On the vast, boundless desert, a... well, a white, solid cube is rapidly moving horizontally.
The bottom of the box rolled over the sand, leaving no trace of crushing, but the dust it stirred up and the rapidly receding trail made its speed readily apparent.
This is certainly not Saudi Arabia, nor is it Iraq.
This is... the electronic world.
"Look at the radar, turn right 100 feet ahead. We've set up an anti-aircraft gun position there."
"Receive."
Upon hearing the message through the earpiece, Tailaipu immediately responded by pushing the joystick to adjust the direction.
As the "tank," or this white box, drew a beautiful curve on the sand, its front end suddenly burst through a cloud of dust that blotted out the sky, and the air defense position not far away came into view.
Or rather... it's the same white box, only slightly larger.
"Bang"
A cheap-sounding door slamming shut echoed out of nowhere, and a smaller... white box appeared in front of the white box that Tailaipu was piloting.
It's all white boxes! This is clearly the character controlled by Tailaipu.
He moved quickly, trying to get closer to the "anti-aircraft vehicle" not far away.
But it's clear that someone has already noticed his actions.
Before he could even run a few steps...
"Boom!"
A deafening explosion rang out not far from him.
The sandstorm immediately reduced visibility by several levels.
Tailaipu was startled and wished he could speed up as fast as he could, practically tumbling and crawling into the anti-aircraft vehicle.
"Beep beep beep--"
In the air defense radar's field of view, the Support aircraft circling overhead was clearly visible and was quickly locked onto by the radar.
"I've locked onto the enemy aircraft. Repeat, I've locked onto the enemy aircraft."
"Copy." Meanwhile, on Lin Lixin's side...
"Missile lock! Missile lock!"
The missile lock-on alarm kept going off, using old sound effects from Ace Combat, but it felt particularly fitting here.
"They moved pretty quickly..."
Seeing that there was no way he could get the fries, he had no choice but to throw out a hot tinderbox and run away quickly.
Once his long, white box landed on the runway, Lin Lixin took off his headset, stood up, and nodded in satisfaction.
"Okay, now I can say with 100% certainty... the feasibility study was a complete success!"
"Long live!"
The others in the room cheered almost in unison.
This is a closed room at Gamenova's headquarters, with two sets of computers arranged in a row, designed to the specifications of a top-of-the-line internet cafe.
For any online content or PC game testing, the entire development department will first conduct preliminary rough testing here.
The task of this test is simple: to check the operation of LOD and fog effects on a large map, and whether the server-side interest management and dynamic broadcasts are functioning correctly.
Therefore, apart from a few models used to test graphics card performance, all other entities were made of white cubes, with smoothness being the top priority.
The test results did not disappoint.
Based on the data collected from several PCs with different configurations, it performed even better than expected.
The desert is practically the most suitable environment for computers, second only to the void, which is truly "nothingness."
The abundance of simple terrain allows for complete freeing up of memory and video memory. Only the necessary parts of the content need to be cached, and the entire world can be continuously filled with one or a few textures.
The overall visibility control was even better than expected.
"This is... unbelievable..."
A few days ago, when he heard Lin Lixin say that "the game map is bigger than your factory," he didn't actually believe it.
Well... that's not entirely true.
When Tailaipu realized that Lin Lixin wasn't joking, his first thought was of those top-down 2D Tile Map from the era of Command & Conquer or Fire Emblem.
At that scale, even an entire mega-factory used to produce heavy machinery would only be a small section of it. Considering the issue of scale, Lin Lixin's statement is actually quite accurate.
In Command & Conquer, a single map is equivalent to an entire Battlezone.
Can...
What do you mean by saying you made a 3D FPS game?
A 1:1 scale representation, and the entire game map is even larger than the Marietta Plant?
wtf?
But the facts are right here.
Gamenova really did it.
It's not just bigger than the Marietta Plant; it's bigger than all the surrounding facilities of Marietta combined.
A complete runway, an endless desert, rolling Dune...
If you didn't have a vehicle at the start of the game, you wouldn't even be able to explore the entire battlefield on foot.
"Such a large map, could it be that Gamenova... has developed a new type of disc?" This is a big deal.
In his understanding, such a vast game world would probably be difficult to fit on a single 700MB disc.
Not to mention that space needs to be reserved for various boot files.
The total usable capacity is only a little over 600MB.
