Lack of HDD forces Saint's Row to scale back game...

[jpr27]

"MS has been clear for a long time to not expect an attached hard drive. The only way for you to be right is if Volition has severe ear wax problems."

I have some reservations about when MS advised developers not to expect a HDD attached. I could see it with maybe larger first party developers but I think the statement of 1yr is maybe a little stretch. At E3 I was advised by both MS reps and some developers the importance of the HDD within their game and the possability of exciting features in their future games.

 

[LightHeaven]

I think the main problem here is because they are alreading stream everything in the game as the developer said it wont have any loading times, even when entereing on buildings...

Maybe a best choice would be to cut off the streaming on the core version, which would have loads screens, but them all users could benefit from flying features. And premium users would get that and no loadings times

 

[MechanizedDeath]

No that's a terrible point actually.

#1. The drive is a 5400 RPM SATA LD25 from Seagate, it's hardly a POS. Yo say it's a POS, then in the next breath admit you don't even know the RPM and model of the HDD, what gives?
Read up: http://www.seagate.com/content/docs/pdf/marketing/PO-LD25.pdf

#2. IIRC, according to From software, the average transfer speed for the DVD is 11mb/s, and average of HDD is 17mb/s. So that's over a 50% increase. In addition seek times are 10x's longer with a DVD vs HDD.

1. What does knowing the model of the drive have to do with anything? I mentioned the transfer rate being listed in the Goto diagram. And ANY HDD has an order of magnitude advantage in seek time over an optical drive. That goes without saying. That's why I made mention of both of these things in my post. And my 7200rpm Hitachi says that drive is a complete POS. Hell, the 30GB drive I ripped out before says that drive is a POS. But thanks for the link. I wasn't really aware they made lappy drives in 5400rpm. I figured it was 4500rpm and 7200rpm. Meh.

2. The transfer rate isn't significantly greater to warrant any change in engine capability IMO. You mean to tell me an extra 5-6MB/s of compressed data is gonna account for the inability to stream landscapes? Again, this seems to be more an issue of the decompression than the actual raw transfer rate. Hasn't it already been noted by other devs on here too that seek time has more to do with loading than pure transfer speed?

Meh, I'd like for some clarification on all of this, but it's not like it makes much of a difference anyway. The engine has to be written for the Core Pack. Nothing will change that now. PEACE.

 

[randycat99]

The funny thing is that he actually thought that cute little pdf actually contained useful information so that we could view it and determine it is not a POS, rather than being simply a short piece of marketing fluff. I mean, c'mon now!

 

[Acert93]

"MS has been clear for a long time to not expect an attached hard drive. The only way for you to be right is if Volition has severe ear wax problems."

I have some reservations about when MS advised developers not to expect a HDD attached. I could see it with maybe larger first party developers but I think the statement of 1yr is maybe a little stretch. At E3 I was advised by both MS reps and some developers the importance of the HDD within their game and the possability of exciting features in their future games.

The leak itself notes that it may not be standard and that is very old. And we had been hearing for months, "Don't count on the HDD being standard".

I cannot seem to find the quote for MfA right now, but I do remember it being said by a MS rep or Dev that they can make exclusive HDD games. It is linked in a thread in one of the HDD threads because at the time there was a lot of talk about MMOs and how they wont be able to count on it etc...

 

[LunchBox]

Most PS3 games will probably just use DVD as well, why would they use BR just to put uncompressed video/files on the disc? That's completely backwards in a system with massive computational power and relatively slow transfer speeds, makes much more sense to compress it as heavily as possible and have the CPU decompress on the fly, taking advantage of the faster DVD read speeds.

But won't it waste cycles to decompress data, instead of just working on it from a direst feed?

 

[Shifty Geezer]

Apparently not the one that chap has pointed out. A 17 mb/s HD isn't a POS? Can't even imagine how compromised the seek rate must be given the alleged throughput rating...

I've find one link to seek time which is 12.5ms, but that's from a forum. Can't find anything official.

Regardless it's still going to be some 10x the DVD's seek speed, which'll have a dramatic benefit on streaming fragmented data.

 

[Bjorn]

Why? The problem is the transfer speed isn't fast enough and HD-DVD or BluRay are unlikely to be as fast as a 12x DVD drive unless they're in multispeeds themselves.

