Blade47167
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But you really have burnout and you recently sold Halo 4???
The all new Carmack-inspired disk and HDD installation discussion thread* (spin-off)
- Thread starter Arwin
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But you really have burnout and you recently sold Halo 4???
Right, which is why developers use compression already! You don't need financial penalties as an incentive to get devs to use optimized data. They will use it anyway because the consoles would be rubbish without it! The only thing increased license fees would impact is how much data the devs are willing to use. They will either compress everything beyond 'optimized' to 'low quality', or just design a game with less stuff overall.
You should have deleted the game you sold, why keep it on your harddribe, it´s a 15GB install.
Here's a point I've thought of..Carmack and others should realize DVD instead of Blu Ray is allowing 360 Arcade to sell at 199 soon, which will allow more of his games to be sold because more people will own 360's than otherwise. Maybe it's not ideal from a technical perspective, but a big picture guy like Carmack of all people should know it's a tradeoff.
If there wasn't a "tax", what incentive would there be for developers and publishers of asset heavy titles to spend money on the additional time and resources necessary to squeeze the game down to one disk?
And likewise, where's the incentive to struggle to squeeze high-quality assets onto one disk rather than reduce the asset quality? People aren't looking for making their lives any harder than they have to be, whether that's wrestling with disk space or developer tools or programming paradigms. Any heavy-handed forcing of developers is bad news and won't go down well. If you want a certain 'best behaviour' you want to encourage it through positive means.
Legroom (or headroom).
On PS3, the largest scope is probably to stream from Blu-ray and HDD at the same time. According to its specs, besides the video stream and game data, the former can also handle up to 32 channel of audio streams (dialogue, music, sound effects). I supposed the HDD can focus solely on textures and other critical resources, may be even recording gameplay or PlayTV programs simultaneously.
The gameplay experience can be richer and have less/no pop-ins I guess (See MGS4). The other benefit would be cost/Gb of HDD is way cheaper on a PS3.
The harder part is probably to budget and figure out how to hold all of the working set in memory. NaughtyDog and Insomniac have some of these working.
jandlecack
Banned
Just a heads up; it has been confirmed that you can record TV via PlayTV to the HDD while playing a game or doing allsorts. So your theory has legs.
I'm not aware of any limitation on the 360 that prevents simultaneous use of the hard drive and optical media. It was suggested that the PS3 model of optional installs, where developer selected data (presumably the most seek/latency sensitive) gets copied to the hard disk and the rest of the data gets read from the BR drive was/is the optimal configuration.
My point was that this is already common practice in 360 games when it detects a hard drive. The developer can choose what data gets copied to the hard disk (cache partition) and the rest can be fetched from the DVD. The data maintained within the cache partition although only 2GB, can be managed to be relevant to your progress in the game. The data copied there is persistent between reboots and doesn't need to be re-copied unless overwritten by another game. A developer can also flush the cache to align data on the hard drive a certain way for even greater optimization. Installs are at the mercy of whatever fragmentation level is present. And because the cache is reused, it doesn't matter if you boot 10, 50, or 100 games, have a 20GB, 60GB, or 120GB hard drive; users aren't required to manage space for it.
The whole idea of installs on a console is still a bit foreign to me. I guess on the PS3 there really isn't another way to combat the high seek latency of optical media other than forcing them, but I think swap/cache partitions are still the more elegant solution. Although on the 360, with its DVD size limitations, optionally installing secondary disks on multi-disk titles to avoid disk swapping makes sense.
I understand at a certain user level, (ie. to us here at b3d and me included) that managing disk space, resolution settings, network access, etc. isn't complicated and the fine grain control appreciated. But for Joe Public, a console shouldn't be that complicated. When little Johnny can't play his game because his hard drive is full, and his mom Nancy tries to fix it for him and can't, then you have crossed that line from mass market consumer electronics to hardcore gadget.
My point was that this is already common practice in 360 games when it detects a hard drive. The developer can choose what data gets copied to the hard disk (cache partition) and the rest can be fetched from the DVD. The data maintained within the cache partition although only 2GB, can be managed to be relevant to your progress in the game. The data copied there is persistent between reboots and doesn't need to be re-copied unless overwritten by another game. A developer can also flush the cache to align data on the hard drive a certain way for even greater optimization. Installs are at the mercy of whatever fragmentation level is present. And because the cache is reused, it doesn't matter if you boot 10, 50, or 100 games, have a 20GB, 60GB, or 120GB hard drive; users aren't required to manage space for it.
