Grand Theft Auto IV trailer: now online

[woundingchaney]

GTA-SA is a previous-gen game with pretty lame gfx compared to this trailer. Everything will get bigger, sharper and better. Sound, gfx, assets, textures, AI. Don't be too sure everything will fit within the 7.8GB limits a DVD9-disc presents for the 360. 3GB of extra space is not much at all for such a big leap in all elements of a game. We all know that the beautifull Gears also fits on DVD9, but we also now it's pretty damn short in gameplay with it's 8 hours and not freeroaming, so that's not comparable. Neither is Oblivion. It has huge (but pretty empty in terms of NPC's) maps and lot's of quests, but compared to what is going on onscreen in this GTA, one can easily understand that this is not a honest comparison.

Crackdown features advanced physics, AI, very beautiful explosion, good texture work, nice all around effects, a 10 sq. mile city with 8 miles of highways and a verticle limit that hasnt even been attempted on other sandbox titles all fit into less than 2GB of game data with the rest being audio etc. (oh and what little is needed for the Halo beta).

Oblivion features vast varying environments, hundreds of weapon and armor configurations, massive hours of story and spoken dialogue as well as music. Oblivion is a massive title discrediting it because its not in a city environment simply doenst hold.

I thinks right now its a good bit of a stretch to assume that DVD9 is limiting for this title.

Don't get me wrong, more space never hurts, but you said what I wanted to say as well.

I very much agree but I have been through this so many times on different forums and I simply dont see how all of a suddern the next GTA is going to be so massive that it wont be comparable to other titles in its genre.

 

[iceberg187]

GTA-SA is a previous-gen game with pretty lame gfx compared to this trailer. Everything will get bigger, sharper and better. Sound, gfx, assets, textures, AI. Don't be too sure everything will fit within the 7.8GB limits a DVD9-disc presents for the 360. 3GB of extra space is not much at all for such a big leap in all elements of a game. We all know that the beautifull Gears also fits on DVD9, but we also now it's pretty damn short in gameplay with it's 8 hours and not freeroaming, so that's not comparable. Neither is Oblivion. It has huge (but pretty empty in terms of NPC's) maps and lot's of quests, but compared to what is going on onscreen in this GTA, one can easily understand that this is not a honest comparison.

The point of the matter is, and this seems to be eluding you, is that the vast majority of the space taken in these sandlot games are audio. The 360 has XMA for audio and that is very good for compression of audio. That's it. On the Xbox, GTA:SA was under 3GB, and 4.7 on the PS2. There alone tells you that Microsoft has some sort of tools for compression and that given how basically everyone lauds their development services, have no doubt matured. So, your argument about disc size is misplaced here.

 

[MasaC]

Did you notice the person driving the blue convertible and the grey sedan in the beginning of the teaser didn't look like the guy talking with an accent at the end? Significant?

 

[DJ12]

The PS2 version was barely over a gigabyte, the size "reduction" in the xbox version doesn't mean a thing (or if the xbox version was actually 3.7gb it proves the opposite)

Most of the space on the PS2 version is duplicate data used for spacing the content strategically around the DVD.

I reduced GTA3 down to about 600mb to play off my harddrive.

 

[-tkf-]

It could but that would still be unfounded for the concept.

I would love to carry on this discussion , please find the thread where we argue about Size. My comment was that since all the mentioned games was shipped, designed and placed on a DVD which holds 4.7 GB they had to fit. It´s like saying look, i got a pint of milk in this bottle, so therefore i have a pint of milk.

But asi said, another thread and we can go on for a few 100 pages..

 

[TrollFace]

Crackdown features advanced physics, AI, very beautiful explosion, good texture work, nice all around effects, a 10 sq. mile city with 8 miles of highways and a verticle limit that hasnt even been attempted on other sandbox titles all fit into less than 2GB of game data with the rest being audio etc. (oh and what little is needed for the Halo beta).

Apart from the question if your numbers are correct (it would mean that from the total of 7GB Crackdown-data more than 2/3 would be sound) : Why are you excluding the audio and music. It's a huge and essential aspect of gaming, especially in GTA with all the carsongs, radiochannels/dialogue, city-audio from all the stuff going on, carsounds, cutscenes etc.