Under these conditions, it would be impossible for Gamenova to fit such a large game map inside.
They must have achieved some new breakthrough in the laboratory.
It is foreseeable that in the near future, the prices of several material-related companies will likely rise for several more days.
"Of course not. CD-ROMs aren't even widespread yet. If we introduce a new standard now, all the user base we've worked so hard to build will just go to waste."
Lin Lixin laughed and shook his head.
"We used some... 'black technology' to create this desert map. If you remove all other elements in the scene, such as vehicles and buildings, the actual map size is only... 8MB."
Tailaipu's neck stiffened, nearly scared to death by the sudden snap. "Young Master... Young Master?"
"8mb. If we compress the height map further, the size can probably be reduced a little more."
Lin Lixin was very satisfied with his performance.
That's right, that's more like it.
The core members of the gamenova group have all reached a very high threshold; normal boasting no longer gets them emotionally affected.
These guys are used to the miracles their boss pulls.
But for Tailaipu, who was practically an "outsider," this was terrifying.
8MB, if this were ten years ago... let alone ten years ago, even five years ago, it would have been unimaginable.
Back then, most people's storage capacity was still in the kilobyte (KB) range, and a game cartridge with 64KB was considered a AAA title.
Later, Gamenova managed to create a 256kb cartridge of the green-skinned caliber using bank technology, which was already an astonishing feat.
But what about now?
Just five years later, thanks to the efforts of companies like Sony, Gamenova, 3DO, and Dell, CD-ROMs have begun to gradually enter households. A capacity of hundreds of megabytes is no longer something found only in science fiction.
A CD costing just a few dollars can easily hold hundreds of megabytes of content, enough to store a lossless original soundtrack!
In this day and age, 8MB is practically nothing.
"You mean... without any new storage media, entirely through software and program implementation, you compressed such a large world down to only 8MB? Are you sure you're not kidding me?"
"Hey-hey..."
In response, Lin Lixin could only say, "Praise to the ancestor Shannon!"
Why can desert maps be compressed to this extent, but other maps can't?
The answer to this question was given decades ago, in 1948, by Claude Shannon, the father of information theory.
"The information entropy of the desert is too low; we can store it with less information."
Entropy, or information entropy, is an important concept in information theory and the foundation of all modern compression algorithms.
In fact, looking back at Lin Lixin's connection with information entropy, it actually began many years ago, during the Fire Emblem era.
During that period, the collaboration between Electronic Games and Gamenova was heating up. Fire Emblem, with its excellent strategic depth and groundbreaking turn-based RPG gameplay, quickly became the top game of its time.
It was around this time that Lin Lixin created a "DLC" for Fire Emblem.
Map editor.
Everyone can design their own game map, import it into the game, or share it with others for a challenge.
The method for sharing maps is very ingenious.
It referenced the then-prevalent cryptographic archiving technology.
The entire game map was compressed into a string of characters and published in a magazine.
Players simply need to input the information above to play on the same map as everyone else.
This solution significantly boosted the sales of "electronicgames" during that period, and even now, new maps are still being shared from time to time for everyone to challenge.
It has simply become a tool for skilled players to use in their games.
Compressing an entire game map in Fire Emblem into a string of characters is essentially the same idea as compressing the entire desert world to 8MB.
Thanks to the tile system and the relatively small number of tiles, Fire Emblem's map actually has very low information entropy. More importantly, the world always follows certain patterns; grasslands are always adjacent to grasslands, and water is always next to water.
Information entropy is a metric used to measure the uncertainty of a system.
The more unpredictable, irregular, and complex the changes, the higher the information entropy.
vice versa.
It's like how modern people share their Wi-Fi password with others.
"Eight 8s", "1 to 8", "my mobile number", etc., are all manifestations of "information compression".
The owner doesn't need to say the complete 88888888; they only need to tell the other person that there are eight eights, and the other person will naturally be able to relieve the pressure.
In a sense, the human brain is the most sophisticated and ingenious wet-component computer.
Combining memory with external storage allows for incredibly fast addressing and information transfer at an efficiency incomprehensible to silicon-based systems.
Similarly, deserts are highly regular, predictable, and have little variation in their terrain.
Compression algorithms can compress large amounts of repetitive data into extremely short segments.
Even the texture maps are highly repetitive and low-entropy. Everything is so perfect.