DVDs are big enough for Next-Gen + File sizes for X360 launch games

[Shifty Geezer]

Haven't read the article. I'm responding to the OP's quoted figures...

Condemned: 3.9 GB
Madden 06 NFL: 3.3 GB
Dead or Alive 4: 5 GB
NBA 06: 4.5 GB

Historically, how did PS2 and XB games grow (or not) from launch size to later games? IIRC from talks on this forum, a lot of PS2 game launched on CD. So the real question is what are future games going to consume? DOA 4 is already over half-way the space of the disc. I don't see that it's safe to say games won't be going over 8.5GB. Well, it is safe to say that as developers will limit themselves to that much! They're not likely to produce an 11 GB game if they can avoid it. But looking at Nintendo GC, their games were mostly on 1.5 GB discs, so does that mean XB and PS2's extra capacity went unused?

This is one of those questions that can't really be answered until a couple of years down the line, where the benefits or lack thereof of BRD can be compared to DVD.

 

[groper]

Haven't read the article. I'm responding to the OP's quoted figures...
Historically, how did PS2 and XB games grow (or not) from launch size to later games?...

This is why you have to read the article. :smile:

 

[!eVo!-X Ant UK]

Condemned: 3.9 GB

Madden 06 NFL: 3.3 GB

Dead or Alive 4: 5 GB

NBA 06: 4.5 GB

So launch games dont fill the disk, but what about 2nd,3rd,4th gen games???

 

[Platon]

So launch games dont fill the disk, but what about 2nd,3rd,4th gen games???

Wasn't that the whole point of that article, that the absolute majority of games will most probably not grow so much as to surpass that limitations of the DVD, and even more since new technologies are comming along that intend to make things smaller, e.g. procedural synthesis...

 

[Phil]

No, actually this is the argument I've always been hearing.

It only takes a bit of common-sense to realize that anything is always enough if it's the only option. It's like forming an argument that at least 32 sound channels are required - you can have less than that and it would only result in having less options available. Point is, the more you offer, the more likely you are to give developers the necessary freedom and options in reaching their goal and vision.

Blu-Ray (more space), network interface, sound-output, graphics-output, digital-optical out, harddrive etc... they all give developers options.

You can go on and on believing what you want is possible on DVD, yet the matter of fact IS that Blu-Ray as a medium offers more size and this can ammount to potential advantages that can help developers reach their goal/vision. If developers use this advantage or not, is up to them. Some will, some won't. Some games may be possible even on DVD, yet some may be difficult to accomplish and may never see the light due to medium-size constraints. There's really no point in arguing this further, really.

 

[Pugger]

I agree that hardware gives developers more options. If they make use of them or not is entirely up to them. However in some instances developers make use of these options when I wish they wouldn't. MGS for instance, I wish they were only able to use CD’s. This would have saved me from the hours of inane and frankly embarrassing cut scenes which for me destroyed the game. As for storage space I can see what advantage a single disk has over multiples in that you dont have to press a button and swap a disk. However bar that what can be archeived on BR that can't on DVD's in a gaming sense? Nothing as far as I can see bar the fact that they maybe, just maybe developers may require more than one disk, which is hardly a technical barrier to stop a game seeing the light of day. it’s just not an issues for me as a consumer, I couldn’t give a monkeys if it’s on 2 disks or even more and I suggest nor do 99% of the game playing population.

 

[Platon]

Sorry, but couldn't resist. The bolded parts added by me That was unnecessary by me, and not necessarily 100% true, so take it as a joke mostly.

I do agree on the increased costs, but as the demands of gameplayers increase, they have little options left than to supply.
Gamers are starting to except more varied game universes, not the same brown tile corridor with an odd detail texture added here and there for variety, or the same troll instanced 200x with identical animations, and that I expect take more space and resources and money.

No probs , I am sure many will find Morrowind like that.

As for the varied universes I agree and I have thought so for some time and truth be told there are a lot of games that have gone away from the corridor shooting like Far Cry et.al. and actually I would say pure corridor shooters aren't all that many now. Now variety doesn't always mean more space, or atleast not much more space. In the example of the trolls 200, identical ones could take as much space as 200 unique ones, depending on how unique they are. You could use the same assets in both cases but you have a some values that change from one troll from to an other to make them unique, a little bit like the last project offset demo...

 

[tema]

It only takes a bit of common-sense to realize that anything is always enough if it's the only option. It's like forming an argument that at least 32 sound channels are required - you can have less than that and it would only result in having less options available. Point is, the more you offer, the more likely you are to give developers the necessary freedom and options in reaching their goal and vision.

Blu-Ray (more space), network interface, sound-output, graphics-output, digital-optical out, harddrive etc... they all give developers options.

