Primarily, texture size has increased, texture count has increased, audio quality has increased, and the amount of audio files in a game has also typically increased.
Its not really a deadlines or optimization problem. Compression always decreases fidelity, and many developers choose to compress as little as possible in order to achieve the highest fidelity. Since RAM and storage capacities have increased, the compromise of compressing everything at a great sacrifice to fidelity is not as obvious of a tradeoff anymore. Developers don’t have to choose between voicing an entire game with nearly unintelligible voice compression or only voicing important cutscenes. They can voice the entire game with minimal compression at the cost of a bigger install size, which is free for developers.
It sort of is an optimization problem though because excess textures and audio files could be separated off into their own DLC packages (see Age of Empire II High-Res texture DLC and Steam’s Language Selection feature)
The really big problem is people being riddled with 4K textures on 1080p monitors and 20 audio tracks for different languages when they only need one.
This will get better as NN/AI chips become the norm in gaming. Compression gains, on the fly generation of textures, voice generation when needed, etc.
I envision a future dev using rough shitty textures to conceptualise a game, and then an NN to bring it to life during runtime.
You might even be able to load your own NN interpreter to make the world more cartoony, or change the intended setting entirely, or unlock the nsfw filter on the vanilla interpreter.
Saved you a click:
Primarily, texture size has increased, texture count has increased, audio quality has increased, and the amount of audio files in a game has also typically increased.
Its not really a deadlines or optimization problem. Compression always decreases fidelity, and many developers choose to compress as little as possible in order to achieve the highest fidelity. Since RAM and storage capacities have increased, the compromise of compressing everything at a great sacrifice to fidelity is not as obvious of a tradeoff anymore. Developers don’t have to choose between voicing an entire game with nearly unintelligible voice compression or only voicing important cutscenes. They can voice the entire game with minimal compression at the cost of a bigger install size, which is free for developers.
It sort of is an optimization problem though because excess textures and audio files could be separated off into their own DLC packages (see Age of Empire II High-Res texture DLC and Steam’s Language Selection feature)
The really big problem is people being riddled with 4K textures on 1080p monitors and 20 audio tracks for different languages when they only need one.
This will get better as NN/AI chips become the norm in gaming. Compression gains, on the fly generation of textures, voice generation when needed, etc.
I envision a future dev using rough shitty textures to conceptualise a game, and then an NN to bring it to life during runtime.
You might even be able to load your own NN interpreter to make the world more cartoony, or change the intended setting entirely, or unlock the nsfw filter on the vanilla interpreter.