How Game File Sizes Will Be Reduced Up To 70%

[cliffbo]

How Game File Sizes Will Be Reduced Up To 70%
Bit-tech.net has a preview up of new technology called Allegorithmic demonstrated at GDC London which promises to reduce texture file sizes by 70%. Don't believe it? Well you will when you download RoboBlitz from Xbox Live Arcade "soon". In case you didn't know, RoboBlitz is a full featured 19 level XBLA title that runs on Unreal Engine 3 and clocks in at under 50MB. The real kicker - the entire texture set for the game totals up to under 300 Kilobytes. Check out screens of the game to be amazed, and check out the full preview of this awesome technology at bit-tech.net:

just read this i know it`s not directly ps3 related but i wondered if anyone has any thoughts on this as the response seems to be the usual we don`t need blu-ray in ps3 argument.

http://www.evilavatar.com/forums/showthread.php?t=18791

[Coded-Dude]

how does this compression affect real games with intensive battles/graphics
(an arcade game does not impress me......yet)

[nwo504]

another lame excuse. if data sizes were to get smaller they (some developers) would probably add MORE textures on the BD. 25gb>9Gb

[LiquidEagle]

Also, don't confuse reducing the texture file size with reducing the game file size :)

It reduces the Texture file size by up to 70%, but there's more to a game than textures :-D

[xbdestroya]

I think the whole argument that compression technology will greatly extend the usefulness of DVD-9 is honestly a very good one. How can it be denied?

For BD to prove a true factor this gen in gaming, beyond the quieter drive operation, then PS devs are truly going to have to create games that would simply be impossible on DVD-9 with compression. That's going to mean that someone puts down the money for some massive, massive games.

Now, Resistance uses 22GB... but is this such a game? We won't really be able to judge until we see it in action. They have attributed the size to level design and scale though, so indeed it makes me hopeful. But we just have to wait and see. I can't help but think that they could have compressed things below 22GB if they really had wanted to.

[LiquidEagle]

Yeah that's true xbd, I think most developers right now are really stretching their legs while they still use some old technology they had from PS2 development (stuff there aren't tools for yet on PS3, though I can't give any examples I'm sure there's some of that happening). Once we get into PS3's second year of operation I think devs are going really zero in on making things as efficient as possible since they'll be using all current technology. Just a guess though, I might be wrong and there may actually be current technology available for all different areas of development.

[OmniCloud]

Why does this compression only apply to 360? Doesn't that mean if 360 could have twice as much textures then PS3 could have 4 or 5 times as much? Siraris posted this in another thread-and I don't see how this wouldn't benefit ALL systems equally let alone if this works as good as it sounds. The "Learning curve" may have more to it than what's being shared right now.

We have only seen I think the first level of Resistance-but just look how big the worlds are and the number of enemies/allies/effects on screen at once! We can't judge untill the final product is shipped-but I think Resistance will be the "wake-up" game for a lot of devs...

[Carn]

haha

I remember these same issues when cool scene demos came out clocking at 2K on my C64 :P

[makeitlookreal]

For the PS3 having smaller texture files (is this some kind of compression?) will be nice, but is not as important with the large storage space Blu-ray provides.

What is important is if these compressed textures are natively supported by the GPU. For example, DXT textures are compressed and are fed into the GPU compressed, and the GPU actually works natively on the compressed textures. This means you can get more textures into your RAM with DXT and you do NOT have to decompress them before you feed them to the GPU.

If this new method is NOT natively supported by the GPU then it just means the textures will have to be expanded in the RAM, take up a normal sized footprint, and there will be no benefit at all when it comes to graphical quality in a game.

I realize that this technology could be very beneficial to those with a 360 due to the limited capacity of a DVD. However, I'm trying to figure out if it could enhance the quality of texturing in a PS3 game.

EDIT: now that I think about this I think Allgerithmic is actually a form of procedual texturing. This is not compression in the normal sense of DXT at all.

[Domination]

just read this i know it`s not directly ps3 related but i wondered if anyone has any thoughts on this as the response seems to be the usual we don`t need blu-ray in ps3 argument.

http://www.evilavatar.com/forums/showthread.php?t=18791

I ran across this, too, but the site was too slow at the time to really discuss it. This very well could work, but I'm wondering if this software is limited to particular tasks or the size of the file it is trying to compress. If none apply, I can definitely see the advantage here.

[venomv]

The problem is one of the biggest chunks is audio, which is one reason I think Resistance is so huge, it will have every language supported on one disk, which I think is great for devs/publishers. So this would help some games....and other will still have trouble with only one DVD.

[Domination]

Why does this compression only apply to 360? Doesn't that mean if 360 could have twice as much textures then PS3 could have 4 or 5 times as much? Siraris posted this in another thread-and I don't see how this wouldn't benefit ALL systems equally let alone if this works as good as it sounds. The "Learning curve" may have more to it than what's being shared right now.

We have only seen I think the first level of Resistance-but just look how big the worlds are and the number of enemies/allies/effects on screen at once! We can't judge untill the final product is shipped-but I think Resistance will be the "wake-up" game for a lot of devs...

It doesn't. But seeing how Microsoft's console is already out and in need of a compression solution, it was mentioned. My understanding is Microsoft using a compression solution of their own and now necessarity this one. Thus making this compression a third party solution to developers of all sizes. So in that instance, you are absolutely right.

