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Comment by zionic | Hacker News Reader

Between virtualized geometry and raytracing the amount of work to make a game is steadily going down. Artists can simply make objects at full quality (no more manual LOD creation!) and put stuff in a scene and the lights _just work_.

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I'm not an artist and I still can't wait to get a closer look at their new geometry renderer tech. The UE5 early access branch is already on github, this is gonna be wild. I also saw they are planning to deprecate raytracing and... use lumen for everything? Wonder what Nvidia says to that. But with the next-gen consoles not using RTX cards I guess this is a reasonable move by epic.

Some specific workflows may improve and be more efficient here and there, but it would be the first time in history if this would mean games are cheaper to produce, instead the scope will increase.

As for LOD creation, there are things like https://www.simplygon.com/ already.

Although I think it's extremely important to move forward in making artists do less work, I do not expect that a full zbrush model without any retolopogy to go into the engine and expect it to just work, specially because most of the time you also need to take care of animation and texture/uv. Also I also worry about download size. So there are still many reasons why you'd want to optimize the hell out of a mesh in a game engine even if it has the capability to support millions of polygons.

In the video they say that they animated the high poly golem mesh using their new animation tools and they are certainly marketing it as 'zbrush directly to engine'. I'm curious how they went about texturing that massive mesh though and how well it works with humans where muscle deformation is important (I'd imagine the answer is "it doesn't").

Yes but their demo is a 100GB download alone, it seems. That's just a demo. The capabilities of new hardware and engines to render worlds is massively outstripping the capabilities of distribution networks to get that data into people's homes. That's where the next challenge is. Xbox Live is already a long way from being able to deliver games quickly and it will only get worse.

…and then management asks you to make a Nintendo Switch version.

Its a good think but this increases work. The amount of detail that needs to be created continues to skyrocket. And it never "just works."

My understanding is that this shorten the time in some cases, but most Artist being perfectionist meant they will continue to use their time refining other things or more work being assigned. Basically quality may go up in this case, but cost isn't going down at all.

I have been wondering for a long time if there are tools or massive innovation that bring the cost of building games down by a significant amount.

I'll believe it when I see it. In my experience, anything Unreal takes a long time to download, forever to build and then another eternity to cook the assets.

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