These tools have been grudgingly adopted, but only to make ‘let’s hire ten thousand artists for a decade!’ accomplish some ridiculous goal, as measured in archaic compressed textures and static models. The closest we came was “tessellation” as a buzzword for cranking polycount in post. And it somehow fucked up both visuals and performance. Nowadays Unreal 5 brags about its ability to render zillion-polygon Mudbox meshes at sensible framerates, rather than letting artists do pseudo-NURBS shit on models that don’t have a polycount. And no bespoke game seems ready to scale to 32K, or zoom in on a square inch of carpet without seeing texels, even though we’ve had this tech for umpteen years and a texture atlas is not novel.
Budgets keep going up and dev cycles keep getting longer and it’s never because making A Game is getting any harder.
How do you think modern games are made? Procedural generation is used all over the place to create materials and entire landscapes.
But never ships clientside.
These tools have been grudgingly adopted, but only to make ‘let’s hire ten thousand artists for a decade!’ accomplish some ridiculous goal, as measured in archaic compressed textures and static models. The closest we came was “tessellation” as a buzzword for cranking polycount in post. And it somehow fucked up both visuals and performance. Nowadays Unreal 5 brags about its ability to render zillion-polygon Mudbox meshes at sensible framerates, rather than letting artists do pseudo-NURBS shit on models that don’t have a polycount. And no bespoke game seems ready to scale to 32K, or zoom in on a square inch of carpet without seeing texels, even though we’ve had this tech for umpteen years and a texture atlas is not novel.
Budgets keep going up and dev cycles keep getting longer and it’s never because making A Game is getting any harder.