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| Levels-4-You : Lounge : Game file sizes could soon be 70% smalle |
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| Predalienator_ |
  Posted 28th Oct 2006 8:20am |
L4Y Member
Post 1034 / 1532
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| Quoting Bit-tech.net | One of the most interesting talks at London’s GDC (Games Developers Conference) this week came form one of the lesser known companies called Allegorithmic, who claim they will be able to reduce texture file sizes in games by up to 70%.
Their new programs, that they hope development artists will soon be using as an industry standard, are called ProFX and MaP Zone 2. Their ambition is to keep the graphical quality of game textures at the same standards as current games, whilst dramatically reducing the amount of data required for the game to work.
The implications of such a technology would be far reaching. As the current trend of digital distribution gains momentum a huge emphasis is being placed on games being made smaller and thus downloadable quicker. Their claim is that the current tool of choice for most games artists, Adobe Photoshop, is not ideally suited to making textures for games.
I was doubtful of this technology; however the company ran a demo that persuaded me otherwise. In the demo they had a bathroom full of beautiful textures, then with the flick of a button the bathroom took a more hellish look – all the while the textures looked the equal of Half Life 2.
The next demo was of a game that is due to come out for the XBOX Live Arcade called ‘Roboblitz’. Due to the requirement to get the game under 50MB, the developers needed to keep the textures as small in filesize as possible. Using the new texture system the overall size for all the textures was less than 280KB – watching the game (which runs on the Unreal 3 engine) I was amazed.
Confused by the fact that I hadn’t heard about this technology before, I spoke to one of the men behind it directly - Dr Sébastien Deguy. He assured me that there were no catches with his system, that if a game contained 1GB of textures he would be able to reduce that to 300MB and lose no quality. When I asked why everyone wasn’t using the program at the moment he explained it was due to people needing to be retrained in learning a new system. He was optimistic however, that soon all games companies will be using their new texture tools.
So what are the implications for you and I? In terms of traditionally packaged games that come in boxes, there probably won’t be much difference. Dr Deguy argues that if textures are smaller in file size and easier to create, then next-generation companies will be able to create even more textures for the games. We may then see a big leap forward in how richly detailed games are in the future as they triple the variety of textures the game includes.
The biggest impact however will be the benefits this will have to digital distribution. Games with texture quality and diversity matching Half Life 2 may soon be available in minutes of downloading rather than hours – for gamers this can only be a good thing. |
Imagine the possibilitiesssss.................................
RF could be a mere 10 mb,HL2 could be 340 mb,s. |
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| Vidi44 |
Posted 28th Oct 2006 8:39am |
L4Y Member
Post 586 / 668
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Wow. I'm glad I didn't ruin my mind by learning Photoshop like all the other "real gamers".
This sounds fun, and I agree with the guy's last two paragraphs. For games that need a smaller size, this is definately great. For games that don't mind a bigger size, this will allow more detail for everything, making those games better looking while still the same relative size as a comparable game.
Any idea how soon this'll be available to the public? |
"Don't go there. It's ugly, and it never stops being ugly."
"Naps are good" - Visual C++.NET for Dummies, page 1 |
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| Predalienator_ |
Posted 28th Oct 2006 9:02am |
L4Y Member
Post 1036 / 1532
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Hi Vid long time no see 
I think this technology is gonna be for game devs only by the time so lets hope they will release it to the public. |
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sobe  |
Posted 28th Oct 2006 5:25pm |
Post 2079 / 3194
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Well, 10MB for RF, get realistic  I'd say maybe 1GB from the standard 3GB that RF currently is. Maybe less than 1GB, but still, this is awesome. I wouldn't mind snagging a copy |
| "Apparently, Plaintiff believes that he could sue an egg company for fraud for labeling a carton of 12 eggs a dozen, because some bakers would view a dozen as including 13 items." - Western Digital 2006 |
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| Predalienator_ |
Posted 28th Oct 2006 6:52pm |
L4Y Member
Post 1037 / 1532
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I dunno i think it wil be the same as 3ds Max or maybe less. |
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| Vidi44 |
Posted 30th Oct 2006 3:47am |
L4Y Member
Post 587 / 668
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No, I think that if they release this to developers, it'll likely come out in a MS-style pricing system:
300 or so for "standard" users (ie independent developers and hobbyists. Would have minimal features).
500 or so for the "enhanced" version, which would be for above people, but have more features.
700 or so for "professionals", which would have all the features, save for team development.
1k for teams, or a company.
Why? Because they could make a lot of money from this if it actually delivers what it promises. So in traditional capitalism spirit, they'd charge out the {censored} for it.
Who knows, maybe they won't have 3 levels for individual licensing? That'd be nice for a change (hate reading over how I'd have to spend several hundred just to buy a good programming do-hicky. Yes, I know that this isn't a programming do-hicky either, but they could easily pretend it is, as it would be almost as powerful as one ). |
"Don't go there. It's ugly, and it never stops being ugly."
