| Squilliam said: Except the industry if given enough performance from the console itself will continue the trend of moving away from expensive CGI onto pre-rendered or in game cutscenes. The rest -> Textures, models, etc would likely still be random access in the same way it is now. Yes the assets are getting bigger and compression isn't getting better. If they could compress efficiently now they wouldn't complain about the DVD-9 disc size. However the actual models and terrain themselves can get a nice dose of tessellation, the first gen technology of this will be implemented with direct3d 11, by the time 2011 rolls around we'll have 2nd or 3rd generation tessellation hardware which should simplify the rendering of polygons and the models used to create the game. I don't see how using 10-20GB flash drives would be any hassle in a couple of years. It will be more expensive than optical drives, but consider the savings of not having to use a mechanical hdd or optical drive and slashing the ram requirements down. Its a saving which could net more than $100 and $5 per game at the start of the generation is a pretty good tradeoff with that level of savings.
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We're reasoning about 5 years in the future, right?
- CGI are not going away in 5 years. Next gen consoles won't be powerful enough, as they will probably comparable to PCs of 1-2 years before the launch date. As for the CGI price: moving in-engine the rendering won't make much for the biggest cost, that is the setup of models and scenes and animations. It's not the rendering farm that is expensive, it's the artists designing the stuff. Same man-hours spent setting in-engine scenes instead that in Maya means comparable cost.
- Tessellation basically saves on geometry, and that saves you precious GPU memory. But space on the storage media is hardly taken up by detailed models data. I deem that marginal. On the other hand procedurally generated content will be more and more important for sure for things like terrains in open world games.
- Higher def textures wil simpy require more space. They do on today's PC games.
Completely removing the optical drive doesn't make sense: in 2011-2013 both MS and Sony will still want their console to be a media hub. This media hub must be able to play CDs, DVDs and most probably BluRay movies.
What makes more sense? Using the BluRay disc format for games too and including 200-500GB of solid state storage in the console, or limiting games to half the size of MGS4 or FFXIII on each $5 stick?
