Activision has moved to explain the enormous file sizes Call of Duty fans can expect to hit their hard-drives with the launch of Modern Warfare 3 this month.
Actually, my statement might be a bit wrong regarding map size once I think more carefully. Modern trend that allows artist to directly paint on game world could create really heavy virtual texture assets that scale with size of the world. Games that approach “unique” look or feeling per area without making you feel they reuse or have tileable textures all over the place tends to use this as you can just stream in textures that mask over tileable and make it looks really decorated for that area. They basically trade file size with artist freedom.
One example is BG3, where the VirtualTextures_*.pak have 18 files, 72GB. While normal asset textures has only 4 pak files and aobut 13GB.
Actually, my statement might be a bit wrong regarding map size once I think more carefully. Modern trend that allows artist to directly paint on game world could create really heavy virtual texture assets that scale with size of the world. Games that approach “unique” look or feeling per area without making you feel they reuse or have tileable textures all over the place tends to use this as you can just stream in textures that mask over tileable and make it looks really decorated for that area. They basically trade file size with artist freedom.
One example is BG3, where the VirtualTextures_*.pak have 18 files, 72GB. While normal asset textures has only 4 pak files and aobut 13GB.