Kojima "Blu-Ray is too small for Metal Gear Solid 4."

[rabidrabbit]

Uh, your angles are a bit single-sided, aren't they
Why did you miss the fourth angle, that the extra space indeed benefits the gameplay and the end-user experience enough to justify using Blu-ray.

 

[Crayon]

Uh, your angles are a bit single-sided, aren't they
Why did you miss the fourth angle, that the extra space indeed benefits the gameplay and the end-user experience enough to justify using Blu-ray.

Oh I meant for that to be implied by my "communications breakdown" angle. The way the article is being presented, it seems like he's only using it for big audio. That why I said that maybe he was just using that as an example, and perhaps there where lots of worthwile assets taking up the space.

 

[Gollum]

I'm taking the wait and see approach on this. Kojima is a great game designer, but he also likes to talk a lot of ... horsedung when the day is wearing long. I hope his demand for 50GB discs makes more sense than this next-gen dinner comparisons. All I can think of, that could use up that much space is pointless filler content, loads of file padding, or uncompressed audio and video. So far I honestly don't see how you could possibly use up that much space in a gameplay-enhancing way. If his game doesn't fit on a 25GB disc, he might as well just ship it on its own 80GB HDD or something...

 

[Arwin]

I'm not going into the rest of the BluRay vs DVD discussion again, but I think it's best to keep in mind that Metal Gear Solid 2: Substance was one of the larger Xbox 1 games out there. Neither MGS2 nor MGS3 are small games on the PS3, and Kojima uses in-game engine storytelling a lot, which does require a lot of vertex animation data, textures, sound, and so forth. Even the PSP's MGS: PO is 1.3gb, and it is telling that both in that game and in the Ac!d games the in-game engine story-telling have been skipped. I've always presumed that was because they didn't have room for them.

See, what you may forget is that whereas in the game, you don't only spend more time in the same area, but the player and the AI create a lot of the animation, which contains a lot of recycled material. But scripted animation for whole scenes of several minutes long takes a fair bit of space. I wouldn't be surprised if at some point it becomes cheaper to have those animations on the disc pre-rendered and compressed as a kind of AVC format, simply because only showing the 2d representation of one view of a detailed 3D world is a form of compression in itself.

Oh, and stop this 'single layer 50GB disc' nonsense please. He's simply talking about 50GB dual layer discs, which haven't been used for games yet at this point.

 

[infinity4]

is it uncompressed audio whats taking up most of 50GB??? is it necessity for majority of gamers??? i even feel that not even half of 360 + ps3 gamers have an HDTV...

 

[crystalcube]

is it uncompressed audio whats taking up most of 50GB??? is it necessity for majority of gamers??? i even feel that not even half of 360 + ps3 gamers have an HDTV...

You all do understand that HDTV is a visual device and even if you have a 108" HDTV uncompressed audio will not benefit you ? Although on other hand if you have a fairly good surround sound system, even with a small 17" SDTV, good audio can be quite interesting.

in short to take benefit of uncompressed audio you dont need HDTV.

 

[Darkon]

is it uncompressed audio whats taking up most of 50GB??? is it necessity for majority of gamers??? i even feel that not even half of 360 + ps3 gamers have an HDTV...

Highly doubt it , but it is one of the reasons why he and his team may want 50 GB BD

 

[Bludd]

Take benefit of uncompressed audio? Uncompressed audio is not needed if you have sufficiently powerful processors because compared to AVC decoding, audio decoding is almost trivial.

50 gigabytes of uncompressed 32bit 96kHz 1 channel audio is about 38 hours of audio. Just using Flac at low complexity settings will probably net you somewhere near 30% compression. Uncompressed audio is stupid.

 

[Crayon]

Take benefit of uncompressed audio? Uncompressed audio is not needed if you have sufficiently powerful processors because compared to AVC decoding, audio decoding is almost trivial.

50 gigabytes of uncompressed 32bit 96kHz audio is about 38 hours of audio. Just using Flac at low complexity settings will probably net you somewhere near 30% compression. Uncompressed audio is stupid.

I had it pointed out to me that uncompressed and lossless are not the same thing.

Any chance we're actually talking about lossless compressed audio here? I don't terminology want it to needlessly muddy the discussion.

 

[Bludd]

When someone says uncompressed audio and not saying anything more, they are most likely taking about straight PCM. What I am saying is that straight PCM is silly when you can losslessly compress it and decode it bit-perfectly.

There's no reason to use uncompressed audio unless you are severely computationally restricted.

 

[pegisys]

I had it pointed out to me that uncompressed and lossless are not the same thing.

Any chance we're actually talking about lossless compressed audio here? I don't terminology want it to needlessly muddy the discussion.

yeah flac is lossless compression, flac actually stands for free lossless audio compression

but what is the difference between lossless and uncompressed, it can be the sound, if it's lossless it is supposed to sound exactly the same, at least thats my understanding of it

 

[London Geezer]

Pardon my french, but this whole thing to me sounds like a whole load of bollocks. From "needing" more than 25GB just for uncompressed sound, to the fact that he wants a 50GB disc "that is not a dual layer Bluray disc" (??)... What a load of smelly bollocks.

