I've noticed that the past Starfinder AP PDFs have jumped in size and now the latest "Waking the Worldseed (Devastation Ark 1 of 3)" is ~340mb for a 64 page book! Do these not get optimized anymore? Dawn of the Flame/Attack of the Swarm were ~25mb on average for comparison.
For the past few months, there have been a lot of requests for better maps in the PDFs because so many players are online using VTT sites.
You might look at map resolution to see if that's causing the bigger files.
Wow! I have not purchased the new AP, but that seems way out of line, even for high quality maps. The previous APs (I have Dawn of Flame, for example) got updated with higher quality and detail in the maps a few months after release and as you point out, the resulting file size is quite reasonable.
BTW, if you want the original quality maps from the PDF, its possible to extract them at full resolution using an PDF unpacker or image extractor utility. That's what I've been doing for VTT. For Dawn of Flame, the maps saved in the PDF are 1148 x 765 with minimal noise or artifacts, which is good enough for VTT.
Starfinder PDFs have always been bigger than Pathfinder PDFs with comparable page counts, but the reported size of the latest AP module is ridiculous.
I hope they fix that soon.
Seriously? Another huge file? There appears to be something going horrendously wrong when creating the Starfinder AP retail PDFs, judging by the file sizes.
To compare:
Starfinder Core Rulebook: 532 pages, 142 MB file size.
Waking the Worldseed: 68 Pages, 339 MB file size.
The Starstone Blockade: 68 Pages, 331 MB file size.
At this point the new file sizes are sufficiently large as to be rather slow to read on my admittedly older tablet just due to the memory required. That's not even considering that each of those files takes up a rather large chunk of storage. Goodbye easy electronic reference.
Is someone accidently skipping an image/filesize optimization step somewhere in the process between a version meant to be sent to the printer with maximum image quality and one intended for retail usage?
I had a look at the resolution of the images inside #31: Waking the Worldseed and nothing there seemed too large. The maps are a reasonable resolution and consistent with previous APs. I did notice that each page had two background images that were large, but even those still don't explain the large PDF size. My guess would be that it's the format of the images themselves. Usually you would expect jpgs, but maybe some other format is being used?
The Starfinder APs did seem to go up in size starting with the "The Threefold Conspiracy" adventure path and these latest two are over triple the size of those.
Another large file for the latest Starfinder AP. "Starfinder Adventure Path #33: Dominion’s End" comes in at 296 MB.
The problems seem to have started with #25. Previous to that AP, sizes were between 14 MB to 26 MB.
#22 - 23 MB
#23 - 21 MB
#24 - 23 MB
#25 - 77 MB
#26 - 75 MB
#27 - 94 MB
#28 - 96 MB
#29 - 73 MB
#30 - 102 MB
#31 - 347 MB
#32 - 340 MB
#33 - 296 MB
It would be great if someone could take a look at #25 to #33 and see what is happening with the PDF process.