The Game Developers Conference that took place this week in London may not have been the most exciting game show on earth, but the gathering summoned some well known figures, including Lionhead's charismatic Peter Molyneux, and featured a particularly interesting presentation form one of the lesser known companies, called Allegorithmic. What was so interesting about it, you ask? Oh, not much... just that they claim they will be able to reduce texture file sizes in games by up to 70%!

That really is as impressive as it sounds, considering that if a game has 1 GB of textures, Allegorithmic would be able to reduce that to 300 MB, without losing any quality. As reported by Bit-tech.net, one game that already benefits from this technology is RoboBlitz (soon to be released on Xbox Live Arcade). You probably heard about it by now, and that it runs on the Unreal 3 engine. But what I for one didn't know, is that the entire game had to fit in under 50 MB, and that the overall size for all its textures is less than 280 KB.

Allegorithmic's new texture system is thus clearly a wondrous fit for digital distribution, and even if games will keep their currently extravagant sizes, this technology will allow developers to fit more diverse textures in the same amount of space. It may take some time for it to become an industry standard, but hopefully it will, someday.

For now, one thing that needs to be acknowledged is that developers today are Lazy. With a capital "L"! How else would you explain games that look like five years ago (or worse), but require more powerful hardware - and even then, they have a crappy performance. These days, developers have the luxury of storing their game assets on several GB, when they really only need a fraction of that. With some proper coding, that is.

Unfortunately, modern PCs and next-gen consoles don't force developers to get their proverbial faeces together. Mobile games, on the other hand, have very strict limitations in terms of available memory and processing power. So it's no wonder that they remind us of the old days of leet assembly coding.

Fortunately, however, this trend is making a (modest) comeback nowdays, in the form of procedural design. Remember how Will Wright kept talking on and on about how "procedurally generated" Spore will be? Procedural textures, procedural models, procedural animations, procedural mating, you name it. It's the future, and it's already there for the taking.

Actually, it's been here for like 15 years, but like I sayd: devs are lazy.

(N.B. Archive text, links removed)