Primarily, texture size has increased, texture count has increased, audio quality has increased, and the amount of audio files in a game has also typically increased.
Its not really a deadlines or optimization problem. Compression always decreases fidelity, and many developers choose to compress as little as possible in order to achieve the highest fidelity. Since RAM and storage capacities have increased, the compromise of compressing everything at a great sacrifice to fidelity is not as obvious of a tradeoff anymore. Developers don’t have to choose between voicing an entire game with nearly unintelligible voice compression or only voicing important cutscenes. They can voice the entire game with minimal compression at the cost of a bigger install size, which is free for developers.
This will get better as NN/AI chips become the norm in gaming. Compression gains, on the fly generation of textures, voice generation when needed, etc.
I envision a future dev using rough shitty textures to conceptualise a game, and then an NN to bring it to life during runtime.
You might even be able to load your own NN interpreter to make the world more cartoony, or change the intended setting entirely, or unlock the nsfw filter on the vanilla interpreter.
It sort of is an optimization problem though because excess textures and audio files could be separated off into their own DLC packages (see Age of Empire II High-Res texture DLC and Steam’s Language Selection feature)
The really big problem is people being riddled with 4K textures on 1080p monitors and 20 audio tracks for different languages when they only need one.
I agree with the audio files for languages the player never plays, but 4k textures at a 1080p rendering resolution is not a problem.
Texture map size depends priparily on how the UV maps of models make use of the texture, and how close the camera is to the objects using that texture on average. A large wall texture will have more noticeable detail with a 4k texture than a distant tree in the skybox. The details will be visible on the wall whether the player plays in 720p or 8k, depending on how close the camera gets to it. You may be fine with environments looking like they were made for the Nintendo64’s 4kb of texture RAM, but 1080p players still gain massive benefits in graphics quality with 4k textures.
Being unable to uninstall/choose not to install the 4k textures tied to ultra/very high settings that you will never use so they clutter up your storage space is a problem. If they aren't installed then the highest settings can be disabled until they are installed.
A skybox using a 4k texture on low is fine, we are talking about the textures that are only used when the settings are set to 4k or ultra or whatever.
And even lossy compression is not inherently bad. AAC is completely indistinguishable from lossless for most people and hardware setups, and very close anyway when it’s not. It uses a fraction of the space, though. (Not a comment on game dev practices, more a comment on compression.)
Im excited for something like this as I would like to see more form factors. tv sticks, tablets, workstations, gaming laptops. I know anyone can do the last two but having a hardware vendor cover the software officialy is sorta a big thing
They didn’t abandon it, they opened it up to anything running at least Andriod 8.0 or newer. So basically every Andriod device made since 2015 can run Steam Link, maybe not at a quality seen as appropriate but it’ll run.
I believe so yes (tbh forgot it was a thing) but for example my smart TV does not have a steam link app available for some reason (LGC3) and I would definitely stream to it given the chance. Not sure why the steam app is not available.
The Steam Link tried and succeeded at this. My guess is only technical people understood its use-case at the time. For hardware to do well on a large scale it needs to be standalone. You turn it on and immediately see the benefit of it. Can’t be dependent on the customer’s other hardware.
well it will help if you can get many of the same internet streaming apps you have with firetv stick and such. so people might just buy it to steam netflix and be part of the market outside of the ones using the game streaming.
Set aside the china argument. In a random conversation about a video game, when do these topics come up? Unless the game is directly telling a story about those elements, I don’t understand why this matters?
If people wanna discuss a topic, fine, but I don’t see what it even has to do with an average video game.
I’ve seen game streams before where someone plays a random game while discussing a completely unrelated topic. It’s so strange to me and not my thing. But them again, ANY commentary over a game video is garbage to begin with. They never add anything to it. No commentary is just superior for watching videos of gameplay.
I’ve been watching Falcom drill down on sexual harassment as a form of humor in the Trails series. Now that they’re remaking Sky, I’m curious how well they’ll handle having a female lead for once in a long time.
Put short, feminism is an important value in games for me - and shouldn’t be a high goal to achieve.
Yeah what I was thinking, too. Someone stripped a bunch of long-deprecated old pipelines, but this is a nasty side-effect of it as the new pipelines all mandate that DRM being added.
Which is something that a manager decided to implement, and not allow the programmers proper time to do full testing before rolling it out?
