https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Procedural_generation
.kkrieger got a lot of attention for using this method and only being 96KB.
Certainly, there are similar things in user space where you can share your creations from some games using a code that was generated or similar.
As to faces, Skyrim does that. There aren't unique face meshes for every NPC, there's some base meshes and various parameters to adjust texture and shape.
The latter sounds nice but in practice game execs just use that to cut corners and you end up with an unrewarding grirnd fest of a game.
Yes.
> I would rather have a 300 GB game
I, on the other hand, would not.
For example, increasing background details (more pedestrians, cars, traffic, sounds, etc) in a city scene can greatly add to the atmosphere regardless of your specific gameplay loop.
Going even further, things like GPT can generate text given an input. It's beyond me but couldn't something similar be used to describe environments on the fly to be generated, or generate NPC stories on the fly given inputs?
I think a lot of this tech is coming together and games are about to get a whole lot larger, more immersive, and cheaper to produce. Even just replacing voice actors would be a huge leap.
Present games just completely ignore file size because compared to GPU 1tb SSD are cheap and multi TB HD cheaper.
There are games that completely waste their space, but we can’t lump them all together. Some create vast detailed and beautiful worlds from their storage budget. Some of them, however, are large without any compelling reason to be, with many gigabytes of wasted space on assets that are barely used.
If you were to generate faces "on the fly" as a level streamed off disk then that would likely take up too much of your frame budget and your game would grind to a stuttering halt. The other way of doing it (and this is generally how games which use procgen work) would be to either have a precompute step when you first install or launch a game. This might give you a long install or launch time and would still mean that you have a huge install size, but you would avoid taking up a chunk of your frame budget. Or you could do some clever scheduling and level design where you force the player through "tunnels" between areas that gives you enough time to generate a few new faces and load in assets before they enter an area. This is a pretty common technique where you need to load in a bunch of assets or do some heavy calculatuins. The Witcher 2 had an interesting and slightly buggy version of this where whenever Gerald opened a door to go from outside to inside the camera would swing around so you couldn't see inside the building, a second long animation would play and then when the camera turned back so you could see into the now fully loaded interior if the building. It didn't work properly but it was a good idea.
You could do what ms flight does and have a locally installed low resolution world and a high resolution streamed world. Adapting this you could stream in procgen'd faces and other items generated offline. I think this would work rather nicely.
Lastly, I know it was just an example but still, faces are probably the last thing you want to procgen with out passing the results by a human filter as humans are incredibly sensitive to them looking "off". If all your characters end up looking grotesque and off putting you might be shooting your self in the foot. See the furore about eFootball's terrifying crowd models.
It also solves the problem of "we have to choose what objects to model because our 3D artists don't have infinite time". Now the artists review GAN output and tweak what the algorithm gets wrong, creating tons of content without needing to create every vertex from scratch. Very exciting
Also, creating new content from GAN might not be super appealing for the artistic qualities of the game. Why not do what Escape from Tarkov seem to do with photogrammetry on real objects? Many props like soup cans, couches, whole environments, weapons, can be acquired in real world reasonably easily.