That being said, Crackdown is not looking nearly as good as this GTA-trailer. It's an impressive game, but the gfx and textures are not even in the same league. ( http://images.eurogamer.net//assets/articles//a/7/2/8/5/8/ss_preview_Image1.jpg )

Oblivion features vast varying environments, hundreds of weapon and armor configurations, massive hours of story and spoken dialogue as well as music. Oblivion is a massive title discrediting it because its not in a city environment simply doenst hold.

It does hold, because beautifull looking empty nature-scenery is just something else compared to a city full of cars, people, skyscrapers, will all their own AI behaviour, sounds and physics. Well, you have to ask an expert or dev on this to verify, but I believe the hundreds of weapons and armor configs do not nearly compare to the scale GTA works in realtime. You are talking options, not realtime. It sounds huge in gameplay-option terms, but from a capacity point of view, this kind of stuff is not that GB-hungry. Also, the dialogue in Oblivion was pretty low quality compared to what they want to do in next-gen on the audio and music (5.1 dts etc). I mean, a simple 100MB mp3 file coded in 64Kbit/s still sounds pretty good, and it could take hours and hours of spoken dialogue, crystal clear. You don't need 320 Kbit/s super-DTS-5.1 for dialogue. So in that sense, all the speech in Oblivion wasn't that big of a problem to store, because I don't believe it was that high quality and memory-hungry.

 

[3roxor]

What impressed me about this trailer is the music and the shadows. What somewhat dissapointed me the gray buildings and the city as a whole. Looks kinda generic.

 

[archangelmorph]

What impressed me about this trailer is the music and the shadows. What somewhat dissapointed me the gray buildings and the city as a whole. Looks kinda generic.

I don't know whether it occured to you or not by the city is manhattan..?!

It looks pretty accurate in terms of representation and I guess when you model a real-life city-scape, it kinda makes it a bit difficult for you to add flash, vibrant colours in an attempt to glitz-n-glamour it up..

I think what was shown of the city was pretty impressive & i'm definitely sure about one thing..

Since GTA has prided itself on scale and diversity in terms of the environs, I doubt what you saw in the trailer is truely representative of all that GTA IV has to offer..

 

[3roxor]

Yep, it's manhatten alright..I was speaking Metaphorically btw. I played them all but after all the speculations like 'the main character will be a women', 'it will include cities from all over the world' and so one I'm kinda disappointed at the moment. Seems they are taking the safe route with this one..

 

[cloudscapes]

The music is Philip Glass
doubt they'll use that for the actual game (though that would be pretty itneresting)
neat trailer!

 

[nAo]

It easily beats, graphics wise, plenty of next gen games that are not meant to represent large scale cities as this one, it looks extremely promising to me.

 

[Gradthrawn]

doubt they'll use that for the actual game

Why do you say that? I can't think of any reason why they wouldn't add that, and some other music of the same variety, to one of the radio stations.

Oh, and thanks for providing the artist name. I was wondering that myself since the music really grabbed me. You wouldn't happen to know the song name, would you?

EDIT

Note to Rockstar: I want a portable MP3 player available to the main character while on foot! Preferably one with an FM tuner. And all the vehicles should have mini-jack plugs to hook it up to.

 

[AlNom]

It looks pretty accurate in terms of representation and I guess when you model a real-life city-scape, it kinda makes it a bit difficult for you to add flash, vibrant colours in an attempt to glitz-n-glamour it up..

GTA Vegas

 

[woundingchaney]

Apart from the question if your numbers are correct (it would mean that from the total of 7GB Crackdown-data more than 2/3 would be sound) : Why are you excluding the audio and music. It's a huge and essential aspect of gaming, especially in GTA with all the carsongs, radiochannels/dialogue, city-audio from all the stuff going on, carsounds, cutscenes etc.

These figures would be comparable to other sandbox title that typically show that the majority of data is held to be sound more so than game art assets or engine data.

