What is Digg?78 Comments
- The_Pope, on 10/12/2007, -2/+39Smaller on my hard drive, quicker to install from DVD... I was thinking this would be perfect for next-gen consoles but then again, I imagine all the extra capacity of Blu-ray is for video files.
Then again, smaller textures on the disc would presumably use less VRAM, which is ALWAYS a good thing in a console (as any PS2 owner can attest) - inactive, on 10/12/2007, -3/+38"smaller textures on the disc would presumably use less VRAM"
I'd imagine not as they'd be stored uncompressed in memory.
I'm just thinking...more compression=slower loading times. - EntropyMan, on 10/12/2007, -1/+34I don't see anything in the technology (from the developer's site) that indicates a path to convert existing textures to procedural ones. Procedural textures are cool and important, but their generation is very different from traditional art. And there's no indication it would reduce texture memory usage, unless the procedural expansion code is part of the rendering pipeline, which trades space for time (i.e., it's slower to render).
- TheThirdWheel, on 10/12/2007, -7/+35Perfect for 360, which is limited by the standard DVD size. If they can reduce texture size by 70% then who needs Blue-Ray? (Because FMV is for TV not games)
- Mejogid, on 10/12/2007, -0/+20"smaller textures on the disc would presumably use less VRAM"
Not true - since this is presumably a form of compression, textures would have to be decompressed before reaching the video card. Unless we can get completely on the fly hardware accelerated decompression, the same amount of memory will be needed for the decompressed textures. I'd have thought the primary use for this is more variation in textures without having to go all the way to procedural generation. - Wisgary, on 10/12/2007, -0/+17What this amounts to:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Procedural_texturing - merreborn, on 10/12/2007, -0/+14"I'm just thinking...more compression=slower loading times."
Exactly. This is just the usual time versus memory trade-off. Of course you can compress game data. It's just going to require more CPU time to decompress that data when you need it.
Compression isn't news. If anything, it's a step backward. Games are bloated 'cause storage (ram, hard disks, optical media, bandwidth) is cheap, and CPU time is at a premium. CPU/GPU is the bottleneck in gaming, not storage. - EasY_TargeT, on 10/12/2007, -3/+13Great, this just in, game torrents now download in 30% of the time.
- TheThirdWheel, on 10/12/2007, -0/+8It is a huge portion of the game. The other huge chunk (If you don't include FMV's) is sound, with the HiFi Surround in today's games and hours of voice acting.
- count_z, on 10/12/2007, -0/+7That utility is for create procedurally generated textures, (PS2 developers very often have to do this because the PS2 only has 4MB of "fast" video memory and no texture compression).
This tool doesn't automatically take a texture and create a procedural texture for you; that needs to be done manually (which can be a giant pain, or just plain infeasible). If plan on starting-off with procedural textures, it's just fine (but again, you don't need this tool to do it... it just tries to make it easier).
Then there's the matter of creating the "real" texture. Depending on your hardware, it might not be worth the bother because it will tax your CPU or your GPU to render the procedural texture.
If you don't have pixel shaders (something the Wii might not have... at least if the leaked specs are true... but I'm not too sure about that), you'd have to render the texture with the CPU into RAM... so you only save on storage space, but tax your CPU and use MORE RAM (because you wouldn't render to the S3-compressed texture format - that take too long - just to a plain old uncompressed bitmap). - 2000, on 10/12/2007, -0/+5About 7-8 GB.
- NorsteinB, on 10/12/2007, -0/+5Been there, done that: http://www.theprodukkt.com/kkrieger
- inactive, on 10/12/2007, -2/+7This is another reason why we don't really need blueray/hddvd yet. Most xbox games (original xbox that is) are less than 2 gigs. Even with the increased graphics I can't see the xbox 360 or ps3 games getting large enough to justify using a new format. I don't own an xbox360 though. Anyone have any idea how big the new games are?
- NalosLayor, on 10/12/2007, -4/+8So here's what happened:
1. Guy hears about technology that's been known since the mid 90s at least (texture compression)
2. Guy implements it himself.
3. Guy pretends the reason it's not done that often is because nobody else has heard of it (not true at all) and then glosses over the technical reasons for not using it.
Guess what guys? Textures are images, image compression dates back to the 60s and texture compression has been around almost as long as 3-d games have. Everything is a trade off. What this guy gains in disk space (which is cheap today), he loses in CPU time, decompressing EVERY SINGLE texture. I'd rather pay for a game on 2 DVDs than have my frame rate drop by 20% - darthtrevino, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4Actual game-engines, level designs, and game-scripting are miniscule compared to textures and sound. You sir have inaccurate presuppositions.
- TNHitokiri, on 10/12/2007, -1/+5tavisjohn...
mp3 and divx are compression in which the quality has been lowered from the original so that less bandwidth is needed..
if you read the article, this compresses and keeps the quality.. making this similar to a zip file, and so the smaller file needs to become bigger eventually, which leads to CPU usage and slower loading times and whatnot - inactive, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3This isn't a compression technology. It's simply an algorithmic approach to texture creation.
