Reducing textures size up to 70%!!!

http://forum.teamxbox.com/showthread.php?t=474617

this is really interesting, so either games files will be much smaller thus easier to download and no more need for high capacity storage for a long time from now, or doubling (tripling?) the number of textures making games more rich and detailed... hope this thing is really serious.

They' re always creating better compression algorithms...but this is a pretty big jump. I know devs for 360 and ps3 games will be very interested in this.

Yea I read about that. Theres some really impressive work going on in that field at the moment.

Did anyone ever play that game they showcased a while ago, which looked almost like the doom engine, but was only 96kb (..that' s correct). Kriegger or something. It was all based on ' procedural algorithms' ...apparently!

Seriously impressive nonetheless.

don' t go too far, just check out the next game on xbox arcade robobitz por something, it runs on UE3 and it' s only under 50mb, really impressive, this might be a revolutionary midleware, how come the other members didn' t comment on this big news , they only get excited about jade raymond and DOA chicks , then you can' t see them stoping their worthless comments , " oh her mouth is big" " oh shes beautiful" oh ih aah

Did someone say....

Jade Raymond?

There are two rules to success:

1. Never tell all you know.

It' s not so much a new middleware that is easy to switch over to. Artists working on games have to be retrained on the new program, since most game designers create textures on Photoshop. The game you' re talking about is..

HERE

The people behind it have also done some other very exciting things, such as getting a fully 3D demo with complete sound under 300k! The technique is called " procedural textures" , in that the texture memory is created as the game loads - it doesn' t load the textures, it creates them in real-time, thus saving on space.

The people behind it have won numerous awards, and the FPS they created won a contest to create the most possible under 100k! Interesting stuff really, and the argument is more relevant than ever with the introduction of Blu-Ray to the PlayStation 3!

It would be interesting if this technique could be combined with traditional textures. So you could have very detailed unique objects like characters while walls,skies,floors can be procedually generated.

Well, that should be theoretically more than possible! Another thing to note, however, is that this loss in size does NOT equal a loss in quality - the creators of the programs claim you can make the size of the texture 70% smaller without loss of detail - so you could still have highly detailed characters with wonderful textures, just not making a huge hit on the memory.

Not only is it great for current storage mediums, but it makes the reality of digitally distributed content much more feasible. No need for super high bandwidth connections in order to download 10GB+ games.

Procedural textures aren' t really new. In fact they' ve been in use for a long time in conjunction with painted or photographed bitmap textures.

They' re often used to mask the visible tiling that occurs with a photographic texture. A layered shader will be created. One layer will be a photograph, and then another layer will be a procedural texture which is semi-transparent. A good way to see an example of this is to start a multiplayer game on Halo 2. In the match, go to your friends list. Then, as you emerge from the friends list back into active play, you will see the environment with only the procedural textures and color vectors in effect for about a half a second before the photographic textures pop back into place.

Procedurals are great for natural patterns, such as areas of snow and exposed rock on a mountaintop. They' re even often used for very regular patterns such as a chain link fence. What they can' t really be used for are things that are human-designed, like signs with text or, say for example, complex ordered designs like the decorative detailing in the iron radiator next to my apartment window.

Edit: another common example of a layered texture with both procedural and photographic elements is the field in a football game. As it gets worn throughout the game, that is done with a procedural layer of dirt that becomes visible through the photographed or painted grass & paint on the field.

Not only is it great for current storage mediums, but it makes the reality of digitally distributed content much more feasible. No need for super high bandwidth connections in order to download 10GB+ games.

Or 1GB if you' re like me with a crappy DSL connection. This could be really good for digital distribution, if it' s implemented right.

Oh goody, now when Oblivion " Game of the Year" comes out it' ll only be 4GBs big....


I' m assuming this means faster loading times...

Can someone give me the break downs (ruff % please) of how much space these take up in the games? buddy?!?!

Graphics
Speical Stuff (Lighting, Sparks, ect)
AI
Online Codes
Sounds/Music
CGI (w/ ingame engine or not)

...Random Madness, Forward...

Great, been waiting for a leap in the compression market for awhile :/

" What most people need to learn in life is how to love people and use things instead of using people and loving things."
~ Unknown ~

It usually would be much longer load times. Depending on the textures they are making.