They didn't actually say that the transfer speed is the main problem though, just

DVD drive’s inability to stream the environment fast enough in full 720p resolution

Which of course could be caused by the horrible seek times on the DVD. Just install Visual Studio .NET from a DVD and you'll see what i mean.

 

[mckmas8808]

They didn't actually say that the transfer speed is the main problem though, just



Which of course could be caused by the horrible seek times on the DVD. Just install Visual Studio .NET from a DVD and you'll see what i mean.

And that's why I asked my question. Why did they even bring up DVD? Why isn't anybody discussing this? Why did they say "DVD inability is stream fast enough in full 720p resolution"? What is the point in saying it's a High Definintion resolution?

 

[Acert93]

And that's why I asked my question. Why did they even bring up DVD? Why isn't anybody discussing this?

What about DVD? Obviously they are contrasting the Xbox 360 DVD drive and the HDD (which is about 1.5-2x as fast on average and has a lower seek rate) and how it has affected their game. So we are talking about it.

Why did they say "DVD inability is stream fast enough in full 720p resolution"? What is the point in saying it's a High Definintion resolution?

Because at non HD resolitions they could have used lower resolution textures and assets and therefore would 1.) have been able to store more in memory and 2.) transferring from the DVD would not be as much of a hinderance because they would be able to transfer more "stuff" due to the lower resolution/quality of the material.

And like others said, the main problem is time. Devs have done this in the past and other devs are planning it this gen. The HDD makes ones life easier for sure, but this is not an issue of "without a HDD we cannot do this". It just takes more planning and time... which of course Xbox devs are not used to because every Xbox1 had a HDD. Ditto PC devs.

 

[shred5]

Most PS3 games will probably just use DVD as well, why would they use BR just to put uncompressed video/files on the disc? That's completely backwards in a system with massive computational power and relatively slow transfer speeds, makes much more sense to compress it as heavily as possible and have the CPU decompress on the fly, taking advantage of the faster DVD read speeds.

You are right.. I musy have had a brain fart when I typed that.....

 

[Sis]

Does this sound like even a remotely logical assertion? Of course I don't think X360 can't do flying games.

Point is the HDD is a performance tool, and not having causes features to be cut. I would propose for everyfeature the we hear about, there's many more that get cut in the development livefycle that we never even know about.

This is for everyone who says HDD does not add to games, Saint's Row would have been a better game with a HDD, it would have allowed them NOT to cut this feature, you can argue to the cows come home about how they 'could' do it. But the hard fact is they AREN'T, and if it had a HDD they would have.

So no HDD will result in lesser games, maybe not in the fantasy world of "well a good dev could get around it" but in the real world of budgets, timelines, and performance constraints.

On a side, I know Saint's Row isn't supposed to have any load times, but what's so bad about having a few load screens while you're flying around? It worked OK it GTA...

Don't talk to me about logic; I'm not the one creating a whole new thread declaring that "features" are cut due to the lack of hard drive, thus proving some point about hard drives being useful for more than just a streaming mechanism (how do you think faster load times are achieved in the majority of cases?).

Also, I wish the "journalist" would have listed the full quote instead of summarizing what the developer said. I mean, what kind of crap is this:

"I think [Jacques Hennequet (Producer for Saint’s Row)] felt somewhat disappointed, as it could have opened up much more possibilities within the gameplay for Volition's first Xbox 360 title."

I think he felt disappointed? The state of gaming journalism is a whole seperate, non-technical topic, but this article is a good example of what's wrong. It's basically some kid in his treehouse printing out his club's newsletter...

.Sis

 

[dubyateeeff]

Would a 20GB HDD be enough for PS3 if there are a lot of BR-disc games utilizing its space? I think not. Even for X2 I think 20gb is to little, especially since Id like to play a few games at a time and I would hate to install/cache it each time I change a disc.

But a HDD for downloadable (free or sold) content and save games is great. I was really looking forward to a PS3 and cool japanese games which I could purchase cool stuff for over the net. I hope Sony solves this in a way so that it will be used and usefull. Anyway, I hope this takes off on X2.

 

[Sis]

Which of course could be caused by the horrible seek times on the DVD. Just install Visual Studio .NET from a DVD and you'll see what i mean.

Not a good comparison, IMO. The Visual Studio .Net install is not optimized for "random" streaming. In fact, it's just a folder structure copied to the disc.

