Do they really load so many spirites into memory it's heavier than 3D?

Sohcahtoa82 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

There are assumptions being made about texture resolution.

The high quality sprites are 64 pixels across per tile. With each tile being 1 meter, 1 pixel is 1.56 cm (About 0.63 inches) across. By today's standards, that's a very low texture resolution, though they can get away with it when your camera is so far away.

But if the game was 3D, you could expect players to put the camera closer to your objects. You'd need significantly higher texture resolutions. And you'd need a texture for each part of the object.

Meanwhile, consider a 3x3 object. That's 192x192 = 36,864 pixels. Assume it has a 60 fps, 2-second animation loop. That's 4,423,680 pixels. With 8 bytes per channel and 4 channels (RGBA), that's about 17.7 MB, which allows you to store 56 objects per GB.

Which doesn't sound like a lot, but we're making some huge assumptions. Not all objects are 3x3 tiles. Most don't have 120 frames of animation.

And as I mentioned in another comment, you don't need to store ALL the game's art in VRAM at once. Only what's on the screen. And you can certainly fit an entire screen's worth of animations in a 2 GB GPU.

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soulbadguy 2 hours ago | parent [-]

> Meanwhile, consider a 3x3 object. That's 192x192 = 36,864 pixels. Assume it has a 60 fps, 2-second animation loop. That's 4,423,680 pixels. With 8 bytes per channel and 4 channels (RGBA), that's about 17.7 MB, which allows you to store 56 objects per GB.

I am assuming that they are laveraging multiple compression technics like using texture specific compression on the gpu, or sub sampling the resolution directly. 8 bytes per channel seems rather large here as well.

	▲	Sohcahtoa82 an hour ago \| parent [-]
		> 8 bytes per channel seems rather large here as well. That was a typo. I meant 8 bits per channel.

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mitxela 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Yes. Several GB. I had to enable half resolution to play modded Space Age.

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sdenton4 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Hmmm... The Factorio team is famously performance oriented, and more scenes are often far less so. Are you sure the problem wasn't the mods? I have good memories of sending my Kerbal frame rates to hell with generous modding, both for graphics and the physics engine.

	▲	lucb1e 2 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		I also struggled with performance in space age and mentioned it to a developer, but the solution was setting a setting which I had tested previously (no fog) and did nothing... on Nauvis. Turns out it's the difference between stuttering and smooth when in space platform view. They do still care but I guess there's only so much you can do if you also have other tasks to get to
	▲	bombcar 2 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Reporting the issue with mods to the team will likely get them to fix something - they're that performance oriented.