A recent headline at BitTech.net suggests that new software from Allegorithmic might reduce game file sizes up to 70%. While the Allegorithmic technology is extremely interesting, that headline is a bit misleading, since it makes it seem like it's referring to the size of the entire game. Just as a matter of perspective, I'd like to point out that the actual impact on the game's total size in the article's example is a bit less significant. The article's example, an upcoming Xbox Live Arcade title RoboBlitz, suggests that the technology is only responsible for about a .007% reduction in total game size, even if there is a 70% reduction in texture size. At least, that's according to the numbers provided by the article. An insignificant amount? Hardly, it's still a 70% reduction in texture size, which take up varying sizes of different games.

Some time ago GamesFirst published an article that examined how Xbox titles grew from the beginning of the Xbox life-cycle to the end of the Xbox life-cycle. With all the debate about whether or not the Xbox 360's DVD9 has enough enough capacity to handle complex games, we wanted to see how much games really had grown over time. The result was that games had grown, but not as much as most people think; advanced programming techniques like procedural synthesis and more efficient asset use had lead to more complex games with smaller footprints. Games like Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind were not as large as most people assumed, taking up only about 900 megabytes of a 7,000 megabyte disc. As part of the article, we discussed procedural synthesis and XNA as examples of technologies that change the debate about game size.

The BitTech article talks about how a new company called Allegorithmic could reduce file sizes by 70% using procedural generated textures. The article points to RoboBlitz, which uses only 280K for its textures yet creates a high-definition FPS using the Unreal Engine 3. That's very impressive, but not necessarily because of the Allegorithmic technology. In fact, according to the article, the Allegorithmic technology would have only been responsible for a reduction in file size of between .0014% and .007%, about 700K from a game that's likely to be between 10 and 50MB big in its final form. Let me explain.

From the article:

Confused by the fact that I hadn't heard about this technology before, I spoke to one of the men behind it directly - Dr S?bastien Deguy. He assured me that there were no catches with his system, that if a game contained 1GB of textures he would be able to reduce that to 300MB and lose no quality.

Applying these numbers to RoboBlitz, it suggests that the games uncompressed textures, without this technology, would only have been about 1MB big to start with. For a game that's supposedly fighting to keep under the 50MB mark, that's hardly the source of gigantic bloating. In fact, if the game does push the 50MB mark, a 700K reduction in file size like that isn't 70%, but only about .0014%. Even if the game itself is smaller, such as 10 or 20MB, 700K is a fairly small reduction in terms of the overall game, about .007%.

That doesn't mean that Allegorithmic hasn't done some really cool things. They've released tools that make procedural graphic design a more simple task, similar to designing graphics on Photoshop. Traditionally, procedural synthesis is difficult to develop, since it is sometimes difficult to predict the outcome of a change to an algorithm.

In fact, procedural synthesis is one of the most promising technologies around, with both the Xbox 360 and the PS3 sporting some sort of hardware specific support for it. One of the most popular demonstrations of this technology is a two year old game called .kkrieger. You can find screenshots of the title here, here, and here. As good as this game looks, it is less than 100K in size.

While Allegorithmic has developed some exciting tools, people have been talking about it as if it's going to fundamentally change the world overnight. Someday it might, when the technology is applied to other assets besides textures. Until then it's just an extremely interesting advantage, but hardly the breakthrough most people expect from a "70% reduction in size". What's amazing is the fact that the textures used to produce RoboBlitz could fit into a single megabyte; it seems to me that if the compression numbers are true, the nod should go to the game developers who already managed to squeeze a lot into very little.

Procedurally created content is great, and if I were a developer I wouldn't finish the day without checking out what Allegorithmic has to offer. People should just be a little more hesitant before they talk about the reduction of texture size being the most amazing thing there is about RoboBlitz.