Interesting article. I think it would be really stupid to not reuse stuff if your game is set in a realistic universe (would be different for a cartoonish universe).
In fact, it would even be a way to avoid using AI (even if I think we’ll end up with devs reusing stuff and using AI).
Then you can use colors or lighting to create a different feel to the game, just like different movie directors can film the same place in a totally different way.
Or, to put it another way…if you aren’t spending your assets on modeling and texturing and animating a bear for the thirtieth time the industry has done so, you can be off modeling and texturing and animating a space squid or something new, and having both it in game as well as a bear that looks kind of like bears in other games.
And if you have One Bear Model that lasts for N years that most of the industry uses, it can be a really good bear model.
Like, there are a lot of ways that efficiency gains could be expressed.
If only there was a communal source of assets that people and companies can contribute to and pull from. If something doesn’t quite fit your game you could instead spend 10 hours editing and adjusting a premade model instead of 40 hours making it from scratch. Then upload the new model for someone else to start with later.
Game engines like unreal engine and unity have huge prefab libraries that contain both free and paid models and people can share or sell their own prefabs too. The problem with those are that you cant just pick models willy nilly as it can make the game feel like patchwork quilt when every asset has little different art style. Also in bigger production games things like polygon counts start to matter a lot, so in some cases its easier to make assets from the ground up than start to fiddle with existing models.
Most bigger studios have pretty large internal libraries they can pull from. Like for example mountain lions in GTA V and Red dead redemption are almost identical. They even use the exactly same sound in both. And bears in Skyrim and Yao Guai in Fallout 4 have same skeleton and some of the animations are fully reused.
I don’t know what the situation is for commercial games — I don’t know if there’s a marketplace like that — but I do remember someone setting up some repository for free/Creative Commons assets a while back.
It’s not highly-structured in the sense that someone can upload, say, a model in Format X and someone else can upload a patch against that model or something like that with improvements and changes, though. Like, it’s not quite a “GitHub of assets”.
I haven’t looked at it over time, but I also don’t think that we’ve had an explosion in inter-compatible assets there. Like, it’s not like a community forms around a particular collection of chibi-style sprite artwork at a particular resolution, and then lots of libre games use those assets, the way RPGMaker or something has collections of compatible commercial assets.
I’m sure that there must be some sort of commercial asset marketplace out there, probably a number, though I don’t know if any span all game asset types or if they permit easily republishing modifications. I know that I’ve occasionally stumbled across a website or two that have individuals sell 3D models.
Interesting article. I think it would be really stupid to not reuse stuff if your game is set in a realistic universe (would be different for a cartoonish universe).
In fact, it would even be a way to avoid using AI (even if I think we’ll end up with devs reusing stuff and using AI).
Then you can use colors or lighting to create a different feel to the game, just like different movie directors can film the same place in a totally different way.
Or, to put it another way…if you aren’t spending your assets on modeling and texturing and animating a bear for the thirtieth time the industry has done so, you can be off modeling and texturing and animating a space squid or something new, and having both it in game as well as a bear that looks kind of like bears in other games.
And if you have One Bear Model that lasts for N years that most of the industry uses, it can be a really good bear model.
Like, there are a lot of ways that efficiency gains could be expressed.
If only there was a communal source of assets that people and companies can contribute to and pull from. If something doesn’t quite fit your game you could instead spend 10 hours editing and adjusting a premade model instead of 40 hours making it from scratch. Then upload the new model for someone else to start with later.
I honestly dont know if this is sarcasm or not.
Game engines like unreal engine and unity have huge prefab libraries that contain both free and paid models and people can share or sell their own prefabs too. The problem with those are that you cant just pick models willy nilly as it can make the game feel like patchwork quilt when every asset has little different art style. Also in bigger production games things like polygon counts start to matter a lot, so in some cases its easier to make assets from the ground up than start to fiddle with existing models.
Most bigger studios have pretty large internal libraries they can pull from. Like for example mountain lions in GTA V and Red dead redemption are almost identical. They even use the exactly same sound in both. And bears in Skyrim and Yao Guai in Fallout 4 have same skeleton and some of the animations are fully reused.
I don’t know what the situation is for commercial games — I don’t know if there’s a marketplace like that — but I do remember someone setting up some repository for free/Creative Commons assets a while back.
goes looking
https://opengameart.org/
It’s not highly-structured in the sense that someone can upload, say, a model in Format X and someone else can upload a patch against that model or something like that with improvements and changes, though. Like, it’s not quite a “GitHub of assets”.
I haven’t looked at it over time, but I also don’t think that we’ve had an explosion in inter-compatible assets there. Like, it’s not like a community forms around a particular collection of chibi-style sprite artwork at a particular resolution, and then lots of libre games use those assets, the way RPGMaker or something has collections of compatible commercial assets.
I’m sure that there must be some sort of commercial asset marketplace out there, probably a number, though I don’t know if any span all game asset types or if they permit easily republishing modifications. I know that I’ve occasionally stumbled across a website or two that have individuals sell 3D models.