Tell that to our artists 😉. As a coder I’m all for procedurally generated content. I did replace several heavy textures in our games by procedural materials, to squeeze out a couple of extra MB. However, that’s not the way artists traditionally work. They often don’t have the programming knowledge needed to develop procedural materials on their own, and would need to rely on technical artists or programmers to do so. Drawing a texture however, is very much part of their skillset…
But yeah, the mention of “squeezing out a couple of MB” brings me to another topic, namely that (at least in our games) the on-disk textures are only part of the RAM usage, and a relativley small one on comparison. In the games I worked on, meshes made up a significantly larger amount of RAM usage. We have several unique assets, which need to fulfill a certain quality standard due to licensing terms, such that in the end we had several dozens of meshes, each over 100 MB, that the player can freely place… Of course there would still be optimization potential on those assets, but as always, there’s a point where further optimization hits diminishing returns… In the end we had to resort to brute-force solutions, like unloading high quality LODs for meshes even if they are relatively close to the player… Not the most beautiful solution, but luckily not often needed during normal gameplay (that is: if the player doesn’t intentioally try to make the game go out-of-memory).
But I’m rambling. The tl;dr is: The memory constraints would not be a big deal if there was enough time/money for optimization. If there is one thing that’s never enough in game dev, it’s time/money.
I was talking about the person(s) at Microsoft, who decided that it’s a good idea to have less RAM on the Series S than on the Series X…
(And for context: I work in gamedev, and in my experience making games stay within the memory budget is one of the toughest parts of porting games to consoles.)
Thanks! I caught it more or less by chance though. I was just scanning all moons in the system, and thought that landing would be a nice break from the scanning routine. And then this happened. It looked even better a few moments before, when the sun that’s visible in the shot was still partially occluded by the gas giant. Took me too long to fire up camera mode to catch that though…
Yes. It’s in the Xbox Requirements, as in, the checklist of stuff you need to fulfill if you want to release a game on Xbox. To be precise, it’s test case 130-04: Featured Game Modes.
My recommendation list is going to be a wild mix of different styles. Basically aynthing in my Games Library that I find visually appealing…
Gibbous - A Cthulu Adventure: While it isn’t my favourite point&click (that price goes to the Deponia Trilogy), it’s by far the most beautiful I’ve played up to now. The attention the devs paid to detail is astounding. The animations are perfect. In other words: A work of art.
Euro Truck Simulator 2: I might be an exception here, but to me the main selling point of this game is the scenery, not the trucks.
Elite: Dangerous: Most of the times this game looks utterly boring. Sometimes however, you catch an exceptional sight. Here’s a screenshot of an eclipse in a binary system, as seen from an icy moon of a gas giant (behind which the primary star is hidden).
Space Engine: Same argument as for Elite. Most of the stuff is boring. Sometimes you find an exceptional sight. Also, Space Engine isn’t really a game, but rather a “beautiful picture generator”, as there is no real gameplay as of yet.
Dwarf Fortress in ASCII mode: The ASCII “graphics” are a work of art on their own. Especially the animations. And the best part: The ASCII version can be downloaded for free, while the (imho less beautiful) graphical version costs money.
Pyre: A mix of Visual Novel and Sports Game. The backgrounds and characters are beautifully drawn.
Beat Hazard: The colours of the effects are stunning.
For obvious reasons I can’t post it publicly before MS discloses it. They are currently migrating more and more GDK docs to the public site, so I wouldn’t be surprised if the link became publicly available soon, but currently one still needs to register a dev account to access it.
direct3d Direct3D 11 and Direct3D12, to be precise. Direct3D9 was working fine before - and there even was native driver support for it in Mesa, that could be used together with a patched WINE.
In my case: Instead of Baldur’s Gate 3. I can’t find time for Baldur’s Gate any more since I started Book of Hours. It’s just too good. It’s one of those games where I just don’t want to stop playing. Just one more book. Light LEAKS through the CRACKS. My mind is BRIGHTER than it EVER was. THE HIGHER I RISE THE MORE I SEE.
Also, the tutorial has suffered bitrot quite a lot. The game has seen many significant changes since release, but the tuturial was only partially updated to reflect them.