I was reading through Game Informer's rather long spiel on L.A. Noire today, and they had some very interesting things to say about Rockstar's new MoCap tech. Apparently, they are capturing the outside of the face and/or body whole, as opposed to capturing the skeleton as would be done traditionally and then have animators create the outside "body" of the model using the engine or using CGI. Now, according to Rockstar they have 200 Terrabytes of storage space ready for this capture data. This, according to GI, "allow[s] the player to to finally react to the characters as real actors in a way that even games like Uncharted 2 or Mass Effect haven't acheived." You can have actual, captured facial expressions from real actors, and the more actions they capture, the more realistic it gets. Goodbye Uncanny Valley? Maybe.
The question that this brings up to me is this (and I realize that this has only a tenuous link to what I wrote above, but I thought I would share and it stimulated my little grey cells): will games start to use LESS storage space as technology advances? I know, it sounds kind of crazy but bear with me. As capture technology improves, every item can become more and more independent, and engines will be able to increase flexibility. I'm not sure if this is happening yet, but what if eventually we don't have to have fixed objects consisting in millions of polygons stored on the disk/harddrive/cloud, but a brilliant AI "overbrain" that says, for instance; "This is Madison Ave, New York City, 1926; there's a cop here, punching a man in a fedora hat" and then renders the scene on the fly with nothing but some general size and shape data. No giant hi-rez skyscrapers, no extremely expensive facial expressions and having a hi-def image for the set of the mouth for every letter.
The point is, Rockstar isn't going to put those 200 TB on one disk, be it a DVD or a Blu-Ray. They'll have to have the processors handle what seems to be an unprecident amount of the rendering (it looks great in the screens in the mag, by the way). So, if we can do this now, when we hit that next gen will we need more than 50 GB's of data, as the processors get more and more complex and powerful and handle increasing amounts of rendering without preset objects? Maybe this is old news to everyone else, but it kind of blew my mind to think that game sizes could possibly (and I emphasize "possibly" here) get smaller. This of course would ease the transition to streaming and DD media, as a DVD size game on the current infrastructure is possible to download in a non-brain blowing out amount of time, and streaming would be cake, with less compression as well.
So, am I nuts, way behind the times or just slightly dull? Your thoughts.
