Among all the applications we have on our mobile, video games are surely the most demanding, both in terms of battery consumption and space. This is irremediable because they are a task that requires a lot of data, not only in textures, but in physics, logic and other resources such as music and connectivity.
Any small improvement can mean a big change, and Google is increasingly striving to make Android a system in which the playable experience is the best possible. Just a few days ago Google unveiled a tool for developers to improve the performance of their games while reducing battery consumption, and today we know of another technology capable of making games occupy much less.
Google’s new technique to reduce space in games
Watch video
Google continues to work on improving the gaming experience on Android, and has been based on the technology we know as the App Bundle, a technology that reduces the size of applications by segmenting them based on what our mobile needs and saving on downloading unnecessary packages.
In the same way that applications used to store unnecessary information, games include textures to be compatible with any title, something that takes up extra space on our mobile to not provide any benefit. As texture compression has evolved, the same image quality can be achieved using less storage and memory, but more advanced techniques only work on newer graphics processors.
Asphalt Extreme.
As it does not make sense that a game is prepared to support all kinds of textures if your mobile is only going to use the most advanced compressed texture format to which it has access, from now on developers will be able to mark their game so that, when someone download it from Google Play, the app store itself download only the best supported textures. According to data from Gameloft, Aphalt Xtreme has been able to reduce the size of the game by 30% on devices compatible with ASTC.
If you are a video game developer and you want to apply these improvements to your creations, we recommend that you read the original Google ad here. If you also use the Unity 3D game development engine, you can use theplugin official Google to prepare your game.
The entry Google’s new trick to make your mobile games take up less space appears first in The Free Android.