The whole idea of installs on a console is still a bit foreign to me. I guess on the PS3 there really isn't another way to combat the high seek latency of optical media other than forcing them, but I think swap/cache partitions are still the more elegant solution. Although on the 360, with its DVD size limitations, optionally installing secondary disks on multi-disk titles to avoid disk swapping makes sense.
I understand at a certain user level, (ie. to us here at b3d and me included) that managing disk space, resolution settings, network access, etc. isn't complicated and the fine grain control appreciated. But for Joe Public, a console shouldn't be that complicated. When little Johnny can't play his game because his hard drive is full, and his mom Nancy tries to fix it for him and can't, then you have crossed that line from mass market consumer electronics to hardcore gadget.
Aye, 360 should be able to stream from both DVD and HDD when the developer wants to. They will need to make sure the game pays well on the no-HDD systems at the same time.
So far, the exclusive developers have exploited Blu-ray better though (since they can optimize for the platform fully). In general, these games support more pristine (and richer) sound stage or even in-game video quality. It also means that the CPU has to spend more time decompressing/decoding stuff. As long as the HDD is relieved of streaming these high quality audio, video or other data; then it should have more breathing room for handling more time critical resources within the game or in parallel with the game.
The developers may also use the dual HDD + Blu-ray streaming framework because it is cleaner and easier to do so (instead of optimizing for specific level conditions every time). Afterall, they may need extra time on teething Cell challenges.
I am more interested in the available memory on PS3 today. Most criticisms focused on the limited memory, asymmetric memory model and the high entry price of Blu-ray.
The problem is guaranteed HDD presence. You can't write your game assuming m Megabits/s data from optical drive and n Megabits/s from the HDD. You can only work with the optical drive source and add in some extra caching for any HDDs presence. Thus if streaming megatextures requires 40 Megabits/s and PS3 can manage 50 Mbps HDD and BRD combined, and XB360 can manage 20 Mbps from optical and 40 Mbps from HDD (illustrative figures only!), the XB360 development still has to work with only the 20 Mbps limitation. AFAIK there isn't yet a game where the graphical fidelity is compromised for those without HDD. HDD may improve framerate and reduce pop-in, but it's not allowing for higher quality models or more detailed textures. I don't know the MS would ever approve that if a developer wanted to target HDD.
For megatexturing which is all about storage, PS3 offers HDD+Optical bandwidth. XB360 doesn't, at least without alienating the non-HDD userbase, which would require MS to label the game 'you can't play this game without an HDD'. But then they have done that before.
To my point. It's not that they should, they do. And they only need to make sure the game plays on the no-HDD system, not necessarily well. I'm not aware of a TCR that requires a game to deliver the same experience with and without a hard drive. The experience for a no-HDD player can be reduced. They might spend longer looking at the lower res textures, experience pauses moving between areas, etc.
Shifty Geezer said:
Once again this is no different, since the PS3 argument was for "optional" installs. In the mandatory install case you are right, but as noted, that is not without its own set of issues and per above there is no requirement to deliver the same experience with and without a hard drive.
I think there's an implied limit, even if not an official one (and there may be for all we know) that things like texture and model quality won't be reduced on a non-HDD XB360, because, as far as the consumer is concerned, they're buying the same product. I don't think you could produce a game radically different supporting the HDD - I think you'd have to choose to make it HDD only, and of course get MS's approval on that.
As you say though, if we're talking optional installs, the issue is the same across platforms.
As you say though, if we're talking optional installs, the issue is the same across platforms.
So Carmack has an interview at Toms hardware where he clarifies a couple things:
http://www.tomsgames.com/us/2008/08/07/carmack_interview/
And
Sounds like it will be two DVD's even IF MS compromises..
http://www.tomsgames.com/us/2008/08/07/carmack_interview/
And
Sounds like it will be two DVD's even IF MS compromises..
That is pretty much correct. The blu-ray drive can't compete on load speed to the 360's dvd drive. So at some point Sony changed the load time tcr to a really low number, that for most games is simply impossible to meet with just the blu-ray drive. Hence why all of a sudden games started all requiring mandatory installs on PS3.
There should be more than one way to solve this problem though. Mandatory install seems to be the most straightforward way out, but we have certainly seen games without it, and no load time.
We already know Blu-ray has lower transfer speed than the peak DVD rate, but it also has a higher average transfer across a wider surface. As long as games are designed to take advantage of these characteristics plus HDD cache (as always), we should be able to see more games with large media, no load time and no mandatory install.
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