Chat with J Allard

Very nice post scooby_dooby. I agree 100% ands its something I have been trying to argue in favour for as well. You just put it sooooo much better than I ever could!

 

Keeping track of object positions in a game like Halo takes next to no RAM. What are you guys talking about?

 

Johnny Awesome - your post - "Keeping track of object positions in a game like Halo takes next to no RAM. What are you guys talking about?"

Is this true? - can you link to something that proves it? It would make me feel a whole lot better about the lack of HDD if it is true.

 

For object positions you need an identifier (which object) position (2 or 3 coordinates) and rotation (3 coordinates). At 16 bits per value thats 14 bytes per object. 10,000 objects takes < 140 kb.

I'm sure gamers agree with you, but the hardware manufacturers don't as it eats a lot into their profit margins. That's the only reason.

To me that's useless overkill. Why is that important? How's about they also simulate road wear-and-tear causing infantismal variation to the road surface over time? For me persistance is only worth considering if it adds to the game. Living populated worlds is one such use, as is destructible environments that you can revisit. Everlasting marks on a road seems pointless and unrealistic.

 

The unrealistic aspect of that is that Tracks are often cleared of debri of any kind, if stuff like that where left on the track, crashes would be more frequent due to the road becoming filed with debri.

 

Nor did I say that it was. Please for gods sake, read the damn posts if you already go through the effort of replying to a specific quote.

Out of curiousity, is there any way of knowing for sure what used the harddrive in ANY way or is this just a humble assumption on your behalf? As far as I know, there's a certain space or partition on the harddrive that is open to be used as temporary space by any game - question is, if there's any way of knowing if a game used that or not?

 

Ya they leave their files there after, with a modded xbox it's as simple as FTP'ing in and checking the x, y and z partitions for files.

Many games routinely leave large cache files >200mb, the cache allows over 700mb for each partition, I've seen some cache files as large as 550mb.

 

That's your opinion, I think it's great. It's not pointless at all as the brake marks signal hard corners and it gives you a heads up on when to brake. It actually becomes easier to drive as the courses get marked up and the hard corners get exposed.

More than that it's just plain cool.

btw - as for persistence adding to a game, the only thing it ever adds is REALISM, and to that end the tire marks in Forza "adds to the game" as much as any other feature.

 

I don't know what you're talking about with some of these games.

Mercenaries? That was also on PS2 and it was the same exact game.

Mechassault 2? The only "persistent" thing about it was the online mode.

And what about Fable was persistent and dependent on the HDD?

 

Another Hardrive Question

As has been stated numerous times before, and re-confirmed in the game industry feedback that NextGen ran last week, developers have been told from the beginning that, because the harddrive is removable, their games need to be able to function with or without it. Since there is such foreknowledge of this on the part of developers, how difficult and/or time consuming is it to code games to take advantage of the hd if it's there?

Also, my understanding is that many of the functions that devs had to code for in the past are now handled automatically by the 360's OS, which in theory should free up some dev time and resources (?). Could the hd be one of those things that the OS could help with?

I guess what I'm wondering is this: So much of the debating is over whether or not devs will take full advantage of the hd - but with knowing that the 360's drive would not always be present, as well as realizing that the primary console, PS3, would not have a harddrive either, how much of an issue is this really? Again, I'm not talking about SKUs, whose lying, etc. but strictly in terms of functionality that can be taken advantage of.

 

I'd say that for realism, the tyre marks on a course aren;t the responsibilty of one car alone. All the cars add to the marks. And assuming that the track has been in use for years before you appear on the scene, there would already be a lot of tyre marks present, to the point that your marks would just blend in with the rest and be unnoticeable. Realistically, Michael Schumacher doesn't turn up to a race track and see his tyre marks from three seasons previous still on the road ;p. I doubt any driver uses tyre-tracks to navigate through corners either unless it's a totally unknown course, in which case it's everyone else's tyre marks that matter.

Whereas in an RPG, rather than just being about realism persistence can be used for gameplay. Your actions in one part of the world can graduly be commincated throughout the rest of the world, changing people's attitude towards you and hence affecting gameplay. eg. Lots of abusing the peasants could make finding allies harder. Of course a lot fo that could be approximated which is what happens when an HD isn't present, in the same way tyre marks could be approximated by not recording the driver's marks, but having a static texture showing several months racing on which, each time the course is raced, the player's tracks are added over the top.

Perhaps true persistencehas yet to be really exploited, as it would require a degree of low-level gameplay complexity not yet considered? eg. Morrowind, where you could if you wanted rearrange all the items in the game world, but in which most of those kinves, forks, bowls etc. you'd never touch. What if the position and arrangement of all those items had influence? What if you could turn your character invisible and rearrange objects, and by doing this over a period convince some villagers the area was haunted? Rather than staying in the area for some game months, you'd move objects, go off and do some exploring/questing while the locals get spooked, return to move some more objects, do some more questing, repeat a few times until the villagers have all left afraid of the poltergeist? What games are there where in an expansive universe you have course to change and return to different environments to change the course of the game?

Still, without HDs in the basic consoles this isn't something we're going to be exploring this generation.

 

YOu haven't been watching prices of hardrives . 70-90$ is a good price for a 20 gig hardrive 2.5 inch sata drive 7200rpm . You find them normaly for 80ish . These are laptop drives .

Now why they didn't go for a desktop drive that would be what 3.25 inchs ? where we could get 330 gigs for a 150$ i have no clue . Guess they felt it would be way to big to attach anywhere to the consoles shell ?

I think its dumb personaly . As it would have been nice to see at least a 100 gig packed in.

But hwat are you going to do . I don't care about price as i know what this stuff costs . Only that the hardrive wont be standard .

 

Yes, it looks like a 2.5" 20Gb retails for about $70+$15 external housing. A 3.5" front loading removable drive bay would've been a much nicer option though!

 

On the plus side it's a fast little drive, SATA@7200rpms, anyone know the throughput on these? Probably in the range of 150MB/s.

I don't mind paying a bit more to get some quality hardware.

 

Is it 7200rpm? I thought it was 5400rpm.

 

Yes, 5400rpm is what seagate say for the LD25.

http://www.seagate.com/content/docs/pdf/marketing/PO-LD25.pdf

 

Will a faster have any worthwhile benefit though, worth the extra money? On a PC the HD's being thrashed all the time, but as the XB360 seems mostly for saves and media a faster disk sounds like it might be overkill for the purpose.

 

sorry my bad . Still can't find many sata drives under 70$ . So thats still only a 30$ mark up .

 

Exactly, theres no real point in getting a better HDD (speed wise) that will not be utilized on the same scale as it would on a PC. What i'm worried about is how much a bigger 20GB drive is going to cost (20Gig isn't alot of space if you want to store media..but I guess thats what streaming if for). I can imagine the 40GB drive going up to $150 (from MS)