[QUOTE="HuusAsking"][QUOTE="SUD123456"] Awaiting the but, teh GTAIV sandbox gamez argument.....
SUD123456
I'll bite. How would you respond to the argument that disc space can put a limit on sandbox games, especially sandboxers with branching or nonlinear storylines where storyline points can be highly divergent (to the point where you can't predict where you take up a particular mission, meaning that if you went multidisc, the duplication of data would be too great to fit on the disc, forcing a geographic rather than storyline split)?PS. What if limited disc space is the hidden reason GTA4's Liberty City has no analogue to our Staten Island (AFAIK, that's still true)?
Glad you asked.
Do you believe in the concept that 'need is the mother of invention'?
All the fanboy stuff aside, the industry as a whole is facing and will increasingly face issues of 'realism', at least in HD gaming. More and better textures. More and different kinds of enemies simultaneously onscreen. That kind of thing. Right now the largest single cost of development is related to art. Creating/painting all these things. The greater the world with the more unique things and the more enhanced, differing and unique textures all adds to realism. It also adds hugely to the cost.
The current system of game development is not sustainable. As we demand more realism the cost to produce it with current methods will mulitply....either games go up in cost to us as consumers, or there is less variety and more consolidation, particularly in HD and so called hardcore game markets. This is not fanboyism. It has nothing to do with which system. It has everything to do with the cost of art production.
This thread presupposes that more space = longer & better games, better textures, more realism etc. That is what is implied.
That is a crock. Cost of production is the most important limiting factor, not space.
Having greater space actually solves nothing and helps create the problem of consolidation. It is an illusion.
Need is the mother of invention.
We need to improve realism while driving down costs or at least keeping costs steady.
Procedural generation is a possible way to do this. Re-using the same core code, but filling it with differing textures. Trees with different leafs for example. This is still in its infancy...although it is also very old.
There will be a renaissance around procedural generation of some form. It is inevitable and will be driven by cost. More space simply means more of the same way of doing things. That is not going to sustain the industry.
In the future GTA5,6 or 7.....will be 3 times the size and take only 1/2 the space.
From wikipedia:
Spore extensively uses procedural generation, rather than individual objects. Wright mentioned in an interview given at E3 2006 that the information necessary to generate an entire creature would be only a couple of kilobytes, according to Wright, who presented the following analogy: "think of it as sharing the DNA template of a creature while the game, like a womb, builds the 'phenotypes' of the animal, which represent a few megabytes of texturing, animation, etc."
An interesting argument, yes. But Procedural Synthesis is still rather computationally intensive, which is probably why we're only seeing it in limited circumstances. Anyway, what's to stop using Procedural Synthesis during the production and then putting the results into the final product? You'll still need the space, but you won't need the artists, either. 
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