[OmniCloud]

Tks man...I thought I was the only 1 there for a second..lol

[lips]

I certainly hope so.

edit: I nearly went on a rant. rofl.

[GodMachine_Iridius_Dio]

They're using procedural textures (mentioned somewhere a looooong time ago) - It's nothing new, but still, good find.


Dio

PS: In no way is this only 360 related, nor is it a technique owned by one specific company, maybe this implementation is, but the concept and technique is not.

[xbdestroya]

Ah well there we go then, that would certainly explain it.

[DC_613]

Looks like they done it with many a 360 game already lol........... NEEDS MORE BROWN AND SHADES OF GRAY!!!! GOW is a fine example lol looks like pretty muck.

[GodMachine_Iridius_Dio]

Here it is, by the way...

http://news.teamxbox.com/xbox/10391/RoboBlitz-to-Feature-Procedural-Texturing-System/

[ddaryl]

Excellent news, Reduced texture sizes means they can stream in more textures and games will have more detail and still end up being 10GB + in size.

All this means is developers will be able to fit a heluva a lot more on a bluray disc. It'll help Xbox 360 keep pace, but it still opens up even more possibilities for bluray based PS3 games.

[xbdestroya]

Well, since we're talking about procedurally generated textures, we are definitely talking about something for which Blu-ray would be massive overkill. Keep in mind this game here we're discussing is under 50MB.

Granted, Cell should be great for procedural generation, so if you want to talk about PS3 and this technology, best to talk about Cell I think... rather than in terms of Blu-ray.

[LaLiLuLeLo]

Ted Price did say that they were compressing as much as they could in an ign blog post, and the game was still as big as it is.

[nwo504]

does uncompressing affect load times? either ways its a win win for bluray. they can save texture space and add more stuff if they want.

[LaLiLuLeLo]

I'm pretty sure compressed data loads faster (am I right?)....

[nwo504]

uncompressing that must take up some cpu power i guess.

[cpiasminc]

I'm pretty sure compressed data loads faster (am I right?)....
That is correct... at least until the decoding process itself is so CPU intensive that it eats up all the time you saved by having to read less data off disc, which is rarely the case. Which, for procedurally generated stuff is pretty predictable in that the amount of data in a history graph is indicative of how many steps need to go into the generation process.

Just be wary of how much is feasible. As much as textures eat up (a good 75% of the content these days), some of it simply will not work in a procedural context (particularly when a texture is not used simply as an image, but as computational parameters), and tools like this are more of a fix for a fraction of the textures you actually use in real practice.

Notice they don't say anything about how to actually get this into your pipeline (you basically have to implement their tool's algorithms all internally), and the usual MO is you give them your engine and they implement their code into it, which can be quite the deal-breaker for a lot of studios. Notice also that for all the talk of how much disc space it saves, they don't say a thing about memory footprints? One of the nice things about actually doing your textures up as real images is the control and feedback you get over memory management at the content level.

[ddaryl]

Well, since we're talking about procedurally generated textures, we are definitely talking about something for which Blu-ray would be massive overkill. Keep in mind this game here we're discussing is under 50MB.

Granted, Cell should be great for procedural generation, so if you want to talk about PS3 and this technology, best to talk about Cell I think... rather than in terms of Blu-ray.


Ok so lets talk procedural textures. Wouldn't it stand to reason that having more information to proceduralize would still require more space. If we can save massive space then that should encuorage more textures in games, which would be great.

If we were in an outdoor enviroment with multiple types of foliage, mulitple NPC's, enemies, vehicles and controllable characters etc... all requiring there own unique detailed textures would this procedural based texture system be up to the task ?

I see the screens of Roboblitz and they look really good, but there really isn't much being show in the screens texture wise. Bland enviroments and one Robot.

Here is a quote from Darkman at Evil Avatarr (http://www.evilavatar.com/forums/showthread.php?t=18791&page=4&pp=10)forums which I found to be interesting and the Achilles heal to this technology in regards to making Bluray unecessary for games. If you read that forum it seems like a lot of Xbots are giddy with this possibility.

Also most companies already use advanced compression for file storage, so this isn't much of an issue. What you have to keep in mind though is that when the game is run if the file size is 150k on disc it doesn't mean that it is that size in Ram.

This tech seems only to be really benificial for online distributed games that need to keep size's small, and may work to some extent on "Sandbox" style games to deal with terrain texture generation....

[casualkiss]

Its not reasonable to ask artists to use procedural textures.

It must be hard enough PhotoShoping beautiful textures using traditional artistic tools, but telling them now you have to work by manipulating mathematic pattens and with enough trial and error, you might get something that looks like a carpet is nuts!

[Applefiend]

Ideal situation for fast loading is blasting the data directly off the disk into memory ready for CPU/GPU to use with no decompression. And fast loading is a must.

If you have a huge game you're better off with Blu Ray. You can make do and tailor your game to smaller disk sizes, but it's better to have more options. You can stretch your game over 2,3 or more DVDs, but developers are more reluctant to do that, they use what they have, one DVD. Developers like Insomniac, Sega with VF5 and the rest are using the Blu Ray space to make better games than would have happened if Sony had gone with DVD-9.

Less is not always more. Most of the time more is more. :)