Not as far-fetched a scenario as in a sane world it should be. I could imagine the next version of Chrome running a local mini-Gemini instance with a custom system prompt __"You are a fast, secure, and error-free Javascript JIT compiler.."_

And "social justice warriors" are very much a "fucking chud" thing to give shit about.

I don't doubt they saved that much- you can naively downsample a 512x512 texture to 20x20 and it will take up less 98% space and look about 98% more ass. And clearly what they invented looks better than that blurry blocky alternative, but how much better? It's sure not 100% as good as the normal hi-res, and at short distance, maybe worse because you notice the hard edged Art Deco shapes more than you would notice the blurryness.

Maybe looks as good as a really well made 128x128 antialiased texture that's 1/16 the size, with hardware filtering, but that's the subjective part, which is why it's a meaningless saving figure.

And the 'meh' screenshots matter, because now that you're only taking up 2% of your old texture size, are you using that to make your texture maps look 50x as vivid, or 50x as detailed, 50x as varied, or just 50x awesome on some way, vs. what they are or otherwise would have been? From the screenshots; no. Not seeing it.

They're able to use such small textures by drawing things in a way that fits the shapes. So the art team probably likes this even less than the other developers ( also less likely than the coders to complain because they "have an art job*- at a game studio- in the 2020s ) for having to learn a janky, probably-vibe-coded internal tool to draw all their stuff instead of Krita and Aseprite or whatever.

Gonna say yes- but that's because they don't sound very significant.

First, the 98% texture memory reduction is a made up BS statistic, ignore that.

Second, people have been dealing with blurry stretched out textures since Mario 64 and Quake 1 so it's the way you expect a too-close texture to degrade and it's not that bad- it's not clear that degrading into high-resolution triangles and circles and arcs instead would be an improvement. Looking at the screenshots, I am not impressed by how those textures look- even if it's justified as going with the game's style, subjectively I think they looks kind of ass.

I'm even going to guess that none of the other devs at the game company are as impressed by this gimmick as the guy who came up with it but they have to pretend to be because he's their boss.

He frames them not failing as a bad thing, by the way. Otherwise he'd get his Republican card confiscated and Business Insider wouldn't platform him. "The dirty lazy poors will get too used to all that free stuff and get uppity and demand more, which will eventually cut into the ability of the investor class- you and me, the only worthy people who matter- to maximize our earnings."

I imagine when you're knitting socks by hand- (or with whatever medieval sock loom may have been available?) it's going to take you almost as long to just make a plain white one. But after the first about two of those you get really bored. Even more so if you were making a full floor size rug. So maybe the motivation for the 'unnecessary design' on everything back then was less about the customer's vanity than the artisan's sanity.