Procedural texture generation has been around for a decades now. Games companies are late getting around to it since it's only been with the addition of programmable shaders that graphics cards have enough horsepower to make it practical at good framerates. Had the graphics card industry planned their own development better, they could have been doing this years ago. Then again, had they planned better, we'd have raytraced games now, full of smooth, real curves instead of ugly polygons everywhere...
Haven't you folks ever seen .kkrieger before? A hugely detailed first person shooter weighing in at a measly 96k. Procedural texture and map generation is what makes that possible. Check it out at: http://www.theprodukkt.com/kkrieger - Jammerdelray, on 10/12/2007, -1/+5"Their ambition is to keep the graphical quality of game textures at the same standards as current games." Taken right from the article....So what happens to pushing the envelope in graphics?
- 2000, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3Do you mean Bink Video? http://www.radgametools.com/bnkmain.htm
- Urusai, on 10/12/2007, -4/+7I have a technology that lets you compress images better than that! I can reduce a 200KB JPEG to less than one bit! Unfortunately, it only works on solid black images of fixed size for now, but if you fund my development I hope to add colors and stuff.
- dclowd9901, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3No. "Bink" is a video compression format that attempts to render and compress video at a per-pixel level. It has its benefits, as well as its drawbacks. It works very well for gameplay recordings, but not as well with CGI as, say MPEG-4.
- calhoun, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3""I'm just thinking...more compression=slower loading times."
Exactly. This is just the usual time versus memory trade-off. Of course you can compress game data. It's just going to require more CPU time to decompress that data when you need it."
Not true - the bottleneck is I/O between the disc and memory and the main memory and video memory. If you can reduce the amount of time waiting for data to transfer to vid memory and uncompress it there, that can be overall faster, not slower. - ELiTe185, on 10/12/2007, -2/+5The article is not about texture compression.
Let me use a could texture example .
In the old way of making textures, an artist would open photoshop, render some clouds, and then save it in some file format.
In this new way of making textures, it would instead store the commands for making the textures and generate the textures when needed.
A small text file with some commands for generating a texture is much smaller than the actual texture.
However it is much slower, but it can be optimized.
Enter the Demoscene:
Many people participate in these demo contests where people try to pack as much info into as little space as possible (usually 64KB). Whoever can make the best CGI move with music and pack it all into a 64KB .exe wins.
More on the people who make demos:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demogroup
More on the demoscene:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demoscene
Massive collection of demos, sorted by popularity:
http://www.pouet.net/
Some of the best demos ever:
http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=5 (over 6 years old!)
http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=1221 (also, over 6 years old!)
http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=9438 (3 years old, and probably the most info in 64KB I've ever seen!!)
http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=12036 (the 96KB game!!!!!)
This stuff has been around for a while.
Enjoy! - neftaly, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Hear hear!
- EntropyMan, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Some procedural methods can be used at runtime with good results. The best ones don't recreate the expanded texture every frame, but cache the parts you need. The advantage is you can get near infinite detail when you zoom in. But it does cost CPU/GPU no matter what you do. Second Life, btw, uses procedural 3D objects, which are expanded on the CPU.
As for encoding traditional textures as procedural ones, there's a form of compression called fractal compression which does just that. It's essentially a front-loaded search (sometimes GA) for bits of algorithm that produce something like the input art. It's lossy, of course. And it's very slow to encode. But decompression is fairly fast. I didn't see any mention of anything like that on the company site. - sphinx13, on 10/12/2007, -0/+270% less size for textures doesn't mean 70% less over all. There are other files that make up a game, it's not only textures.
- staticneuron, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3"During the talk, discover the latest product of Allegorithmic: ProFX, a middleware dedicated to the real-time authoring and rendering of procedural textures and its use by Naked Sky Entertainment for its awaited Xbox 360 Live Arcade game Roboblitz."
Awesome.......... except most game devs employ techniques like these already. And games still manage to take up 5 gigs. Oblivion has a large amount of procedurally generated content and instanced objects yet it still the size of a dvd.
Maybe in a game like spore with its unique world, everything being generated would be perfect. But for specific art designs, depth information and unique meshes, procedural generation does not fly. It removes the artist out of the equasion and bases everthing off of mathematical fractals.
What is the matter with people nowadays. Everyone learns about procedural generation ,which is not new tech by a long shot, and now there are spouting that game devs are stupid and the only reason the want the extra space for FMV's. Some people seriousy need to get over themselves. - socokoolaid, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Everybody is commenting "oh these fools, image compression has been around for decades". :P
No where did it mention that it was compression. That was just an assumption you made. A poor assumption at that considering a 70% loss-less image compression is pretty far fetched.
Another commenter mentioned Procedural texturing, i.e. mathematically generated textures. This seems much more plausible. It's been around for awhile too (I remember Bryce 3D has generated textures for quite awhile), but to my knowledge isn't used much in games, mostly just pre-rendered textures. - gabebear, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2The article is very lite on details, but I imagine they have just come up with a better way to store mipmaps of DXTn compressed textures. Video cards can use DXTn(S3TC) compressed textures directly, but you still need several sizes of the texture so that when you are drawing a 4x4pixel polygon it is faster than a 1024x1024 polygon(these are called mipmaps). Creating lower grade DXTn mipmaps from a another DXTn texture can give you some bad artifacts, so several different resolution versions of a texture are included for each full size texture. If this company created a good way to compress all the mipmaps of a texture together then they may have something useful.
