![]() ![]() NBA2K17 is 66GB, for instance, a hefty install size. Vast plains built of terrain geometry and repeating grass textures appear bigger in our heads than they actually are on disk, while a complex gun model that's physically small in-game may weigh more than we know. Why, for instance, are The Witcher 3 and Rainbow Six: Siege both 50GB despite one being an open world RPG and the other being a multiplayer shooter? Such comparisons indicate that the 'scope' or 'size' of a game, as we perceive it in terms of 'a world' or 'hours of story,' has little bearing on install size. Why are some games so much bigger than others? And as memory expands, people keep doing higher and higher resolution textures." "Content will be authored at a very high resolution no matter what game you're making, and then you res it down to what will fit into memory. "One of the quickest ways to make your game look better is to up the texture resolution," says Gibson. Environmental meshes and textures? 17.4GB. Jump to Killing Floor 2, which released last year, and sound now accounts for 1.1GB of the whole. ("People would complain if we did a 100 megabyte patch," says Gibson.) Sound only accounted for 327MB of that release, and environmental meshes and textures weighed in at 1.4GB. In the mid-2000s, Red Orchestra 1 released at 2.6GB, which players thought was awfully big at the time. A breakdown of Tripwire's games tells the story. Those objects-their meshes-are increasingly complex, too. So not only are you using a higher-resolution texture, because video card memory increased, and computer memory increased, but you also have three of them for every object." "And then in the next generation, you have a diffuse texture, a normal map texture, and usually a specular-like a 'shininess' texture. "In 2005 you had a texture, just a texture, which is what later people would call a diffuse texture, but it's just a texture," says Tripwire Interactive president John Gibson. On top of that, textures are also growing in complexity. "They only use local block compression, and thus yield at best an 8-to-1 compression." And regarding Hanish's specific work on Stardock games, " images have to use a GPU friendly memory layout," he writes. Images can be heavily compressed-as with jpgs-but artifacting would be noticable. ![]() Like video, textures are increasing in resolution, except unlike video they aren't fond of being compressed. One element does check all the boxes for exponential growth: textures. ![]()
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