>The crazy thing he mentioned is that if there was zero compression, the latest COD games genuinely had over 1 terabyte of uncompressed assets.
I think what this shows is there should be smart delivery of assets. Before installing perhaps you should be able to choose your graphical fidelity and only download assets related to that fidelity level and below.
This makes manifest building and delivery more complicated, and probably UX too, but I'm sure it's a problem that the infra/marketplace provider (Valve, Epic, Microsoft, Sony, etc.) could solve and make easy for devs.
> I think what this shows is there should be smart delivery of assets. Before installing perhaps you should be able to choose your graphical fidelity and only download assets related to that fidelity level and below.
War Thunder does this - in the game launcher you can choose whether you want the highest resolution textures and most detailed models or not. You can even get a minimal client without vehicle interiors as well (only 3rd person camera available).
It makes a lot of sense to me, to the point where it's surprising that all games aren't embracing this approach. I mean, I don't have a lot of storage, nor good hardware - why should I be forced to download high detail assets that I'll never even see because instead all of the models will be at lower LODs and all the textures will be of a lower resolution.
It feels like the game engine developers don't really care about bundling assets by fidelity and each game acts like it just owns your entire disk.
That's precisely why I don't really play AAA titles anymore and mostly go for pixel graphics and indie titles. There are actually surprisingly few well optimized games out there.
> I think what this shows is there should be smart delivery of assets. Before installing perhaps you should be able to choose your graphical fidelity and only download assets related to that fidelity level and below.
The Diablo 4 beta had this option, drastically reducing the download size if you didn't need 4K
Have you played a modern game? they have amazing levels of detail in the tiniest places. One game I play, Gran Turismo 7, claims that a single car model start to finish takes months to model for a single modeler. Some of the details in those cars that you can see in VR you can absolutely not see in-game normally, such as the door lock controls or the key-hole for the driver's door being exactly like on the real car, even for something so rare as a McLaren F1 longtail. There is so much waste of time and space dedicated to this stuff, but I love it personally!
Gran Turismo in VR is an amazing experience. I'm not even a racing car fan, but holy crap does that game really capture an experience. I'm somewhat afraid to find out just how much data goes into a single model.
The reality is a game has increasingly more content nowadays. Remember, there's a lot of "games as a service". So you have many "seasons" of additional content. You may not play all the content, but someone is. And when people want 4K and 8K textures, different variations so effects don't look the same twice, on top of all the other sizes, plus all the other effects ... it adds up. Never mind huge open worlds, where the asset footprint for just the map might be 100GB.
Having been in a few AAA studios myself (doing database stuff) and sitting next to artists and even art directors, the sheer amount of effort, headcount, etc. put into the art pipeline is genuine madness. In a large studio, art is over HALF the production cost, sometimes more towards 60-65%. Heck, one of the things sometimes brought up about Red Dead Redemption II is that there were three full-time employees in which all they were responsible for was horses. 6000 man-hours a year, on just horses.
To sum up what Chris said towards the end, "The only thing keeping these numbers down is the compression algorithms. If we didn't have these newer compression algorithms, we'd probably legitimately be at a terabyte. I can actually tell you for a fact, that there are over a terabyte of assets in the COD engine."
The crazy thing he mentioned is that if there was zero compression, the latest COD games genuinely had over 1 terabyte of uncompressed assets.