efficiency

SMB had game file size limitations in the dozens of kilobytes range.
- For comparison, that screenshot is 342kb, and Super Mario Bros is 40kb. The screenshot is more than 8.5 times bigger than the game it comes from.
- Modern AAA games need optimisations too
- What I would give to have modern devs work that hard to reduce file sizes

I've seen this same suggestion years ago on Blender tutorials. Generating a scene isn't about making it realistic, it's about fooling the audience into thinking it's real without making it too hard to create. Look at videos from Ian Hubert on how to fake it well.

Halo 3 came out 17 years ago. I learned this today (and still don't really see it...), so I say they did amazingly well!
- Fuck I'm old
My partner compares video game design to stage theatre.
- Good analogy! Anything in particular they've used as examples?

Welcome to gamedev. Its all smoke, mirrors, and magic tricks. Come intervene in our fancy electric rock dreams.

You want them to pay to design TWO ROCKS???? What are they, billionaires???

The monkey's paw curls. New AAA games now feature thousands of individual rock models, among other labor- and space-saving measures being forgone in favor of realism. The game is 400 GB and the devs have worked 110 hours per week for the last 3 months
- All you did was describe the current sad trajectory of AAA games anyway.
- There was a game that came out a few years ago that scanned in most of its rocks for photorealism. I can’t recall the name. EA was the publisher, I think?
- Why did the finger curl? Nothing changed
- https://docs.unrealengine.com/5.0/en-US/nanite-virtualized-geometry-in-unreal-engine/
- And all the 5GB worth of rocks were generated using a single Houdini script.
It's one more rock, Michael. What could it cost, ten dollars?
Setting aside that asset production is genuinely one of the most expensive parts of game dev, if they're smart they can use some clever GPU instancing to improve performance by reusing assets

No clue if that's happening here, though

I honestly don't see the similarity. So nice rotating, scaling, moving skills I guess.

Generally more than half of the rock is underground, so while it might be only one rock, you see many distinct sides of it...

Most rocks are one sided actually.

The desks in Skyrim are just clouds embedded in the ground and recoloured.

The desks are clouds...? How would clouds even remotely look like desks??

Was this supposed to say rocks? I'm so confused 😅
- I think the joke here is that in Super Mario Bros (NES), the bushes are recolored clouds, with their bottoms hidden by the ground. By changing the reference to Skyrim, you get a surrealist joke.
  
  Anyway, that's what I thought the reference was and it made me heartily lol!

And we had to share the rock

Our rock.

Is this halo?

It's minecraft
- Mario

This is literally every game with rocks, since fucking forever..

Lmao, done that before. You do have to worry about the resolution of the textures when changing the model's size, though.

Also, I've made small caves systems and mountains like this, before slapping myself for not remembering terrain generation.

Edit: this is a bit of tangent, but I'm super excited to see more boulders rendered using polycam. Generally, the models are a bit janky and never have straight polygons (along the x,y,z axis) So things like furniture and corridors won't work. Boulders though, it's perfect!

Maybe not polycam in specific, since they too believe that you need lidar to get high quality scans, which isn't true at all.