It does hold, because beautifull looking empty nature-scenery is just something else compared to a city full of cars, people, skyscrapers, will all their own AI behaviour, sounds and physics. Well, you have to ask an expert or dev on this to verify, but I believe the hundreds of weapons and armor configs do not nearly compare to the scale GTA works in realtime. You are talking options, not realtime. It sounds huge in gameplay-option terms, but from a capacity point of view, this kind of stuff is not that GB-hungry. Also, the dialogue in Oblivion was pretty low quality compared to what they want to do in next-gen on the audio and music (5.1 dts etc). I mean, a simple 100MB mp3 file coded in 64Kbit/s still sounds pretty good, and it could take hours and hours of spoken dialogue, crystal clear. You don't need 320 Kbit/s super-DTS-5.1 for dialogue. So in that sense, all the speech in Oblivion wasn't that big of a problem to store, because I don't believe it was that high quality and memory-hungry.

Empty scenes are common amongst previous GTA titles as well. The burstling cities are often surrounded by barren outskirts connecting the metropolis areas. These options in weapons and armor hold specific data for each one showing how little room is necessary for this. In GTA its not as if every character or building or car is going to be specifically crafted. Textures, builds, etc will be reused and reformed for landscapes, people, cars, and buildings. A.I. may follow the norm concerning previous titles and work under the same routine, afaik even the most demanding A.I. code isnt known as being a disk hog.
Dialogue in comparison to an rpg such as Oblivion most likely will be less as most characters will repeat typical phrases and the majority of dialogue will most likely occure in the brief scenes before and after missions. Moving onto music I believe that this will continue to be the disk hog for this title following the norm of other sand-box titles. Given the premise what would be adequate for sound in this title 3GB?? 4GB?? I personally dont know as nothing has been mentioned about the amount of dialgoue and or music tracks found in the game. Crackdown itself supported around a 100 licensed music tracks in 5.1 audio which clocked in at approx 6.5GB still leaving breathing room. Even at this point I doubt the amount would exceed the capacity of a compressed 8GB even including code and art assets.

But as you mentioned we would need a dev statements to be more precise on the matter.

 

[Jesus2006]

The sound quality in the previous gtas was horribly already(compressed) so it is highly unlikely it stay at this size considering the game will also be somewhat bigger. And that is sound alone , textures also sucked...

 

[Cheezdoodles]

Could this be related to having only 4.7 GB capacity ?

Well, on the Xbox it takes up 2.3gb in the trilogy version

 

[iceberg187]

All will be revealed in the upcoming Game Informer. They have exclusive content.

This came out today.

 

[NERO]

This came out today.

The guy on the mag cover looks like comedian Dave Attell. I wonder if he's just as funny?

http://www.daveattell.com/main.php

 

[TrollFace]

These figures would be comparable to other sandbox title that typically show that the majority of data is held to be sound more so than game art assets or engine data.

The majority maybe yes, but surely not in a 65-35% percentage for the audio data compared to the rest of the game data ? I agree engine data is a minority-factor capacitywise, but talking about 720p/1080p textures and gfx data, I think sound and gfx data would be almost comparable. I would like to know how a game like GeoW, with it's very high detailed textures (probably best quality ever on a consolegame), is eating up on DVD-capacity in the gfx-department.

Also, previous-gen consoles like a PS2 probably did not have to CPU-easy ability to decode mp3's easily in realtime during the game, so they probably just worked with nearly uncompressed wav sound/music, and that fills up a DVD quite nicely. I think for this generation it should be a piece of cake to work with highly compressed audio and decode it realtime during play. That would make a big difference looking at how gfx, audio, gamedata relate to eachother on a DVD9/Blu Ray. Ofcourse going for 5.1 DTS quality will partly cancel out this space-advantage, but still I don't believe audio is going to be the dominating factor.

Empty scenes are common amongst previous GTA titles as well. The burstling cities are often surrounded by barren outskirts connecting the metropolis areas. These options in weapons and armor hold specific data for each one showing how little room is necessary for this. In GTA its not as if every character or building or car is going to be specifically crafted. Textures, builds, etc will be reused and reformed for landscapes, people, cars, and buildings. A.I. may follow the norm concerning previous titles and work under the same routine, afaik even the most demanding A.I. code isnt known as being a disk hog.
Dialogue in comparison to an rpg such as Oblivion most likely will be less as most characters will repeat typical phrases and the majority of dialogue will most likely occure in the brief scenes before and after missions. Moving onto music I believe that this will continue to be the disk hog for this title following the norm of other sand-box titles. Given the premise what would be adequate for sound in this title 3GB?? 4GB?? I personally dont know as nothing has been mentioned about the amount of dialgoue and or music tracks found in the game. Crackdown itself supported around a 100 licensed music tracks in 5.1 audio which clocked in at approx 6.5GB still leaving breathing room. Even at this point I doubt the amount would exceed the capacity of a compressed 8GB even including code and art assets.