Also why is Japan getting the hardive standard.. Because the the developers complained about a lak of a larger format dvd drive like hd-dvd... It proves MS knows they made a mistake...

Japan is NOT getting the hard drive "standard". They are just not being given the option of buying a core pack. The distinction is important.

.Sis

 

[Sis]

Would a 20GB HDD be enough for PS3 if there are a lot of BR-disc games utilizing its space? I think not. Even for X2 I think 20gb is to little, especially since Id like to play a few games at a time and I would hate to install/cache it each time I change a disc.

Ken Kutaragi has said himself that 20 gigs is just not enough, and you'd need something more along the lines of 100 to 200 gigs (or maybe even the CELL storage thingy.)

For what it's worth, Ken agrees with you.

.Sis

 

[Any1]

I understand that the 360 will have 512 megs of memory, but can anyone tell me what the Rev. and PS3 are expected to ship with?


..

 

[Titanio]

I understand that the 360 will have 512 megs of memory, but can anyone tell me what the Rev. and PS3 are expected to ship with?


..

RAM?

PS3 is 512MB also, split between two pools off the CPU and GPU.

We don't know about Revolution yet, but I'd probably guess less than 512MB.

 

[BlueTsunami]

Ken Kutaragi has said himself that 20 gigs is just not enough, and you'd need something more along the lines of 100 to 200 gigs (or maybe even the CELL storage thingy.)

For what it's worth, Ken agrees with you.

.Sis

It seems as though 20GB is that weird hazy area between to little and just enough. Its good for maybe movie trailer or clips but actual full blow DVDs would eat through a 20GB HDD fairly quickly. I mean, I'm scrounging for room on my 160GB HDD on my Personal PC...all standard res media. Now with HD Media, that room would be eaten up much quicker....but I believe thats what X360's streaming capabilites are for....basically their way of saying "Do NOT use the HDD for storing large media, use the streaming capabilites to watch WMV-HD video and regular WMV media files".

I can see the 20GB being good for patches, caching, MODs, trailers, video clips, demos and music files. Music files for me would eat up 2GB easily (Even more for some of the people I know). I wish that they would impliment some way of accessing (FULLY) networked storages or shares and make it seem like its local (like mapping a drive). I don't understand why that can't be done.

 

[Any1]

RAM?

PS3 is 512MB also, split between two pools off the CPU and GPU.

We don't know about Revolution yet, but I'd probably guess less than 512MB.

OK so if the PS3 is going to have 512 and possibly even the Rev. (I could have sworn i heard alot of speculation that it would indeed have 512 as well.) Doesn't it then become The Standard? Kind of how the ability to play DVD's will be standard for all next gen consoles.

So doesn't it then make the 512 megs of RAM something to be expected rather than a bonus? So when MS goes around saying "Hey gamers, look at what were giving you instead of a hdd, isn't that great?" Next thing you know, MS will be telling us how great the 360 is because the games will be come on discs rather than cartridges.

The fact is, the PS3 will have just as much memory as the 360 but will also have Blueray, along with being a little bit more powerful. MS is taking away the one feature that Xbox had over the competition and giving us in its place a feature that every next gen system was expected to have anyway.

They said that it would not affect gameplay in the slightest and already we're hearing about a huge aspect of a game that will be deleted because of the absense of a standard hdd. And to get an idea of how big of a difference something like the absence of this feature can have on a game, imagine what GTA would be like w/o the ability to fly.

And to those idiots that keep saying that even if the hdd were standard, developers would not take advantage of it because it is removeable. What the hell kind of logic is that. My PS2 memory card is removeable as well but all most every single game requires it if you really intend on playing the game. Also, even if the above logic was true, what gamer in the world would choose the ability to take a game save over to a friends house above all the gameplay enhancements a hdd offers if it would have been made nonremoveable like the hdd was in the original Xbox.

MS should have had 2 SKU's, a $400 one with a removeable hdd and a $300 one with a cheaper, bigger (in actual size, not capacity), smaller capacity, internal, nonremoveable hdd.

 

[Bjorn]

Not a good comparison, IMO. The Visual Studio .Net install is not optimized for "random" streaming. In fact, it's just a folder structure copied to the disc.

Certainly true. But the question is then, can you really make the data on the DVD's that optimized for streaming when it's likely that there will be somewhat of a storage problem with standard DVD's for the next gen games, most likely the ones that will use large "streaming" worlds ?