2) It's not just me, all of the apps listed have the same issues. I know that in addition to Atlassian, Meta and Canva have sunk millions of dollars into writing custom bundlers.
texture streaming was used on Crash Bandicoot on PS1. Look up the interview with Andy Gavin. And here's an excerpt from Game Developer.
"Andy wrote an incredible paging system that would swap in and out 64K data pages as Crash traversed the level. This was a "full stack" tour de force, in that it ran the gamut from high-level memory management to opcode-level DMA coding. Andy even controlled the physical layout of bytes on the CD-ROM disk so that—even at 300KB/sec—the PS1 could load the data for each piece of a given level by the time Crash ended up there."
That game had a fixed camera on rails though. Theoretically, they could have used a pre-rendered video of the level and just adjust the playback speed. There are some racing games which actually did that. So the asset streaming could be linear and the data arranged accordingly on disk. But that's not how modern texture streaming works, where the camera is assumed to be free. In the worst case scenario, the player can turn the camera around in a second, and the entire texture content has to be replaced in that time.
I think it's overstated that texture streaming didn't happen until two console generations later. Texture streaming was famously used in Crash Bandicoot on the PS1 and extensively on most PS2 titles. However I do understand that with the lens of megatextures it's fun to look at James' accomplishment on the N64 in that light but just know that the N64 doesn't actually have the hardware needed for true modern paged feedback streaming.
I don't think any PS2 games used texture streaming. They used LOD, which is different. (As I argued below, the asset streaming that Crash Bandicoot used was even simpler than LODs because it relied on a fixed camera path.)
I ended up with someone as their only viewer and we bonded quickly, he was happy to have someone there because he was in a really tense situation in Arma - he said he'd never been more frightened. I can vouch - it was a sticky situation - was riveting to watch but he managed to beat all odds and come out on top. He was stoked! Friend for life. ;-)
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