Yall know how Sonic Colors got screwed because the developer Sega hired ran all the stage/background assets through a program that did like an AI-upscaling of the polygonal models, causing severely bloated poly counts and basically un-optimized the game to a point where they had to lock it to 30fps on Switch even though it was a damn Wii game?
...I wonder if it'd be possible to do the opposite. Like run the background assets of a bigass hi-fi game like FFVII-R through a program that automatically trims and lowers polygon complexity to help reduce the filesize for fitting on carts?
Technically you can, but it can also lead to unwanted artefacts, so its not a "do and done" kinda deal, more a "do and check and correct/finish by hand". I asume that in many cases less comples and minor assets get threated that way, and stuff like main charactere models would be done completly by hand. But im not to versed in this field to know how they handle it. I was shocked a few years ago to hear that a friend of mine was reducing complexity by hand, but by now they do use some software there. (but they also have rather simple models, in the area of AR furniture visualisation)
the former is just subdividing
the latter is auto lod generator
this is slightly missrepresenting, the first one is a simple thing, and what if the intent was to have it as a box, then the software would have made a ball of say a cardboard box in the game. if you just blindly give it a model, and say the character has a sharp shoulder guard, without further information it would probably curve the edges, which goes against the design.
With the later its actually easier to analyse the intended way it should look, since you analyse the curvature, and if it is less pronounced then the model generally is when there is a curvature, or if there is a clear edge, then you can keep that more as it is.
Maybe that was the point you wanted to communicate...without more text i was not shure.
It's been gone over by a couple users here, and I've done some google sleuthing too and it seems to be at least partially due to uncompressed audio and textures. Not necessarily reduced quality, just lack of compression. Compression on the Switch version could make a pretty big difference with the only trade-off being a bit of power required to decompress files as the load, which would impact.. what would it impact, smart Fami? Framerate? Load times?
there are 2 types of compression.
Losless compression: you decompress it and it retains all details, but decompression needs space (since for actual use you still have to store the full uncompressed texture somewhere) and processing time for decompressing.
This is good for reducing file size, but not ideal for switch, since it still has less RAM and processing power, so it would increase load times, and if the things are decompressed during gameplay could lead to stutter/lowered framerate/slowdowns/pop in + the storage could just not be enough for all the assets.
Lossy compression (say, mp3, jpeg,...):
you reduce the details. say you have a jpeg in 4k resolution, and one in 1080p. if you watch them both on a 1080p screen, you dont lose much when you throw away the additional detail of the 4k one, but you have 1/4 of the data to store.
Most formats that will be used are a combination:
first lossy compression to remove unececary details and size,
and then losless compression to squeze it slightly smaller if thats possible (usually with a codec that the hardware is able to extract with a dedicated circuit, instead of on the cpu... also why cernei talked about kraken compression on the PS5...because having a dedicated part of your chip that is designed for this operations is way more efficient then doing it with the generall computing logic...but makes only sense if its somethign that your system needs a lot. A typical example are hardware video encoders)
It is always a balance between quality, storage space, and resources when its about games.
which means, doing it automatically will never be the optimal solution, but doing it manually on an asset by asset basis is rather expensive, which is one of many factors in deciding if a port is feasable.
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