 

[Bludd]

yeah flac is lossless compression, flac actually stands for free lossless audio compression

but what is the difference between lossless and uncompressed, it can be the sound, if it's lossless it is supposed to sound exactly the same, at least thats my understanding of it

It is called the standard audiophile patented placebo effect.

Due to the nature of digital audio, there must be some rounding errors when going from the continuous signal to the discrete data unless you have a bit depth of infinity.

A rule of thumb is that for every bit in the bit depth you get 6 dB of dynamic range. 6*infinity is a great dynamic range.

Pardon my french, but this whole thing to me sounds like a whole load of bollocks. From "needing" more than 25GB just for uncompressed sound, to the fact that he wants a 50GB disc "that is not a dual layer Bluray disc" (??)... What a load of smelly bollocks.

Yes. It smells like horse shit.

 

[Darkon]

Pardon my french, but this whole thing to me sounds like a whole load of bollocks. From "needing" more than 25GB just for uncompressed sound, to the fact that he wants a 50GB disc "that is not a dual layer Bluray disc" (??)... What a load of smelly bollocks.

That's 1up's words not his.


This is what he said

and about sound in mgs 4

"With next-generation consoles, both cinematics and in-game sound will closely resemble those found in Hollywood films," according to Tojima. He fully expects gamers to "be surprised by the quality of sound coming into their ears--the sound will react to their conditions in the 3D world like never before." For example, in the scenario where a bottle falls off a table, hits a metal shovel, and then rolls onto a carpet, conventional sound processing would have the bottle make the same sounds regardless of the environment, or what it collides with. That same scenario on the PlayStation 3 might have the bottle make a metallic tink when it hits the shovel, and then create a muffled rolling sound as it travels across the carpet. If the room had its own sound variables, the bottles sound might get take on some echo if in a bathroom, or get slightly quieter if in a bedroom. Then you have to factor in on-the-fly surround encoding, which would make the bottle pan from front to back or side to side in your room, depending upon the way it rolled.
The Metal Gear Solid team flew around the world to capture specific sounds for environments in the game. The group actually lugged surround-sound audio-recording equipment to capture sounds from undisclosed locations all around the world. Tojima's team also recorded special sound effects just for the game, instead of using prerecorded, CD-based sounds.
The new audio-processing capabilities of the PlayStation 3 allow Tojima and his team to manipulate sound in a variety of different ways. Tojima says that, "With this power, we can give the player a better environment to experience, as the hardware can produce more sounds in real time based on where the player is in a room and what objects are in that room." Last year's Tokyo Game Show trailer emphasized the theme "No place to hide!" and Tojima, as sound director, will do all he can to envelop the player in the world of Metal Gear Solid. "In a battlefield with no place to hide, you will hear impending dangers all around you, in all 360 degrees."

 

[Dregun]

Not to get too far off topic but advanced hardware does more for games then just provide "Pretty" graphics as others try to shovel at the 360 and PS3 for not being innovative. HD-DVD or Blu-Ray the fact that a developer is asking for more storage space means maybe larger formats are needed for games. Is it possible the uncompressed audio is needed for "HD" surround sound, do the individual sounds need to be uncompressed so the PS3 (or 360) can process each based on its environment? Since its not just a "single" sound that is being played but a sound being created through the console they can't spend the cycles decompressing it?

 

[infinity4]

i thought dvds are fine since high resolution pc games are in dvd, but now it doesnt seem like that from what people are saying

 

[Shifty Geezer]

Is it possible the uncompressed audio is needed for "HD" surround sound, do the individual sounds need to be uncompressed so the PS3 (or 360) can process each based on its environment? Since its not just a "single" sound that is being played but a sound being created through the console they can't spend the cycles decompressing it?

If the samples being used are all uncompressed, you'll be eating RAM, and at the moment processor cycles is something PS3 has more in abundance than RAM. I think it more likely for things like environmental audio, they'd use a compressed audio stream and decompress+process on the fly. That should be very efficient on a SPE or two, such as use one to decompress, and pass the results to another to process. That'd save RAM and main-memory bandwidth, and disc-read bandwidth, over reading uncompressed audio and processing that from RAM.

 

[Dregun]

If the samples being used are all uncompressed, you'll be eating RAM, and at the moment processor cycles is something PS3 has more in abundance than RAM. I think it more likely for things like environmental audio, they'd use a compressed audio stream and decompress+process on the fly. That should be very efficient on a SPE or two, such as use one to decompress, and pass the results to another to process. That'd save RAM and main-memory bandwidth, and disc-read bandwidth, over reading uncompressed audio and processing that from RAM.

Gotcha, but then why does he say he wants uncompressed audio? Obviously he must have a reason as wasting RAM and access time is not something a developer of his caliber would do.

 

[Darkon]

Gotcha, but then why does he say he wants uncompressed audio? Obviously he must have a reason as wasting RAM and access time is not something a developer of his caliber would do.

Read my post above yours , 1up is misreporting as usual

 

[Nesh]

That's 1up's words not his.


This is what he said http://img411.imageshack.us/img411/8559/kojimainterview108il9.jpg

about sound in mgs 4

Thats one of the most interesting things I ve ever heard about next gen games and most innovative use of sound.