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- URL: https://x.com/rfleury/status/2029607813341917570
- Author: Ryan Fleury (@rfleury)
- Posted: 2026-03-05 17:19:45
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1/ @rfleury
This ignores an important shift in the gaming industry, which is the dominance of art & production teams in producing content, and the shrinking role of programming teams doing the same. And that does have a major impact on download sizes.
When a programmer is in charge of content, they try to get as much content out of as few assets as possible. Assets are broken down into generalized pieces which can be pieced together for a larger variety of purposes. That “piecing together” is a programming task, which is why it works.
On the other hand, when an artist alone is in charge of content, they naturally develop less “building block”-like assets, as they’re trying to investigate a cohesive artistic vision. When there’s a need for a new asset, there’s not really a good mechanism for the artist to programmatically reconfigure existing assets to fit that need, so they will either duplicate an asset & tweak, or create the new asset from scratch. This is true for textures, shaders, materials, models, and so on.
This development process eliminates obvious wins from deduplication and compression, because subtle and slightly mutated pieces across many assets could theoretically be deduplicated & programmatically reused, but it’s impossible to do that without a comprehensive audit of all assets, something that no team really wants to (or can) do.
Branches: 2026-03-05-_Volodian_-strongly-agree-realism-was-a-cause-and-largely, 2026-03-05-attamayte1-i-agree-with-the-conclusion-but-these-examples, 2026-03-05-BoganBits-7zip-compresses-across-files-similar-files, 2026-03-05-CraigHRowland-programmers-also-build-better-games-than-art, 2026-03-05-dervish_candela-i-expected-a-ragebait-turn-any-second-with, 2026-03-05-etodanik-tbh-most-games-do-have-this-pipeline-its-just-a, 2026-03-05-fibrous__-i-also-think-a-big-reason-that-programmers-reuse, 2026-03-05-itchylol-you-provide-no-source-but-you-talk-confidently-i, 2026-03-05-lxopetrucci-the-problem-is-that-the-west-refuses-to-keep, 2026-03-05-MezzaBonSens-needs-extensive-early-planning-if-you-want-that, 2026-03-05-Rev0verDrive-every-3d-shader-artist-i-know-works-on-making, 2026-03-05-RoseSilicon-look-the-compiled-machine-code-is-like-a-few, 2026-03-05-WickyNilliams-the-strive-for-realism-in-games-was-a-loss-on, 2026-03-06-flashmozzg-dont-forget-outsourcing-asserts-are-all, 2026-03-06-JAZAPATAA-i-think-your-analysis-glosses-over-a-lot-of-the, 2026-03-06-JoeWilsonEQ1-bad-take-is-bad-the-assumption-that-artists-arent, 2026-03-06-SpectoCustodes-this-is-genuinely-a-place-where-ai-might-be, 2026-03-06-thelinxiproject-imo-if-more-artists-and-programmers-were, 2026-03-06-TribunalDev-this-is-the-main-contributing-factor-i-worked-on