I am creating a board game (nothing commercial, just a fun project) about system processes, and memory requriements for each process is going to be a key element in gameplay. In a nutshell, the game will let players, playing as different processes and applications, place tiles of memory on the board, and you win once you have enough memory! Each player is able to fight others for memory through rolling a die. I know browsers like Firefox uses around 1 GiB (can confirm by checking system monitor, I’m using LibreWolf).
Notably, I’m not asking about the system requirements of these processes, but the memory usage that each needs. And yes, I know, this will vary depending on the version and hardware it is running on, but general guestimates will be fine for this silly board game.
Preferably in nice increments (e.g. 1 GiB, 256 MiB), since each tile will represent a certain amount of memory. I’m planning for each tile to represent 128 MiB of RAM, meaning you need eight tiles as a browser to win, but this could be lowered in the future depending on how the game plays.
Since I don’t want the game to take too long, I will probably ignore huge memory hogs like video editors (consuming 8+ GiB depending on the project) and LLMs (consuming ungodly amounts of RAM depending on the model).
These processes could be of any kind, but they should be recognisable for the average person though, and preferably no brand names (e.g. “browser” instead of “Firefox”)
There’s not that many programs most people use that consume a substantial amount of RAM, generally browsers are by far the heaviest ones.
I have a system monitor open rn and looking at some basic apps a calculator app uses around 30MiB, office programs would be around 150MiB unless you’re opening massive files, an email client would be around 100MiB, a PDF viewer is around 60MiB, a file manager is 40MiB, a video player is a 100MiB etc.
Games tend to be much heavier than browsers.
And every electron app is basically a browser with a built in website. Spotify, slack and vscodium all use (significantly) more than 150MB on my machine.
I was talking more in terms of “normie” programs than games tbh, they’d obviously use way more lol
And yeah, electron wrappers would also be up there, for me spotify is at around 200-300MiB, I don’t have slack or vscode so can’t check those. In terms of having generic programs rather than specific named ones as OP mentioned electron apps may be harder to specify or label in a way that’s recognizable to most people
Given the size of the games industry and estimates that over 60% of people play video games weekly I’d find it rather strange to exclude games, and the whole gamer vs normie distinction seems outdated.
I would not say that reflects my experience. The vast majority of the people I interact with outside of the internet don’t play video games, and if they do it’s crossword games or candy crush on their phone, so I would not generally consider video games as an average person thing, or at least it doesn’t seem to be where I live outside the younger generations
Either way, OP said they don’t want RAM hog applications, for which they mentioned video editors taking 8+GB, and I’d say on average games probably take 4-8GB (and I don’t particularly play the modern AAA stuff), so I’d consider them a valid target to exclude on those grounds even if we do define them as something for average people
I have a number of things running in the background after booting, so here’s some numbers for you:
- Steam: 1.1GiB
- Firefox: 1 GiB
- Discord: 500-600 MiB
- SchildiChat (Matrix Client): 300 MiB
- KeePassXC: 180 MiB
- KDE’s System Monitor (which I am using to get these values): 140 MiB
In addition to that, there’s always a number of systems services, most of which use a negligible amount of memory, but here’s some I’m just picking out because I recognize what they do:
- plasmashell (KDE Plasma): 380 MiB
- kwin_wayland (also KDE Plasma): 70 MiB
- Syncthing: 80 MiB
- kdeconnectd: 30 MiB
- pipewire: 7.5 MiB (though there are some other processes associated with pipewire in addition to the main one)
- systemd-logind: 1.8 MiB
- systemd: 3.7 MiB
- cupsd: 2 MiB
- XWayland: 45 MiB
- Xorg: 40 MiB
Of course, these are just a snapshot of the systems state, and can only really give you a very rough idea of how much memory something might use at one point in time.
If you want to make your board game more complicated (probably not, but I like the idea, so I’m just throwing it in here), you could use it as an opportunity to teach virtual memory, segmentation, paging and internal vs external fragmentation. Maybe players get certain processes with memory requirements and have to fit them into their own main memory, and whoever can fit the most processes wins, or whoever cannot allocate memory for a new process looses. (I’m just writing down what’s coming out of my head, I don’t want to hijack your game idea, sorry.)
Why not do something retro and base it on classic Mac OS apps? Each one has a defined minimum and preferred memory allocation (reserves its memory at launch and has to stay within that allocation).
Otherwise, if you’re using a modern OS, most processes will allocate memory as they need it, depending on use. If there isn’t enough available, background processes will be dumped to virtual memory to make room for the active process. If all memory is used up, the active process will start moving not-recently-used data onto storage as well.
Classic Mac OS lines up much better with your scenario, and is easier to populate as you can just go on infinite mac, boot an OS version, load up some applications and get info on them to see how mich they allocate.
Memory usage vastly depends on what the GUI framework is, if any files are open, what processing is being done… There can be a terminal emulator that needs 300 MB, and a hex editor can use any amount of RAM depending on what file is loaded (although better ones load file chunks on demand).
