5 ms·

Please let me know if this already exists, but: video games are becoming huge file sizes in part due to HD graphics. Why not just generate say the faces of pede

Please let me know if this already exists, but: video games are becoming huge file sizes in part due to HD graphics. Why not just generate say the faces of pedestrians on the fly? Is it important that some character in my copy of the game looks identical in all copies of the game? I would argue it just needs a unique face to go with the name.

TheDudeMan 5y ago
It can still be the same in every instance of the game -- generate from a known seed. This is basically good data compression, customized for faces.
Liquix 5y ago
Yes! The tech mentioned in the article solves this problem: no more "we have to remove/compress all of these models/textures because our game can't be 300GB". Just use 10 high-res pictures of the object from all angles instead of a model. This could save orders of magnitude of disk space It also solves the problem of "we have to choose what objects to model because our 3D artists don't have infinite time". Now the artists review GAN output and tweak what the algorithm gets wrong, creating tons of content without needing to create every vertex from scratch. Very exciting
- picture 5y ago
  Not sure if "10 high-res pictures of the object from all angles instead of a model" saves any disk space at all considering models in games are usually just one high res picture uv wrapped to vertexes. Also, creating new content from GAN might not be super appealing for the artistic qualities of the game. Why not do what Escape from Tarkov seem to do with photogrammetry on real objects? Many props like soup cans, couches, whole environments, weapons, can be acquired in real world reasonably easily.
Guest19023892 5y ago
Are you referring to procedurally generated content? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Procedural_generation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Procedural_generation .kkrieger got a lot of attention for using this method and only being 96KB. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2NBG-sKFaB0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2NBG-sKFaB0
- lostcolony 5y ago
  I've seen some work on, and expect some games have used, a similar method where they'll have a bidirectional process to generate something from a seed, AND create a seed after having crafted something, allowing them to mix and match, and still achieve a super high compression rate (as, at the end, all that is stored for each face or other element is the seed that generates it). Certainly, there are similar things in user space where you can share your creations from some games using a code that was generated or similar.
omegalulw 5y ago
I mean is file size really a concern? I would rather have a 300 GB game with something like quixel megascanned assets than procedurally generated crap. The latter sounds nice but in practice game execs just use that to cut corners and you end up with an unrewarding grirnd fest of a game.
- dataflow 5y ago
  > I mean is file size really a concern? Yes. > I would rather have a 300 GB game I, on the other hand, would not.
- elil17 5y ago
  You are probably blessed with a large hard drive and a fast internet connection. Other people don’t have these things.
- dillondoyle 5y ago
  The new cartridge is an external NVMe?!
- manigandham 5y ago
  Aesthetics and gameplay are completely separate topics. Procedural generation can increase the visual quality without having anything to do with how you play. For example, increasing background details (more pedestrians, cars, traffic, sounds, etc) in a city scene can greatly add to the atmosphere regardless of your specific gameplay loop.
- rytcio 5y ago
  I was hoping 8 hour download times was a thing of the past
michaelmrose 5y ago
You might be overthinking the problem. There are games that would lose half their weight replacing uncompressed audio with mp3. Present games just completely ignore file size because compared to GPU 1tb SSD are cheap and multi TB HD cheaper.
- wruza 5y ago
  With these load times I figured to only install active games on SSD and delete/move to HDD when done. Reminds me ISA HDD/FDD multicard era somehow.
- jquery 5y ago
  Very few games this would be the case. There are games that completely waste their space, but we can’t lump them all together. Some create vast detailed and beautiful worlds from their storage budget. Some of them, however, are large without any compelling reason to be, with many gigabytes of wasted space on assets that are barely used.
roywiggins 5y ago
Well, there's Minecraft. Its worlds are huge and procedurally generated. As to faces, Skyrim does that. There aren't unique face meshes for every NPC, there's some base meshes and various parameters to adjust texture and shape.
tomc1985 5y ago
It's not just HD graphics, but uncompressed or less-compressed game assets that are provided as such to minimize load times
r_hoods_ghost 5y ago
There's a trade off between processing time and storage space in pretty much everything to do with games. For example the lighting in a scene is often precomputed offline and then baked in to a texture which ships with the game. This increases the speed in which a frame can be rendered, but also means that your game just gained another few mbs in weight. Similar thing with animations of clothing, these are often physically based simulations done offline which are then baked in (again we often use textures to store the information, mapping RGB to XYZ). If you were to generate faces "on the fly" as a level streamed off disk then that would likely take up too much of your frame budget and your game would grind to a stuttering halt. The other way of doing it (and this is generally how games which use procgen work) would be to either have a precompute step when you first install or launch a game. This might give you a long install or launch time and would still mean that you have a huge install size, but you would avoid taking up a chunk of your frame budget. Or you could do some clever scheduling and level design where you force the player through "tunnels" between areas that gives you enough time to generate a few new faces and load in assets before they enter an area. This is a pretty common technique where you need to load in a bunch of assets or do some heavy calculatuins. The Witcher 2 had an interesting and slightly buggy version of this where whenever Gerald opened a door to go from outside to inside the camera would swing around so you couldn't see inside the building, a second long animation would play and then when the camera turned back so you could see into the now fully loaded interior if the building. It didn't work properly but it was a good idea. You could do what ms flight does and have a locally installed low resolution world and a high resolution streamed world. Adapting this you could stream in procgen'd faces and other items generated offline. I think this would work rather nicely. Lastly, I know it was just an example but still, faces are probably the last thing you want to procgen with out passing the results by a human filter as humans are incredibly sensitive to them looking "off". If all your characters end up looking grotesque and off putting you might be shooting your self in the foot. See the furore about eFootball's terrifying crowd models.
paavohtl 5y ago
I think most open world AAA games have done this for over a decade. They either vary a base face model randomly, or mix from hundreds of variants, hairstyles, clothing options, accessories etc. Literally no one is making 400 unique models for a crowd of 400.
2OEH8eoCRo0 5y ago
Spoken dialog is a killer. Studios have to contract voice actors and then it's very difficult to make tweaks later. Why not fancy text to speech with variables for intonation, smoker/nonsmoker, age, gender, accent, etc. Going even further, things like GPT can generate text given an input. It's beyond me but couldn't something similar be used to describe environments on the fly to be generated, or generate NPC stories on the fly given inputs? I think a lot of this tech is coming together and games are about to get a whole lot larger, more immersive, and cheaper to produce. Even just replacing voice actors would be a huge leap.