I'm guessing the 70% saving is from a 32bit bitmap which is sometimes used for PC games because you can always turn a bitmap into a compressed texture, but not the other way. A bitmap is a good fallback if the video card doesn't support compressed textures. Any modern video card supports DXTn compression, but bitmaps are still used because of history, and so that people can turn them off to benchmark stuff. I doubt you could get real gains of more than 20% from raw DXTn mipmaps. - ollj, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3Shocked? no!
This guy is just reinventing the wheel with an upgrade in compartibility.
Texture compression is kinda old and anyone should know this since Farbrauch fr-08 the.product :
http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=1221
The good part of this is Will Wrights game SPORE is almost entirely procedural in textures and 3d models.
Massive ammount of content and data storage my ass, long live the algorythm! - shinynew, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Now is this any diffrent then .theproduct/kkrieger
its competely prodcedural meaning that it first has to load the information (traditional loading times) then it has to carry out the procidures to get the end result.
So as someone said a while back, its space vs. CPU. This could how ever be used for downloading a game then run a program to get the end result of all the textrues therefore reduceing the download but haveing the end result of the game be the same. Which is what the article is more about. - other, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1'bout damn time! Games are getting into the 4GB region for the computer..
- digitalchaos666, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1woulda been nice if this was used on Oblivion
- teamparadox, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Oblivion was about 6 gigs with no compression applied, and since its a 1st gen game it wasnt optimized either.
Why the hell was I down mod'd? - DaAdministrator, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2Isn't the point that these guys have just created a development tool that will make for mass procedural textures? As before this program there was no universal way of doing things, people were using photoshop. Seems like a few of you guys have jumped in balls first and forgot about your penises.
- quentinp, on 10/12/2007, -2/+3Is this like that Binx thing I see in a lot of games?
- spyrochaete, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1This compression technology will be great for digital distribution like Xbox Live and Steam. It'll also be lovely for Bittorrent and Edonkey!
- hank85, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Video game pirates around the world rejoice.
- mxcl, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Although your post sounds sensible it's wrong isn't it? It isn't the same people making the artwork and fixing the bugs, so making less textures won't have much if any effect on the number of bugs in the end game.
- darthtrevino, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1More bits. Targeting current-generation graphics is just a baseline.
- inactive, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1L0 m4n thanks for the KKRIEG's url, that game is ROCKS!
- fquednau, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Lol, count_z, you are making sense and you get dugg down...interesting. Then again, I had to update the page...forget it.
- goatfish, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1I don't think it would be possible to take a pre-existing flat (1 layer) texture and turn it into a procedural one. (Although it might be possible to make one from say a photoshop effects stack. But it's not very practical.)
And they are generaly really slow for the CPU to generate. It's like running lots and lots of photoshop filters. one after the other. - coheedcollapse, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1I hope so. One of the games that I'm beta testing is 20gb...I had to delete a bunch of extra junk from my hard drive to get it on (yeah yeah, I know, small hard drive).
- kingace, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Wasn't that on digg a while ago?
- Thorlord, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1um, its not truely a full compression. its what could be called a 'lossless compression' since the actual image is made up of math (like compression does with files) rather than just lines of information.
yes, it would use less Vram, and less ram, it will probably make a 1gb of Vram all we will ever need for 10 years due to this technology.
it is called Procedural Generation, take a look at Spore which is doing this as well for animaiton, textures, and worlds. we WONT need blu-ray or HD-DvD discs for games simply because of this technology. the advantage is also that extreme detail can also be added to games without any kind of loss. theoretically you can get as close to the texture as you want (ok its not a texture anymore) and it will still retain high-def quality.
want proof?
.kkrieger Project, google it, download it.
its a 98kb game that has graphics that nearly equal DOOM3. and takes about 10-15 minnutes to finish.
the largest filesize of our new games is now prerendered video, and audio clips. the team of .kkrieger talks about how everything could be much smaller if they took out audio completely. - EasY_TargeT, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1How do I have my math wrong, if it takes 100% of the time when the game is full. 70% is cut, that leaves 30% give or take left to download. You sir are an idiot.
- foxhoundadmin, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1procedural generation, anyone? compression is not the issue here (at least not with the 360).
take a look at .kkrieger. - lukas88, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1It seems misleading, because only the texture sizes should be 70% smaller, not the game's file size. I do not know for sure what portion of the file size textures make up, and while I am sure it is a significant portion, it cannot be the vast majority. I think that a large part comes from videos, binaries, libraries, sound, etc.
Of course, this will not even effect games you buy on DVD. They make those games large on purpose so that it because harder/less convenient for people to download a pirated copy. - deleteYourslf, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1The largest files I notice in most current game directories are the sound files...
Multiplayer games are the worst, every time I visit a new server I have to Waite for a bunch of lousy custom sound files to download to my machine. Software developers should consider this usability issue when developing the next-gen games. -
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