The hook with FUEL is that the gameworld is procedurally generated. I’ve done some procedural design myself (example) and I’m really excited to see procedural techniques making their way into mainstream games. Up until recently, only indies and experimental projects like .kkrieger used procedural content. Spore is the other major title to give procedural content a go, but a lot of people looked at that stuff and couldn’t picture how it could be used to make anything besides more Spore. I think FUELsolidifies the idea that procedural content can be used in existing genres of games, and that it will become more important as game content becomes increasingly expensive to produce.

You’d need four bytes of height data for every point in order to produce nice rolling hills. You’d need at leastanother couple of bytes for surface information like texture mapping / foliage / surface behavior etc. This will hold data defining the surface, letting the game know that this little patch of land is made up of grass, mud, clay, or one of a dozen different colors of rock and dirt. Then there will be a few bytes for controlling the placement of shrubs and trees. This is a really conservative estimate, and in practice you can easily end up with a lot more than that. But assuming just twelve measly bytes per point - each single one meter square of the terrain taking less data than the sentence you’re reading right now - the final size of the gameworld comes to 196,608,000,000 bytes of data, or about 196 gigabytes. You would need a stack of around forty DVD disks just to hold the terrain.