How Game File Sizes Will Be Reduced Up To 70%

[dafloppyone]

The chaps over at 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%.

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.

http://www.bit-tech.net/news/2006/10/04/Game_file_sizes_could_soon_be_70_smaller/
​

 

[HangTime]

Only acceptable if there is no performance penalty or drop in quality.

Wonder how it compares with S3TC.

 

[FrenchTart]

Loss in quality would be bad, yeah. Loss in perf, if small, not so bad

I guess if these take up less space in graphics ram too, it's all good.

 

[lozza23_uk]

this looks like a step in the right direction. the amount of times I would like to buy a game but just dont want to go to the shop, or order it online (time retraints) it would always be much better to pay and download if we can.

 

[dafloppyone]

try the demo....robo something...its quite good and graphics quality is impressive

 

[Helium_Junkie]

Anyone ever see "The Product"?
A team of developers had created a series of texture/model demos with excellent quality under 64k.


http://www.theproduct.de/idea.html

The link to the main site doesnt seem to work, but google for the downloadable demo, its out there somewhere and well worth a minute

 

[dafloppyone]

http://www.roboblitz.com/site.html

 

[HangTime]

The product was very impressive, do a search for more of Faub-Rarsch's work if you want to check out some more.

 

[HangTime]

Loss in perf, if small, not so bad

I guess if these take up less space in graphics ram too, it's all good.

Loss in performance would be pretty annoying

As for graphics memory I guess it all depends on whereabouts the textures get decompressed

 

[BillytheImpaler]

Sure, they could reduce things by a lot through good compression but with upcoming formats like BR and HD there is increased impetus to slack off and leave things uncompressed and unoptimized because space is not at as much of a premium as it was first on CD then on DVD.

 

[FrankJH]

thinking along different lines - does this also mean less gpu power would be required ( as vast amounts of textures need processing of some kind, and if this is reduced then so might gpu power)

Possibly ATI/AMD & nv would be against this?

Sounds good but needs to be tested in a live situation with comparisons in game to full textures to see if it would work -- I cant dl anything atm am at work