TheDudeMan 5y ago

It can still be the same in every instance of the game -- generate from a known seed. This is basically good data compression, customized for faces.

Liquix 5y ago

Yes! The tech mentioned in the article solves this problem: no more "we have to remove/compress all of these models/textures because our game can't be 300GB". Just use 10 high-res pictures of the object from all angles instead of a model. This could save orders of magnitude of disk space It also solves the problem of "we have to choose what objects to model because our 3D artists don't have infinite time". Now the artists review GAN output and tweak what the algorithm gets wrong, creating tons of content without needing to create every vertex from scratch. Very exciting

picture 5y ago
Not sure if "10 high-res pictures of the object from all angles instead of a model" saves any disk space at all considering models in games are usually just one high res picture uv wrapped to vertexes. Also, creating new content from GAN might not be super appealing for the artistic qualities of the game. Why not do what Escape from Tarkov seem to do with photogrammetry on real objects? Many props like soup cans, couches, whole environments, weapons, can be acquired in real world reasonably easily.

Guest19023892 5y ago

Are you referring to procedurally generated content? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Procedural_generation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Procedural_generation .kkrieger got a lot of attention for using this method and only being 96KB. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2NBG-sKFaB0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2NBG-sKFaB0

lostcolony 5y ago
I've seen some work on, and expect some games have used, a similar method where they'll have a bidirectional process to generate something from a seed, AND create a seed after having crafted something, allowing them to mix and match, and still achieve a super high compression rate (as, at the end, all that is stored for each face or other element is the seed that generates it). Certainly, there are similar things in user space where you can share your creations from some games using a code that was generated or similar.

omegalulw 5y ago

I mean is file size really a concern? I would rather have a 300 GB game with something like quixel megascanned assets than procedurally generated crap. The latter sounds nice but in practice game execs just use that to cut corners and you end up with an unrewarding grirnd fest of a game.

