Comment on No Man's Sky Orbital Update brings full ship customisation and a complete space station overhaul
CosmicCleric@lemmy.world 6 months agoYou can procedurally generate textures, sounds and geometry
Does any game do that today? I’m not aware of any. ?
As far as I know all the 3D stuff is what takes up the most space on the hard drive, and that stuff is never procedurally created. /shrug
ICastFist@programming.dev 6 months ago
Today? No, I don’t think any game does it.
.kkrieger did that. Not a “real game”, it’s a demo (of a demoscene), a “proof of concept” or a “proof of skill”. Nostalgia Nerd has a very interesting video about it on youtube.
3D models tend to occupy less disk space than textures, as these usually come in at least 2 files: one for the actual colors, one or two more for light mapping (bump map, emission, normals, etc). I don’t know which format NMS uses, but a .obj 3D model with 62k triangles will take around 4.5MB of disk space.
For comparison, this Damaged Helmet in gltf format (which you can see on your browser here) has 15k triangles, a .bin file (the actual 3D geometry) of 545kb and roughly 3MB of textures - The
Default_albedo.jpgis the “actual color” and it alone is larger than the .bin + .gltf, at 914kb.CosmicCleric@lemmy.world 6 months ago
Well, my comment that you replied to was about a specific game that is already out, today. Hence, my point still stands.
Let’s hope that future hardware and games are aligned more with what you described, but today’s games do have limitations, based on the day and age they’re created in.
ICastFist@programming.dev 6 months ago
The limitation is coder skill, not hardware. That .kkrieger example is 20 years old. It could make a Pentium 3 “generate an entire FPS game” from less than 100kb of coding instructions alone.
The question is "why don’t other people do it, then?" and the answer is “because having all those media resources as files makes the startup faster, memory usage down and is easier to modify and replace”
CosmicCleric@lemmy.world 6 months ago
None of that matters, because you can load them in the background/parallel wise, as needed, which is what the game already does today.
But all of that takes space on the hard drive, which brings me back to the point I keep making.
My original comment, what I keep replying back to comment on, is specifically about visuals, and variety in the planets, the areas of the planets, and the star systems, and the aliens. 3D models and meshes.
What you been describing is not 3D models and meshes, which is what takes up the majority of the hard drive space.