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Comment by defaultname | Hacker News Reader

100GB of rocks.

I love the notion of their nanite engine and basically removing concern about LoD (though we've heard that pitch over many generations of engines), and it looks like they're finally improved on what was a terrible, clunky, extremely dated UI.

What I don't love is that it leans into going crazy with assets. Already games are getting simply ridiculous, with new games hitting 300GB, many with an unending stream of enormous patches (looking at CoD Warzone).

Instead of 100GB of rock meshes and textures, isn't there a benefit to procedural on-demand generation for stuff like this?

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Since everything is just from megascans, it might make more sense to have 300gb of photorealistic assets stored on every next-gen device, and (UE5) games can just commonly load from them.

Yeah, at a certain point, it probably makes sense to have a giant library of universal assets like rocks and grass and trees. There's no reason for each outdoor game to keep reinventing the universe.

So basically you’re asking for a node_modules for games!

More like a /usr/lib shared across games on the same console

This is Unreal/C++ we're talking about. If the size of some field somewhere changes, your 300GB will need to be re-cooked...

You can do that with Substance. Store images in a library and procedurally generate textures at runtime.

"and it looks like they're finally improved on what was a terrible, clunky, extremely dated UI." doesn't hold true, it's mostly the same UI with a dark reskin. Certain editor hot paths have been reworked and that's about it. The editor is almost exclusively written in Slate, Epic's in-house Window framework/general GUI module. Slate's got a pretty interesting nested MACRO system. Most definitely not data-driven and pretty much as hard-coded as it gets, redesigning the editor for real would be difficult to say the least. In reality most experienced developers don't want a new design, they are happy with the workflow they have and I have to agree with them. I'm generally happy with the "if it ain't broke don't fix it" reskin decision.

> isn't there a benefit to procedural on-demand generation for stuff like this?

Like how demoscenes do it? I would think a huge trade off is the performance hit (and potential delay / popin) of the generation

In a way procedural generation can be tought of as extreme compression!

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