| JEMC said: ^Sometimes I wonder why I bother making the news... Anyway, here's some food for thought article: Game File Sizes May Skyrocket with Unreal Engine 5’s Nanite, Says Developerhttps://wccftech.com/game-file-sizes-may-skyrocket-with-unreal-engine-5s-nanite-says-developer/ It looks absolutely fantastic. Especially the Nanite system for a start, I had to scoop my jaw up off the floor after that. It takes a lot of the headache out of asset creation, but at the same time, it starts to raise more concerns. And one of the examples is Call of Duty Warzone at the minute, as people are harassing Activision over the size of Call of Duty Warzone. And I think when we've got technologies now in the Unreal Engine 5 that allow us to use the original source meshes, with the original source textures and everything like that, the game file sizes are going to have to skyrocket which presents a unique set of challenges. We've heard and had many debates over game sizes and if they could go down in size thanks to SSDs making redundant data unnecessary, but could the higher quality of textures and assets offset that and make games actually bigger? Also, and just to put this "says developer" in perspective. It comes from a developer of a studio that opened this January and, so far, has created or shown nothing, so maybe his comments are worth taking with a pinch of salt. |
I already expected that two months ago.
Most of those redundant objects are very small files (f.e. the 3d-object of a lamp post) while textures will go up to several layers of 8K textures:
Conina said:
Not scaling down assets in advance will probably also let the file sizes of games explode. Unfortunately Epic games didin't tell use, how many GB storage space were necessary for that 9-minute demo on the PS5 dev kit and how much necessary storage space we can expect for a full-sized 20-hour AAA game with unscaled assets. I wonder if at least 4 "nanite-like" AAA games will fit on the 825 GB SSD (so less than 200 GB on average per game). |
Conina said:
But the textures for that PS5 demo were much bigger than for normal PS4 Pro or XBO X games: "Unreal Engine supports Virtual Texturing, which means we can texture our models with many 8K textures without overloading the GPU." Jerome Platteaux, Epic's special projects art director, told Digital Foundry. He says that each asset has 8K texture for base colour, another 8K texture for metalness/roughness and a final 8K texture for the normal map. But this isn't a traditional normal map used to approximate higher detail, but rather a tiling texture for surface details. "For example, the statue of the warrior that you can see in the temple is made of eight pieces (head, torso, arms, legs, etc). Each piece has a set of three textures (base colour, metalness/roughness, and normal maps for tiny scratches). So, we end up with eight sets of 8K textures, for a total of 24 8K textures for one statue alone", he adds. |
