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[VerbalVenom]

Wikipedia.org on Procedural Synthesis. The Xbox 360 DOES support Procedural Synthesis. Hopefully they'll get these devs trained and using this technology.

[Altima NEO]

QUOTE(VerbalVenom @ Oct 6 2006, 05:15 PM)

Wikipedia.org on Procedural Synthesis. The Xbox 360 DOES support Procedural Synthesis. Hopefully they'll get these devs trained and using this technology.

Oblivion used a form of procedural synthesis for its foliage, neat!

[Heet]

Ya but the foliage pops up.  Hate that.

[Keshire]

QUOTE(Altima NEO @ Oct 7 2006, 01:22 PM)

Oblivion used a form of procedural synthesis for its foliage, neat!

Made by somebody else. Speed Tree is much like Havok. Plug and Play.

[Mr Invader]

Small Arms for XBLA started out as a game that was 1GB. After compressing it as small as they could, the game is now only 50Mb

^Not sure where i heard it from but i guarantee i'm not making it up^

Makes you think on how small the games will be now. With this new compression, Blu-ray wont be needed even more than it is now.

[m_hael]

I hate to destroy any dreams here but... and its a BIG huge freaking massive but...

Allegorithmic's "new" techniques are not new; their "solution" is new. The product they are selling is a plugin that can generate textures from a set of variables; Procedural synthesis. What it does NOT do is compress an existing texture. This is what was meant when he said Developers need to learn how to use it.

The root of the problem lies in artistic flair, if your textures are generated by an algorithm then they are inherently mathematical : regular, patterned, repeating or fractal.

Whilst I don't doubt that some games can and will benefit largely from tech similar to this and probably from this solution too, I will say this ...  artists don't like math and have an inate distrust of pixels they did not generate.

Elements this tech will be good at involve.

Asphalt
rocks
grass
tree's & foliage
noise
sky & clouds
textiles
fractals
normal maps for glass/steel/concrete
and many many more


what this tech is NOT good at is.

decals
photo-realistic anything

most games use a LOT of decals & photorealistic textures.

his estimate of 70% makes a HUGE assumption; that an entire game had EVERY texture designed using the tools they create. Sadly that tool cannot create a face, a hair style, an 'adio" shoe decal... so games which people in them simply cannot use it to the max.

It (procedural synthesis) will help - its already in use in many games - but it is not the saviour of all that is games nor is it going to ruin Blu-ray... it is simply another tool in our arsenal and in this case a product needing to sell and thus sensationalised by a sneaky headline.

[yaazz]

I was going to mention this but M_Hael beat me to it... My understanding of procedural synthesis was that it just uses math algorithms to generate a texture, so instead of using memory to always store textures, the game creates them during the initial load time (which wouldnt add much loading time because i/o of textures is so slow) and stores them in ram as usual.