Is data size development’s greatest hurdle?

Black Rock Studio’s technical director David Jefferies has highlighted a growing problem in high-end developing; data size and asset generation.

Writing in a new blog entry for Develop, Jefferies suggests that when developing for games that showcase ambitious visuals built on cutting edge tech techniques, managing data size is a persistent problem at the core of numerous trials the sector faces.

"Gameplay might be king, but many of the challenges of this industry still revolve around the asset generation and rendering required for high fidelity graphical images," said Jefferies.

In the face of such challenges, Disney-owned Black Rock Studio is already developing tech to help it overcome the hurdles data size presents by concentrating on live update friendly pipelines.

"Looking to the future, we’re trying to mitigate the main technical problem that keeps coming back at us – data size. We had one crack at this a couple of years ago when we wrote our distributed build system but, since, our export times have continued to climb and our source assets just get bigger," he added.

To read the full blog, in which Jefferies details Black Rock’s solution to the problem click here.