You can go on and on believing what you want is possible on DVD, yet the matter of fact IS that Blu-Ray as a medium offers more size and this can ammount to potential advantages that can help developers reach their goal/vision. If developers use this advantage or not, is up to them. Some will, some won't. Some games may be possible even on DVD, yet some may be difficult to accomplish and may never see the light due to medium-size constraints. There's really no point in arguing this further, really.

IAWTP. The common sense in this argument , article or whatever is not big enough!

 

[inefficient]

Regarding xbox games not exceeding ~50% of the disc.

I guess one really good reason to only fill 50% or less would be to pack all the data on the outside of the disc where transfer rates are the fastest.

The slowest part of a DVD sized optical disc is roughly half the speed of the fastest part of the disc.

A 360 game that begins to push the space limitations on dvd9 is going to have to face these performance characteristics somehow. I think this will be a tricky problem for 360 devs.

 

[weaksauce]

Haven't read the article. I'm responding to the OP's quoted figures...
Historically, how did PS2 and XB games grow (or not) from launch size to later games? IIRC from talks on this forum, a lot of PS2 game launched on CD. So the real question is what are future games going to consume? DOA 4 is already over half-way the space of the disc. I don't see that it's safe to say games won't be going over 8.5GB. Well, it is safe to say that as developers will limit themselves to that much! They're not likely to produce an 11 GB game if they can avoid it. But looking at Nintendo GC, their games were mostly on 1.5 GB discs, so does that mean XB and PS2's extra capacity went unused?

This is one of those questions that can't really be answered until a couple of years down the line, where the benefits or lack thereof of BRD can be compared to DVD.

Some games don't make it to the GC and some have to be cut down (I'm thinking of ghost recon).
RE4 on ps2 got extra features, levels, gun.

 

[Phil]

However bar that what can be archeived on BR that can't on DVD's in a gaming sense? Nothing as far as I can see bar the fact that they maybe, just maybe developers may require more than one disk, which is hardly a technical barrier to stop a game seeing the light of day. it’s just not an issues for me as a consumer, I couldn’t give a monkeys if it’s on 2 disks or even more and I suggest nor do 99% of the game playing population.

Depending on the game, swapping disks may not be an option. A possible example would be a GTA kind of game that perhaps models the city of London like the Getaway. One of the possible ways to make such a game would be if you split up the city in zones and have redundant blocks of data swapp in and out of memory when you cross those zones. If the player has to cross such zones multiple times througout the game, having to swap disks at every cross-over may not be a feasable option. Even if the developer could find ways to restructure data and those zones to make it feasable on multiple disks, time/money/effort constraints may be the limiting factor.

Other possible drawbacks to the DVD space available would be that at some point, the entire disk may be used up without having any room for redundant data. Seek times are the most expensive factors that can lead to unbarable loading times depending on where the engine has to fetch its data from - that can either lead to a seriously bad gaming experience for the end-user, which is why I would assume that Xbox360 developers include the DVD size limitation into their deisgn choices. As I already pointed out though, I am interested to see what will happen if PS3 devs want to port over to the Xbox360 at some later point and then have to deal with such topics. That may or may not result in the game not being ported since too much would have to be changed to make it work.

These are of course hypthotetical examples - and not by any stretch unrealistic. Guess will have to wait to find out how those barriers will be overcome.

 

[Nesh]

This has been debated for ages. But here's the first in-depth article I've read on the subject. They appear to be pretty spot on. Check it out:

http://www.gamesfirst.com/?id=1132

Some interesting tidbits. Here are some 360 launch game sizes:


Condemned: 3.9 GB

Madden 06 NFL: 3.3 GB

Dead or Alive 4: 5 GB

NBA 06: 4.5 GB


Also the HUGE morrowind on Xbox was only 900MB. Grand Theft Auto III is a paltry 733 megabytes, compared to Grand Theft Auto Vice City's still paltry 1.2 gigs.

Check out the article, very nice write up

Ahm...i dont know about you but the article and these numbers actually convince me even more that the DVD format is not enough.

Also in the article it mentions percentages of the average game.Most games are crap, mediocre and dont take much from the disk's space since they are not demanding.The average is misleading
I d like to see though how much storage the best games use which are the ones that us gamers are interested on.
Also I am curious to see some PS2 game figures

The 360 examples above arent even close to be considered as demanding or complex games.The difference is mostly graphical and nothing more.They are launch games and they already reached these numbers.

I wouldnt find it strange if the limit of the disk will be reached in 3 years time.

I estimate that the best games will demand atleast 13-17 GB size.On BR I think we might see a game around 20GB for sure someday

I am not expecting a dev to use full capacity of the BR though.Not even half of it.How much is its storage again?50GB?I forgot but I know it has incredibly more than needed.

PS: I remember similar conversations back at DC/PS2/GC launch btw.The sure thing is that the CD has been surpassed almost 10 times.
I see games like the next Getaway if it will exist needing more than 9 GB of storage.

 

[Platon]

Ahm...i dont know about you but the article and these numbers actually convince me even more that the DVD format is not enough.