Face it, there’s no way for managers to weasel out of the blame for this, b/c the buck has to stop somewhere.:-) We simply hold leaders to a higher standard than mere workers, especially if they pay themselves more every hour than a programmer makes in a month (I have not looked into what the pay gap is specifically for Capcom though, this is just programming in general).
No one properly optimizes games anymore. Devs used to have to work with extreme limitations, and make the absolute best of what little they had.
Now with tech advancing quicker than people can keep up with and get accustomed to, and megacorporations like Microsoft prioritizing deadlines rather than overall quality (or the mental health of their developers), that doesn’t really happen any more.
Far too reductive of an assessment. We simultaneously had a massive leap in resolution (higher quality textures needed) and a massive step back in dollar per gigabyte for storage, as we could no longer get acceptable read speeds from hard drive technology. At the same time, for better or worse, open world games are what a lot of these developers are making, which compounds that texture problem. Massive file sizes are what you get when games are optimized; they're just optimizing for performance and not storage space.
I have a problem with that last sentence. Because larger files do take longer to load from storage into main memory, and then longer to load into VRAM from main memory. Also, with larger files, you can't keep them cached and ready to be reused, because you have to free that memory for other large files.
Your argument might be true if computers generally had RAM and/or VRAM larger than the entire game. But when games are 200+GB and typical main memory is 16-32GB for most folks, and only 64-128GB at the higher end, you know data will have to be shuffled around. VRAM situation is more dire: typical is 6-8GB, high end is 12-16GB and absolute max is 20-24GB.
Yes, faster storage and faster RAM help, but all those loads and unloads of huge chunks of data do take up time, cause stutters, or absurdly long loading screens despite the high performance components.
OPTIMIZE YOUR GAMES. Lossy compression is fine, and uncompressed assets should be optional downloads.
Decompressing an asset so that it can be used is an operation that takes processor cycles as well. It's why Titanfall 1 came in so high on storage requirements at the time, because in order to meet CPU performance targets, they had to leave audio uncompressed. In this case, huge texture asset files are often LODs, high detail versions for when you're up close and low detail versions for when you're far away, so that the machine is always loading the right size version of the asset rather than just always using the best quality one in a worst case like you seem to be implying. This takes up a lot of storage space, but it means they aren't wastefully using high detail assets for a mountain a mile and a half away.
Uncompressed WAV files, lol I’ll never get over that
It doesn’t even make sense. Simple compression algorithms like in use by FLAC or AAC are pretty much free to decompress on CPUs from this century and the cpu cycles you save by not doing wasteful IO of huge files from storage easily makes up for that.
I’m sure game devs can make some argument to not use ‘expensive’ compression, but not using any is just wasteful.
Oh yes please. I’d still buy a steam deck bc of their hardware support but nonetheless, this is great news for all those other released handhelds that are held back by windows.
I feel like the issue could be largely resolved if developers would just make a lot of the downloads optional. For as long as I remember, installers for PC applications have given the user options for which parts of the applications they want to install. Yet for games these days, they just take an all or nothing approach. Let me skip the ultra textures, and all the extra choices in languages I don’t need. It seems like it should be such an easy thing to implement!
I get what you are getting at but “misinterpretation of gender” can also happen in indie games and so can micro transactions. They are much more rare but they do still on occasion happen
This is such a weird take. Of course, for the things you mentioned, yes.
But in the case of storage, it’s not like the devs purposefully increase the sizes of their game for some reason. If indie devs had the resources to easily make graphics as advanced and voice every little thing in their games, they would, and their games would become as big.
The only reason it doesn’t happen is because they literally can’t do that with their resources, which are better spent elsewhere. But this is not an inherent advantage of indie games, in fact, it’s quite the disadvantage. I’d love if my indie games at least had the possibility of cutting edge graphics and voice for everything.
Seems only like a natural step up from the previous Switch.
Although I had kinda hoped Nintendo would step up their game and gone for a bigger leap with stronger hardware, or a new device alongside the Switch, to make it a potential competitor to PlayStation. The console market needs more competition, but I think both Nintendo and Sony are very comfortable right now, without being into much of each others way and being able to keep raising prices.
The Nintendo 64 was really the last time Nintendo tried competing on hardware specs for the console market.
After that, you had a major electronics company subsidizing hardware to gain market share and a major software company subsidizing development and software graphics tools to be used also on their computer systems as the two different competitors.
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