But as you mentioned we would need a dev statements to be more precise on the matter.

Again, 6.5GB of 100 music tracks of 5.1 audio. Sounds absurd. That's almost 10 CD's. Sounds to me the 360 has a bit of a problem with decoding highly compressed mp3-like audio, although I don't really believe that. Are you sure you have the right figures on this?

I easily burn 100 high quality mp3-tracks on just 1 CD. This is 7 CD's of GB's. Does 5.1 mp3-audio need 7 times more space than a normal HQ-mp3? I doubt it of you use the latest and proper compression, but I'm not an expert. I read once that PGR3 used one complete core for audio-decoding itself, it seemed a bit strange to me a that time. Maybe some games choose to free up that core for other game-stuff, and need more DVD-space for lower-compressed audio since the audio-core can't work fulltime on decoding. Just guessing.

Compare it to a 5.1 DTS DVD. Mpeg data still costs a lot more space than audio. I know Mpeg is an old compress standard for visuals on DVD and consoles/PC compressiontechniques are a lot futher developed in that sense, but the compression used for the 5.1 sound on DVD's is also very basic. Still the visuals data dominate the audio on a movie-DVD.

 

[woundingchaney]

Again, 6.5GB of 100 music tracks of 5.1 audio. Sounds absurd. That's almost 10 CD's. Sounds to me the 360 has a bit of a problem with decoding highly compressed mp3-like audio, although I don't really believe that. Are you sure you have the right figures on this?

I easily burn 100 high quality mp3-tracks on just 1 CD. This is 7 CD's of GB's. Does 5.1 mp3-audio need 7 times more space than a normal HQ-mp3? I doubt it of you use the latest and proper compression, but I'm not an expert. I read once that PGR3 used one complete core for audio-decoding itself, it seemed a bit strange to me a that time. Maybe some games choose to free up that core for other game-stuff, and need more DVD-space for lower-compressed audio since the audio-core can't work fulltime on decoding. Just guessing.

Compare it to a 5.1 DTS DVD. Mpeg data still costs a lot more space than audio. I know Mpeg is an old compress standard for visuals on DVD and consoles/PC compressiontechniques are a lot futher developed in that sense, but the compression used for the 5.1 sound on DVD's is also very basic. Still the visuals data dominate the audio on a movie-DVD.

Well the 6.5GB quote was from the entire game (although there are varying figures on the game size). This would put the sound on the title at around 4 give or take. But this would also include dialogue and music, and Im assuming sound effects. (sorry for being vague)

Pgr3 would probably be a bad example as I doubt audio decoding need an entire core to be performed. With the early titles cores were used simply not to sit idle (afaik).

I believe the 360 uses a MS XNA compression for audio as to what ratio it gets I would imagine at least equal to Bink 8:1 likely more. Here is a link with a download, although Im in somewhat of a hurry and havent looked at it (hold em game waiting). It is stated to explain techniques for using XNA and various benefits.
http://www.only4gurus.com/v3/download.asp?resource=11517
Here is a link stating compression possibilities, though not in detail.

Independent Compression
Xbox 360 also boasts up to 320 independent compression channels. In layman's terms, this equates to a substantial leap in ambient world sounds (birds chirping, leaves rustling in the wind, gunfire from afar on a battlefield), allowing for a much more immersive experience, as more audio can be compressed without the loss of quality.

If you like to think in terms of numbers, munch on this statistic. The new technique (called XMA compression) allows for a compression ratio of 6:1 on the low side and up to 14:1 on the high side. Compare that to the Xbox 3.5:1 compression ratio and you get some idea of its significance.

http://www.xbox.com/en-US/hardware/xbox360/audiofidelity.htm

As far as DVD movie video standards I honestly have no idea or even if it is comparable to gaming standards.