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.
New report from Skillsearch found that 22% of those surveyed had been laid off within the past 12 months.
It's a step forward for Stop Killing Games.
The Callisto Protocol director thinks the solution involves the right people, the right timing, and perhaps a little bit of AI
I don't agree with that. I WISH I could agree with that. But buying habits and customer opinions prove otherwise
We've seen developers in the AAA space try new things and ideas. More often than not, the customers aren't willing to give things a chance, or not enough people buy into the project for it to grow.
Creativity works better in the indie space because the budgets, pressures, and expectations aren't the same.
it's a nice idea and it worked during the PS2/PS3-era when AAA didn't cost hundreds of millions of dollars. smaller budgets and shorter development time left room for more creativity and more risk. a game didn't need to sell 4 million+ copies to break even. things are different now.
This is the guy who bragged about crunching his staff and having them work through the night. Crunch culture has lost more talent and done more damage to the industry than any other factor. Screw him.
Makes Blue-Ray seem very unnecassary for video games...Would`nt be suprised if microsoft started using this soon.
Nice to see someone with the name:
"PS3ROCKS"
Helps to make the BR even looking more useless. Imagine that. If ever in this gen 5 year lifecycle the DL-DVD max is reached there are techniques like this.
Costprice DVD player: 20 dollar
Costprice BR player: 300 dollar
Now think what is a wise investment seen from a console producer...
I was going to say the same thing...MS should buy these folks quick:)
There are already compression algorithms out there. They use it for video, audio, images, and other things. A decent algorithm already reduces the size of images by 85% with very little noticeable lack of quality. If they're claiming they've improved on those algorithms by 70%, then I'll have to see an image that is compressed to 95% of the original and doesn't look blocky as hell. Let's see some before and after pics, shouldn't be too hard to produce if they're telling the truth.
It seems microsoft was right not to include blu-ray or hd-dvd in their console. Im glad because the games are still great and the console costs 200 dollars less than the rival console.
And as a side note I dont care what any sony dev says, if Oblivion a game that looks great and has 200 hours plus of gameplay is only 4.2gbs then dvd will be sufficient for ANY game.
And to add to what kmis said about compression algorithms, I can name some such as speed tree, procedural synthesis etc. Dev tools and optimization of code play a role in size as well and components such as xna are a great example for increased quality in tools used in development.
O and obviously it has been previously said but the fact that map zone2 and profx can reduce file sizes by 70% with no loss in quality will even further make blu-ray in the ps3 seem unnessary and a plea by sony to push its movie format into homes making the ps3 seem as a movie player first, game player second.