"If you knew how good I am you would think I'm modest."

may be that way we can save the memory bandwith of any console (if it has the power to process those textures) but the CPU might take a hit

may be that way we can save the memory bandwith of any console (if it has the power to process those textures) but the CPU might take a hit

So far that wont be a concern, as no 360 games use all of the CPU, and I dont any PS3 first/second gen. software will either.

hate to be a smartass to sony now but...

Blu-Ray is needed for next-gen gaming experiences

Honestly I' ll be glad if this becomes standard, as next-gen systems have the CPU power to not worry about it, and this would allow games like Oblivion or the next GTA to be a few hundered MB' s, which even if they wouldnt add to the game with the extra space, they could include extra movies, games, or demos and such.

I dont want to celebrate, I want to sell you hate.

Wasn' t Oblivion around 4-5 GB though? There' s still half a DVD left there!!

It is really only practical to do it for textures such as wood and stone. Things that are big and have parterns. Like if there was a wood dock. You could create a bunch of random wood textures for each plank and it would look awesome, no plank would be the same. For things like characters it usually isn' t worth using it.

"If you knew how good I am you would think I'm modest."

Original: Tim Strickland

Wasn' t Oblivion around 4-5 GB though? There' s still half a DVD left there!!

The number I' ve heard thrown around the most is 6.3GB' s, but that' s in no way official.

I dont want to celebrate, I want to sell you hate.

On PC, my Oblivion installation size is 5.4GB. And that' s with a ton of mods and large texture replacements.

Looking at the Oblivion DVD itself, it comes back as 4.18GB. This of course is only looking at the PC version of the game. The X360 version may be a different size due to data needing to be streamed constantly.

ORIGINAL: locopuyo

It is really only practical to do it for textures such as wood and stone. Things that are big and have parterns. Like if there was a wood dock. You could create a bunch of random wood textures for each plank and it would look awesome, no plank would be the same. For things like characters it usually isn' t worth using it.

I' d have to disagree, loco. If you can reduce the texture size of all elements in a game, then you could either; A) free up space for other content, or B) as you stated, add more textures to increase the realism of objects in the game.

In other words, if I could reduce the texture size of ALL elements in a game I' m developing, why wouldn' t I? This is assuming that hundreds of man hours aren' t necessary for the job (which may, or may not be the case).

The question is; would this make the PS3s problems with RAM irrelevent? I mean, if you don' t need as much memory for textures, wouldn' t this be great for them?

The thing is a lot of characters don' t have large areas where the textures are a pattern based. The extra time that it takes to get it to work might not be worth the minute space that it would save for characters. This also depends greatly on the game. If you have a great variety in characters that have patern based textures then it might be worth it as you' re spending more textures on the characters.

I guess we' ll see, I' m sure game progarmers and artists already have this all figured out.

Actually, it' ll still be years before this tech becomes a standard tool - if at all!

ORIGINAL: Agent Ghost

The thing is a lot of characters don' t have large areas where the textures are a pattern based. The extra time that it takes to get it to work might not be worth the minute space that it would save for characters. This also depends greatly on the game. If you have a great variety in characters that have patern based textures then it might be worth it as you' re spending more textures on the characters.

I guess we' ll see, I' m sure game progarmers and artists already have this all figured out.

Basically, they created a tool that does textures more efficiently than what is currently used...

Their claim is that the current tool of choice for most games artists, Adobe Photoshop, is not ideally suited to making textures for games.

...and they want it to become the industry standard. Once developers have a working knowledge of the system, then there would be no " extra" time, per se.

This is a totally different development tool, that is to replace Photoshop as the de-facto industry standard for creating and encoding textures. As such, you wouldn' t just use this program when you wanted to save space. You' d just create all your textures in ProFX and they' d just be smaller. If this thing takes off, it will have a pretty big impact on the video game world.

I' m interested to see how some of the video game developers we have on the forums see this.

Actually all it does is save on disk space, because it creates the textures and puts them into memory. So it wouldn' t help the PS3 at all.
The thing is it will usually take way longer to produce the textures with the equations than to just load them off of a disk.

"If you knew how good I am you would think I'm modest."

ORIGINAL: locopuyo

Actually all it does is save on disk space, because it creates the textures and puts them into memory. So it wouldn' t help the PS3 at all.
The thing is it will usually take way longer to produce the textures with the equations than to just load them off of a disk.

Oh, I see. So the code for generating the textures would be on disk, but the actual texture would be the same when loaded in the RAM! Yes, Pinky! YES!

The question becomes, how much longer would it take for a game to load if it uses this method versus the current method? I guess that' s what could make or break it, eh?