"Naps are good" - Visual C++.NET for Dummies, page 1 |
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| Predalienator_ |
Posted 17th Nov 2006 10:13am |
L4Y Member
Post 1053 / 1532
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If the mod community got their hands on the program that could mean more smaller mods!YayAnd if they have talent that means we will get small great mods!Double yay! |
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| Predalienator_ |
Posted 20th Nov 2006 1:00am |
L4Y Member
Post 1064 / 1532
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They maybe in a new image format or maybe modified versions of the existing image formats and i think that smaller textures mean less graphic card power but you will still need it to render the models though. |
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| Schuy01 |
Posted 21st Nov 2006 8:08pm |
L4Y Member
Post 222 / 245
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With all the advancements in normal mapping, polygons are not that big of a deal anymore. Developers are moving on towards shading, texturing, and lighting. Hell, most of the in-game models for the next gen games are only 5000-7500 polygons. I'd much rather have high resolution normal maps than higher poly characters. |
◄ "Si vis pacem, para bellum!" - Flavius Vegetius Renatus ►
My current project! |
Modified Nov 21st, 08:09pm by Schuy01 |
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| goober |
Posted 21st Nov 2006 8:40pm |  |
L4Y Member
Post 4179 / 265
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Yea, would be easier on your hardware too  |
For anyone reading this in 2019 or later: The RF community is alive on the Community Discord
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| cyrus5 |
Posted 23rd Nov 2006 10:56am |
[CP] Director
L4Y Member
Post 231 / 241
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Hmmm, it might not allow the sort of improvements you all envision.
Its not texture compression per-se, its procedural texturing, all this reduces is the on disk storage size, it saves a description of how to generate the texture, rather than the texture itself.
Effectively you collect together and 'wire up' different generators, effects, processors. You might select that you want a perlin noise generator with a certain set of parameters blended with a 3 level difference cloud effect, then use this as a bump map to light a repeating grid pattern.
When you load your game, it loads the description file and creates the textures in memory. You still end up with the same amount of texture data going through the graphics card, you just lighten the disk IO load.
Its great for consoles though where disk IO is a major bottleneck, unless you are loading huge contiguous areas of the disk. For pc's its less of a problem since hard disk access is faster than a consoles dvd drive, though procedural textures would still be quicker for loading.
Nice idea though. Its been tried before, perhaps its just died in the past because of a lack of decent tool chain. |
Only the dead have seen the end of war - Plato
I think it would be a good idea. - Mahatma Gandhi, when asked what he thought of Western civilisation.
cyrus5.co.uk! |
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| cyrus5 |
Posted 23rd Nov 2006 11:36am |
[CP] Director
L4Y Member
Post 233 / 241
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For the first time, since my first 386 25mhz pc, i am having trouble filling up my pc.. even with broadband.
I still remember with fondness juggling my 40mb hard drive so I could fit doom 2 on with win 3.11 and all my other crap. |
Only the dead have seen the end of war - Plato
I think it would be a good idea. - Mahatma Gandhi, when asked what he thought of Western civilisation.
cyrus5.co.uk! |
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| DVL_IAC |
Posted 3rd Dec 2006 6:17am | |
L4Y Member
Post 1061 / 1417
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| Quoting cyrus5 | Hmmm, it might not allow the sort of improvements you all envision.
Its not texture compression per-se, its procedural texturing, all this reduces is the on disk storage size, it saves a description of how to generate the texture, rather than the texture itself.
Effectively you collect together and 'wire up' different generators, effects, processors. You might select that you want a perlin noise generator with a certain set of parameters blended with a 3 level difference cloud effect, then use this as a bump map to light a repeating grid pattern.
When you load your game, it loads the description file and creates the textures in memory. You still end up with the same amount of texture data going through the graphics card, you just lighten the disk IO load.
Its great for consoles though where disk IO is a major bottleneck, unless you are loading huge contiguous areas of the disk. For pc's its less of a problem since hard disk access is faster than a consoles dvd drive, though procedural textures would still be quicker for loading.
Nice idea though. Its been tried before, perhaps its just died in the past because of a lack of decent tool chain. |
Like what they did with this game way back in 2004.
A couple of levels of a game with full 3d models, nice textures, nice lighting effects, music, and sound effects, all for 96kb. |
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| Predalienator_ |
Posted 3rd Dec 2006 6:32am |
L4Y Member
Post 1094 / 1532
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HOLY SH*T!The future of texture compression is here and we dont even no that it EXISTS! |
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| Vidi44 |
Posted 9th Dec 2006 6:49am |
L4Y Member
Post 594 / 668
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It keeps crashing on my machine :'(
Anyway, procedural programming has long been one of my interests. A lot of people put a lot of work into making games procedurally like this. In fact, one of them (can't find the article) generates entire planets at runtime (yes, it's one of those space-trading games, a sort of ripoff of Elite), so you could fly around the universe for as long as you had the memory to store the instructions (ie practically forever so long as you didn't fly around the universe constantly and forced it to keep saving locations and information from throughout the game).
Mostly though, graphics are where it's used at. What I do like about the one technique Wikipedia mentioned was the ability to procedurally generate one thing, then tack on a pre-built file later. That'd save a lot of computing, and generate similar results throughout the game.
Actually, the XBox360 and PS3 are making extensive use of procedural programming for a lot of their graphics. I think we can all agree that they all look better for it .
It's the wave of the future for not just graphics, but for a lot of things. Imagine a game where each individual character is custom made procedurally. For instance, if RF were procedurally generated, each guard would look different, and if you put enough time into it, could have a different AI. Thus making the entire game completely realisitic (never have to worrry about the guards doing the same thing over and over again).
The only problem is that it takes a long time to do this, and a lot of programming skill. There might someday be a specific class in college on how to do this stuff (because it's pretty deep stuff, IMHO). So, until gamers demand more of this and hardware can advance more, we're "stuck" with pre-built graphics, maps, characters, etc. |
"Don't go there. It's ugly, and it never stops being ugly."
"Naps are good" - Visual C++.NET for Dummies, page 1 |
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