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imeansurewhynot@sh.itjust.works

For any game designers or software engineers, are Rixels as significant for game design and performance as they sound? (www.gamesindustry.biz)

submitted 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago) by imeansurewhynot@sh.itjust.works to c/Ask_Lemmy@sh.itjust.works

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Will they help with controlling the necessary processing power for games? Are Rixels applicable to most games?

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[–] uen3@sh.itjust.works 1 points 5 days ago (1 children)

Gonna say yes- but that's because they don't sound very significant.

First, the 98% texture memory reduction is a made up BS statistic, ignore that.

Second, people have been dealing with blurry stretched out textures since Mario 64 and Quake 1 so it's the way you expect a too-close texture to degrade and it's not that bad- it's not clear that degrading into high-resolution triangles and circles and arcs instead would be an improvement. Looking at the screenshots, I am not impressed by how those textures look- even if it's justified as going with the game's style, subjectively I think they looks kind of ass.

I'm even going to guess that none of the other devs at the game company are as impressed by this gimmick as the guy who came up with it but they have to pretend to be because he's their boss.

[–] imeansurewhynot@sh.itjust.works 1 points 5 days ago (1 children)

Textures take up a lot of space and processing power, any significant reduction should improve performance.

Why do you think the numbers are BS? Dp you mean "likely inflated"? It's not a statistic, it's algebra from before and after they used vector pixels rather than conventional pixels.

[–] uen3@sh.itjust.works 1 points 5 days ago (1 children)

I don't doubt they saved that much- you can naively downsample a 512x512 texture to 20x20 and it will take up less 98% space and look about 98% more ass. And clearly what they invented looks better than that blurry blocky alternative, but how much better? It's sure not 100% as good as the normal hi-res, and at short distance, maybe worse because you notice the hard edged Art Deco shapes more than you would notice the blurryness.

Maybe looks as good as a really well made 128x128 antialiased texture that's 1/16 the size, with hardware filtering, but that's the subjective part, which is why it's a meaningless saving figure.

And the 'meh' screenshots matter, because now that you're only taking up 2% of your old texture size, are you using that to make your texture maps look 50x as vivid, or 50x as detailed, 50x as varied, or just 50x awesome on some way, vs. what they are or otherwise would have been? From the screenshots; no. Not seeing it.

They're able to use such small textures by drawing things in a way that fits the shapes. So the art team probably likes this even less than the other developers ( also less likely than the coders to complain because they "have an art job*- at a game studio- in the 2020s ) for having to learn a janky, probably-vibe-coded internal tool to draw all their stuff instead of Krita and Aseprite or whatever.

[–] imeansurewhynot@sh.itjust.works 1 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago)

Vector images look exactly as high res regardless of the image size.

The significant part of vector pixels is simply that textures now use 50x less space as an asset, not that with 98% more space they can fit in 98% more detail or vividness. The benefit is efficiently using resources and processing power. This is like your electricity bill costing 98% less by using different appliances. Pretty useful for a lot of people if it works as described.

[–] schipelblorp@sh.itjust.works 1 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago) (1 children)

According to the dev, it's not directly applicable for realistic games, which is where we seem to run into the most problems because things have to look a certain way and we don´t want to fuzz it for our brains.

He acknowledges the technology might not be right for every title. "It may matter less to photorealistic games than it does to a stylised game," he says. But he's keen to see how it will be used elsewhere. "It'd be interesting to see what people would do with it in other contexts."

https://www.gamesindustry.biz/reforj-developer-4j-studios-unveils-rixels-modified-pixels-that-reduce-texture-memory-requirements-by-98

But might be fun to see what voxel games can do with it.

[–] imeansurewhynot@sh.itjust.works 1 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago) (1 children)

So it would be applicable to Super Mario or Zelda games, for example?

There are a lot of less realistic, very popular games that this could apply to.

[–] schipelblorp@sh.itjust.works 1 points 6 days ago

Maybe? I guess the question is if it can work on arbitrary shapes, or if it has to be on flat surfaces (like on voxels). Looks like people haven't really started experimenting with it yet.