What are you the
Chruch Lady? = "Could it be Sa-tan? Discuss it amongst yourselves."
Streaming is a relatively simple trick, requiring some advanced programming.
Because you need to do it in the background, before it is needed, thereby buffering the data for later use.
So that your streaming speeds can be that of the RAM and not the lower optical read limits.
By constantly filling up a cache in RAM and it is then read from RAM as needed.
Think of it as one of those ancient Asian water clocks.
Water flows at a relatively slow pace, filling a bucket from a hole based on a calculable or know rate of flow.
The buckets fulcrum/tipping point is towards the bottom of the bucket.
(It doesn't tip over when empty because base has been weighted to not tip until a certain point has been reached.)
However once the bucket is filled to a point, its water volume is dumped forth and empted at a greater rate than that at it was filled.
So, now you know how a water clock works.
Seriously.
You have a buffer space in an area of RAM that you fill with data you know you will need.
Kind of like how when online video players don't play until the buffer fills to a certain point.
Then they start playing before they are full but complete filling before you finish watching the video.
Streaming from the disc works in the same way.
Start streaming into RAM before you need to see the data.
Then learn the timing and necessary buffering of things so that you can use it before all the data has been streamed, without having to stop for additional load times.
The problem with Capcom is how they have gone about using this idea.
While it is smart to place game data on the hard disk, it is not smart to stop and do a full install.
My opinion is that it is in fact idiotic to stop gamers in order to do a full install.
The people at Capcom are not idiots.
Unfortunately they haven't focused enough or consulted with the right people on how to do streaming for their games.
Part of the problem is that streaming is an anticipatory process. Not very difficult at all.
But whoever is in charge hasn't gotten used to creating automatic shader operations that initiate the streaming or loading of data effectively.
The other part of the problem is that Xbox360's DirectXNA API is still a better graphical API than OpenGL ES.
So developers on that platform can use smaller relatively low quality textures and then use pixel shader operations to tweak the quality or appearance of said textures.
So here is where the problem comes together.
In order to do a cross platform game and not set the gaming fanboys on another image quality rant, they worked to deliver similar image results on the PS3. This meant using larger textures. Larger textures equals a larger amount of data they need to stream and required a higher amount of bandwidth to do it in the same time.
Capcom could not figure out how to do sufficient streaming and buffering from the PS3's optical media to RAM and did not take the time to figure out a good caching algorithm for the HDD. So despite what Capcom claims about leading on the PS3, they only managed to use a previously developed streaming program from their Xbox360 games. Not a new working streaming strategy for the PS3. So instead of figuring out how to cache to the HDD and stream from there, they took the easy route and chose to do a full install to the HDD. Where from the gamers’ perspective this is both inconvenient and seems kind of lazy. Though I am modestly sure they tried a little. They must simply have felt they did not have enough time to F*** around trying to figure it out.
So far Capcom is the only company to install a game to the HDD before you could play it.
To be far they wanted to do it on both platforms. But they could not convince Microsoft to let them.
So where they had pop-in or distance draw-in on the Xbox360 they simply eliminated that issue/object on both platforms.
Ultimately this & Lost Planet are a back and forth cross-platform compromise that has inadvertently compromised their attempt at balance with a required install.
They should appeal to Sony and other game companies, then subcontract help with the issue rather than take the approach of doing a full install when there is more than enough time and space to stream the entire disk to HDD in the background. Create a permanent cache for art assets based on the statistical amount of occurrences. Such as the character, weapons, and most common textures. Average this across all scenes and you need maybe 2GB or up to the generous amount of 4GB, at most for no load times. They just haven't figured out how to do this.
Me am Genius, No? Yes!
Dear Developers.,
Every PS3 comes with an HDD, providing you with multiple times the bandwidth given by any optical media.
So please try to make better use of it than Capcom has done with Devil May Cry 4.
Sincerely,
FutureCTO
