make the most of these features, then you would want to try and keep the game around 1-2MB.

Thanks for the replies. currently I'm at 900k, and I think I can go smaller without sacrificing anything. Add in streaming and I think it won't be a problem.

Hanford