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A good way to sell your game is through games portals, but the file sizes need to be small, now fpsc games without lightmaps are not that big, but, and here's the big but, they become massive when one uses lightmaps, why, because fpsc uses a texture over every surface in the game, so if you have a 1000 segments in a level, guess what fpsc has 1000 dds files for the shadows, that makes a massive file, if fpsc supported gifs one could use very low rez gifs to get some basic shadows in the game, just make it stylised and you are OK, only it doesn't support gifs only those massive dds files, you can make them smaller by opening them in a paint/image prog and compressing them down some, that knocks some size off, but still to big, you can get them down from 300k to 100k per image, if it supported gif's, you could go down to a few k, like just have a 2 or 3/4/5 colour image, it would only be a few k in size.

What can we do, is there anything at all, its a damn pain how fpsc uses textures to light the map, wouldn't be so bad if it could output to something smaller than dds, I'm sure it wouldn't be so hard for TGC to support gif files. At the moment I don't see how we can sell games to the casual gamer over portals with fpsc, which is a shame as for that market is a good step to take.

Any ideas on what we can do to get some shadow in a game without having huge file sizes?

Jpeg?

As I said in another thread you can delete the testlevel folder (not the zip) in the levelbank of your game,when the user runs the game the folder is unpacked again.I just took a look at one of my own levels and the testlevel folder is 111Mb in size,of which 72Mb is lightmaps,the compressed zip is only 16.8Mb.

A quick look at some game downloads:
Transformers,The game demo. 733.4Mb
Zoo tycoon demo (1 level). 123Mb
Dark messiah of might and magic demo. 1.38Gb
And these are demos not even full games,so whats the comparison.

Full game download:
Call of duty4, 6.372 GB
Estimated download time:
Cable/DSL: 9h 54 minutes
Dial-up: 265h 8 minutes

So large file sizes for games is not exclusive to FPSC

Thanks Rolfy, I was just looking at portals for sales, that's why its important,
you see concerning sales, selling it yourself is very hard to get the marketing numbers, so its pretty hard with direct sales, so one needs a publisher for any type of distribution worth anything, now doing business with them takes a long time a lot of messing about, plus expenses as well, so I was looking at portals for quick sales, that's why I was looking at small downloads.

Yeah,at the moment I am just happy to get my levels optimised enough to make them playable.If I were ever to reach the stage that I wanted to sell a game then I would probably want the file size etc to be feasible,I have to say though that I think if your game were to be a success with people wanting to buy it,I dont think the large download sizes would put folks off.
It would be interesting to research the ratio of online and over the counter sales,personally I would think that you may be better to look at it as a sales pitch for a publishing contract,if you create a small but successful game using online sales methods you would be in a good position.
If you were going to sell a large game it would always be best to have a smaller demo available for download,if people like it they wont be put off.

I also feel that by the time I finish a game everyone will have 30Mb broadband

yes I think thats very true if your game is enjoyable people wont be suprised or bothered by a large download