Just want to add that the first HUD for Star Citizen, which I wrote, was essentially 100% programmatically drawn and programmatically animated, such that every

Just want to add that the first HUD for Star Citizen, which I wrote, was essentially 100% programmatically drawn and programmatically animated, such that every element and vector shape down to the needles and dots on the targeting reticles were defined in ways meant to be completely skinnable in form, in how they behaved over time, how they might behave differently given "ship damage", and so on. This turned out to impose a hefty 20% CPU drain on the entire game, dragging down the frame rate. It was my own design decision and I argued that 20% was worth it (and that by the time the game was released, CPU speeds would have at least quadrupled), but digging my heels in on the issue of not pre-rendering assets was most of how I ended up leaving the project. So that's why I would (emotionally, maybe) argue that compression has little to do with decisions to generate things procedurally, since compression was not a goal whatsoever, although the speed penalty was as if a large amount of compression needed to be overcome.