dataflow 5y ago
> I mean is file size really a concern? Yes. > I would rather have a 300 GB game I, on the other hand, would not.
elil17 5y ago
You are probably blessed with a large hard drive and a fast internet connection. Other people don’t have these things.
dillondoyle 5y ago
The new cartridge is an external NVMe?!
manigandham 5y ago
Aesthetics and gameplay are completely separate topics. Procedural generation can increase the visual quality without having anything to do with how you play. For example, increasing background details (more pedestrians, cars, traffic, sounds, etc) in a city scene can greatly add to the atmosphere regardless of your specific gameplay loop.
rytcio 5y ago
I was hoping 8 hour download times was a thing of the past

michaelmrose 5y ago

You might be overthinking the problem. There are games that would lose half their weight replacing uncompressed audio with mp3. Present games just completely ignore file size because compared to GPU 1tb SSD are cheap and multi TB HD cheaper.

wruza 5y ago
With these load times I figured to only install active games on SSD and delete/move to HDD when done. Reminds me ISA HDD/FDD multicard era somehow.
jquery 5y ago
Very few games this would be the case. There are games that completely waste their space, but we can’t lump them all together. Some create vast detailed and beautiful worlds from their storage budget. Some of them, however, are large without any compelling reason to be, with many gigabytes of wasted space on assets that are barely used.

roywiggins 5y ago

Well, there's Minecraft. Its worlds are huge and procedurally generated. As to faces, Skyrim does that. There aren't unique face meshes for every NPC, there's some base meshes and various parameters to adjust texture and shape.

tomc1985 5y ago

It's not just HD graphics, but uncompressed or less-compressed game assets that are provided as such to minimize load times

r_hoods_ghost 5y ago

There's a trade off between processing time and storage space in pretty much everything to do with games. For example the lighting in a scene is often precomputed offline and then baked in to a texture which ships with the game. This increases the speed in which a frame can be rendered, but also means that your game just gained another few mbs in weight. Similar thing with animations of clothing, these are often physically based simulations done offline which are then baked in (again we often use textures to store the information, mapping RGB to XYZ). If you were to generate faces "on the fly" as a level streamed off disk then that would likely take up too much of your frame budget and your game would grind to a stuttering halt. The other way of doing it (and this is generally how games which use procgen work) would be to either have a precompute step when you first install or launch a game. This might give you a long install or launch time and would still mean that you have a huge install size, but you would avoid taking up a chunk of your frame budget. Or you could do some clever scheduling and level design where you force the player through "tunnels" between areas that gives you enough time to generate a few new faces and load in assets before they enter an area. This is a pretty common technique where you need to load in a bunch of assets or do some heavy calculatuins. The Witcher 2 had an interesting and slightly buggy version of this where whenever Gerald opened a door to go from outside to inside the camera would swing around so you couldn't see inside the building, a second long animation would play and then when the camera turned back so you could see into the now fully loaded interior if the building. It didn't work properly but it was a good idea. You could do what ms flight does and have a locally installed low resolution world and a high resolution streamed world. Adapting this you could stream in procgen'd faces and other items generated offline. I think this would work rather nicely. Lastly, I know it was just an example but still, faces are probably the last thing you want to procgen with out passing the results by a human filter as humans are incredibly sensitive to them looking "off". If all your characters end up looking grotesque and off putting you might be shooting your self in the foot. See the furore about eFootball's terrifying crowd models.

paavohtl 5y ago

I think most open world AAA games have done this for over a decade. They either vary a base face model randomly, or mix from hundreds of variants, hairstyles, clothing options, accessories etc. Literally no one is making 400 unique models for a crowd of 400.

2OEH8eoCRo0 5y ago

Spoken dialog is a killer. Studios have to contract voice actors and then it's very difficult to make tweaks later. Why not fancy text to speech with variables for intonation, smoker/nonsmoker, age, gender, accent, etc. Going even further, things like GPT can generate text given an input. It's beyond me but couldn't something similar be used to describe environments on the fly to be generated, or generate NPC stories on the fly given inputs? I think a lot of this tech is coming together and games are about to get a whole lot larger, more immersive, and cheaper to produce. Even just replacing voice actors would be a huge leap.