*spin-off* Game size
- Thread starter MrFox
- Start date
Bagel seed
Veteran
Well there's always multiple discs again and install to HDD. I think 50GB is a lot if we compare it to any open world game now that fits under 7GB. But we have to think about how much the fidelity of the assets will increase and inflate in size too.
It's some sort of function of RAM size x bandwidth x streaming speed x visual variety x world size
Stuff gets compressed heavily before they put it on the disc. 50GB of data is already a LOT and they can still build 2-disc games... if they have to...
With 50 GB games, I'm guessing we're not going to see full installs for games, or even many direct download options. What's the biggest downloadable game on Steam?
Bagel seed
Veteran
ID chose to use fully unique textures - something that's not actually required by virtual texturing. I don't think anyone else is going to be rushing to do what ID did for Rage any time soon.
Rage was delivered to the X360 on two DVDs, that's what, 16GB of data? They could double the texture res on the game world and objects and characters, and still fit a game just as big on a single BR disc.
Heck they could still ad some 50% extra content on top, but just those 16 gigs took them some 5 years already...
Heck they could still ad some 50% extra content on top, but just those 16 gigs took them some 5 years already...
Don't forget that their compression scheme was also quite a lot more aggressive than usual, and pretty lossy too
Bagel seed
Veteran
Right, that's the point of MT. Just let the artists do whatever they want with little restriction for variety in environments. I never played Rage so I don't know how impressive or unimpressive it is in terms of variety and level size, but I know they had to stick to regular lightmaps for their solution. Another mark against MT I guess.
Rage on PC was 25 GB. Crysis 2 was 9 GB on PC. Battlefield 3 was 15 or 10 GB on PC(not sure why disc version is more). Sounds like 50 GB is lots.
Actually, no, it's the other way
The completely unique texture coverage has allowed them to not use lightmaps and all and bake all the lighting into the color texture. So it has the same fidelity, which is extremely high compared to any other game.
Games using light maps have a second set of UVs with a much lower texel density, so the quality of the lightmaps is pretty low. Most levels in games are using something like a single 1024*1024 texture for all the surfaces (but try to optimize coverage as much as they can).
They did however also bake the specular highlights in some places, to conserve disk space, which wasn't so good.
Also, Carmack decided that 60fps is more important than adding any kind of dynamic lighting on top - this is more of a question of taste though. A lot of people did like the responsive controls and gunplay that it lead to, and which is so rare nowadays.
Especially if you consider the time, money and manpower necessary to produce that amount of content...
The rumored RAGE HI-REZ texture pack was around 160 gigabytes.
Maybe that just means that Rage's approach isn't the right way to go?
Bagel seed
Veteran
Them textures I guess. Haven't played that one either. Kind of blah on all games and just waiting for next gen to arrive.
If a super linear game (no idea about length or variety) like MP3 supposedly is already 35GB I think 50 is cutting it close if single disc is to be the norm.
You're missing my point, it works and I think at least part of the technology is here to stay, my big question with it is the expectation that artists want to touch every texel, or that every unique textel needs to be stored leading to 170GB HD texture packs.
If you're going to require 170GB of space for you're game I'd personally reconsider the approach, but that's just me.
I'd suggest it's better to algorithmically generate variation in some base material and allow artists to control that, and add specific detail where necessary, then rather than storing every pixel on disk, you procedurally regenerate it in game only saving the explicitly added detail.
At some point there is no distinction between procedural content and compression.
upnorthsox
Veteran
I would need to see a significant wow factor in that 160GBs to feel its worth it.
It may be, but from the screenshots I've seen of the game so far(no hi-rez pack yet) I think it's not.
It may be, but from the screenshots I've seen of the game so far(no hi-rez pack yet) I think it's not.