Also in the article it mentions percentages of the average game.Most games are crap, mediocre and dont take much from the disk's space since they are not demanding.The average is misleading
I d like to see though how much storage the best games use which are the ones that us gamers are interested on.
Also I am curious to see some PS2 game figures

The 360 examples above arent even close to be considered as demanding or complex games.The difference is mostly graphical and nothing more.They are launch games and they already reached these numbers.

I wouldnt find it strange if the limit of the disk will be reached in 3 years time.

I estimate that the best games will demand atleast 13-17 GB size.On BR I think we might see a game around 20GB for sure someday

I am not expecting a dev to use full capacity of the BR though.Not even half of it.How much is its storage again?50GB?I forgot but I know it has incredibly more than needed.

PS: I remember similar conversations back at DC/PS2/GC launch btw.The sure thing is that the CD has been surpassed almost 10 times.
I see games like the next Getaway if it will exist needing more than 9 GB of storage.

I don't think that you read the atcile since they mention what you just said. Some of the top games are also some of the smallest, for example DoomIII and halflife 2 around 2-3 gigas while the Terminator: rise of the machines is closer to 6 gigas. Would you say that Terminaotr was better than the other two. Or the example between Azuric and Far Cry, where Far Cry is head and shoulders above Azurik in almost everything it is only 500MB bigger in file size. Also you maybe misted the point that many games are also getting smaller, there are several examples of games where the second iteration has had a smaller filesize...

 

[_phil_]

i've heard of a certain ps3 launch game,with the developper having some trouble fitting into the Blue ray disc....

 

[inefficient]

Relinking an article by a Naughty Dog dev on this whole space issue.

"Xbox 360 with no HD-DVD = mistake"
http://greggman.com/edit/editheadlines/2005-08-17.htm

He calculates that Jak3 would have been 10-14gigs if it was targeted for the next gen consols abilities.

Is this an over simplification, yes but it's not that far off the mark. To give a very concrete example, Tim Sweeney of Unreal fame told us that a single character in Gears of War uses a 2048x2048 texture. Given that next gen characters need at least a color map and a normal/height map a 2048x2048 texture is 32MEG just for the texture of one single character. Nearly the entire memory of a PS2 or 1/2 the memory of an XBox just to texture one single character. Yes, you can compress the texture, you could also compress the texture on the old systems too. The point is even if you compress them their relative sizes are still going to be 8x to 12x in size which means the data is going to grow 8 to 12 times.

 

[Hardknock]

inefficient, he's got to be talking about PC. I don't see how Xbox 360 or PS3 would have 2048x2048 textures, when they only output games at 720p?

 

[Phil]

Let me bite:

The PS3 will be able to store more data with their blu-ray discs, but that won't necessarily mean that they'll be any less limited in their creativity. It might simply give developers more room to be sloppy in their programing.

While that is true, again, I am going to be very interested to see how those developers [that use the available space inefficiently] tackle the problem of porting over their games onto a different system that not only is quite different but also offers significantly less space.

Sloppy programming - or in other words using available space inefficiently doesn't necessarely mean that those developers aren't doing a good job - they might just be cutting corners like they all have to, to meet their deadlines. In an ideal world, where resources and time are infinite, of course every developer could use all the time and resources in the world to come up with the best most elegant and efficient solution. Reality is quite different though. There will be many cases in where developers won't go through the effort to make sure they use everything as efficiently as possible - the space is there, so they will use it one way or the other.

Also, there's one thing I'm missing in that article to make an "intelligent debate" possible:

Possible reasons why Xbox games are smaller than what they could have been, is because of the built in harddrive that was possibly used to pre-buffer data before going into memory. Xbox360 won't have that luxory since it won't have a harddrive in its most basic form. These things can affect the design-process of a game.

 

[rounin]

EDIT: some more

Heres a screenie from a certain site with the rips. Note that the sizes are of the game RARed. From experience, unRaring will usually add at least 1gig-2gigs to the size.

PGR3 is using 6.54gigs RARed.

That article is pretty biased.

 

[wco81]

How much data is Tiger Woods 360 using?

Whatever it is, you figure the next year's version will use a lot more as it should have more than 3 course or whatever the number they have now.

The reduced number of courses in the X360 version, along with the $60 price, was a sore point for many.

Other launch games like Madden are also missing features from the current generation.

 

[inefficient]

inefficient, he's got to be talking about PC. I don't see how Xbox 360 or PS3 would have 2048x2048 textures, when they only output games at 720p?

Gears of War is a xbox360 exclusive and not targeting the PC.
http://www.igniq.com/2005/05/epic-no-pc-version-of-gears-of-war-in.html

And this is a skin for a 3d model. You can only see "some" of the texture at a time - the part facing you or at least visible to you. They aren't trying to show 2048x2048 of character texture data on screen all at once.