TotK really makes Switch feel dated

[IcaroRibeiro]

Wyrdness said:

IcaroRibeiro said:

You're vastly overestimating the amount of data necessary to store the buildups. The information needed to load the buildups is not huge it's actually very tinny

the RAM necessary to concretely load the assets in the enginee in other hand is big, but the workload to load them js just as big as of any construct made by the dev team. The key here is how costly the assets are for the engine to handle. A game like Zelda has assets with little detail and graphical fidelity, so there is a finite number of items necessary to fill whatever is the space the engine loads in your face, i.e. Give PS5 RAM to Switch and it will load everything you put o the game without much trouble

Of course players could overload the map with designs and turn the game an unplayable mess, kinda like an infinite Kakariko Village, but that's players decision. For instance I have filled my Animal Crossing island with so much furniture that it failed to load the assets seamlessly eventually. This is fixed with enough RAM.

So while theoretically it's an unsovable problem, in practice it's not. Indeed I truly believe that even on the tinny Switch TOTK could actually save the constructs you made and leave them as they are. But they avoided because iit because first it mess deeply with saving files structure and probably needed to rework all the code related to how the assets are loaded and handled, I could only imagine the nightmare of reworking the core engine all over again for such small feature 

Could also understand  the a nightmare to test the consequences of this on map and game design, urgh

Here is the problem in what you posted here the debate is not about how big the data build up is at a time when you load up it's about the culmination of everything over time in a playthrough especially in huge dynamic worlds. The build up over time to keep things permanent is always going to hit a limit the is no way around this you've effectively repeated the more ram answer which I've highlighted the flaw with the bathtub analogy a bigger bathtub doesn’t remove the being a limit before the water starts overflowing and in games where people are going to put hundreds of hours into it will happen.

This problem has been solved but at the cost of full permanence ever being possible. 

The error in your theory is that is infinite water too. While theoretically you indeed can start playing a game with the intention of breaking it (I.e. spamming assets to overload the game engine and physics) for a standard player this will never happen. You don't need infinite RAM, you just need enough RAM (and of course a chip and processor that can make use of this RAM) to prevent the game to break its boundaries 

I think maybe you don't get there is absolutely no difference between loading a construction the devs made and loading a construction the players made. Think about Minecraft. The maps are procedurally generated ? So for all intents and purposes, they are built while you are playing and interacting with the world and have a boundaries of a few millions of blocks, I Googled it and it would take 140 days to reach the games boundaries. In a game like Zelda the boundaries os the map, both in area and in height. You only need enough RAM to fill this map with assets. So it's not impossible, let alone impractical 

I disagree with Svenno this is a limitation on Switch, although he can be right. The reason I think it was not done is because the engine was likely not made with this kind of support in mind and reworking the very complex engine only to save the builds would be too troublesome to very few gains. Other possibility is they tried it and saw some routines were starting to get negatively effected by the changed the player could made (imagine building cages towards the placed the minions can spawn)

I think this all discussion is all very pointless tbh, I don't think I agree with either side and I don't think this negatively impact the game to any degree. Sure I would be much more happy building bridges or fixed platforming sections to climb hills faster, but not to a degree of being gaming changing. Maybe if this was a game with tighter level design where you need to solve puzzles in order to traverse the world, in this case I would understand the appeal, but TOTK? Don't think it matters much