user542745831
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Thank you 
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MGS4 3D engine post mortem [translation needed]
- Thread starter gongo
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My bad. Given a 33 GB total size (unconfirmed), 25 GB of audio and video doesn't seem to make sense, given little video in the game.
Thanks for the actual numbers. I'm not seeing the large audio and video content you allude to though. The largest blocks of data are the stagexx.dat's. Do we know these are audio and video files?
I have no clue on this topic, but I would mention that a straight comparison of game content packing isn't perfect either as with BDR you have the advantage of creating more duplicate content for streaming's sake whereas if you are space limited you will have less redundancy and bite the loadtime bullet more often. How much this is a factor is variable, but is also part of the cost/hurdle of porting.
I'd have thought content duplication wouldn't show up on a file listing, but I've never heard anything official on the matter.
Um, the largest blocks of data is the 13giga demo.dat along with a 3gb video.dat file not the stage files which are i presume is game data for needed for each level.
Duplicate and dummy files are not shown.
Maybe I misunderstand how the files are structured, but my thought was that you would pack your files (for loading purposes) and that there is a replication of certain content in the packing. If you have space to spare you can duplicate files more frequently; if you don't have space to spare you are going to incur seek time penalties as you scan for the contant as you didn't have the disk space to pack it all together. But I could be misunderstanding the process.
I missed the demo.dat file. Do we know that this is audio or video? My point was the largest block of files regarding type and use are the stage files, although overall these do only come to a few GBs. We appear to have 1.7GB of music (bgm = background music?), 3 GB of video, 258 MB speech. What else can we actually tag as audio or video?
We really need an expert to comment on this. Are disc optimisations exectued on the hardware IO level, with tracks being on proximity, or does the developers manually duplicate data, knows where they are on disc by the order they're burnt, and selects the different files in game based on where they are? I imagined the former was the case, with tracks having data pointed to by the file structure, and the head nipping to the nearest source of data, but I may be completely off there! And if this is the case, is the listed file size inclusive of duplicate blocks of data?Joshua said:
Oh I almost had forgot this thread. I may add a summary of the article if no one puts it.
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If you have other games in the MGS series on DVD, you may be able to look up what demo.dat is since it's present in them too.
As for audio, the info in my old post is about it. It's compressed on the disc, of course.
What do you think is that data? The post-mortem article almost mentions what it is by the way (but I'm going to bed tonight :smile
.If you have other games in the MGS series on DVD, you may be able to look up what demo.dat is since it's present in them too.
As for audio, the info in my old post is about it. It's compressed on the disc, of course.
My Googling skills hhave come up with this :
So there's audio in there, but it isn't necessarily all audio as the tool rips audio from movie files. I'm making the assumption here that movies are vids of course
.Still, one's linked post tells us a lot. 1/4 of the game, ~12 GBs, is compressed audio. Data savings can be made, but not of the sort you'd see with uncmopressed audio, and we won't know to what quality. I dare say acceptible quality for the mainstream could be got from quartering the filesize, down to 3 GB, but that is a real pie-in-the-sky estimate.
Quick summary for audio + video so far then=
13gb demo.dat + 1.7gb bgm.dat + 3gb movie.dat + 1.8gb vox.dat + 258mb speech.dat
= 19,758 GB.
That leaves close to 10 GB left on disc
MGO is 2.2gb
So now we are left with 7,8 gb. So gamedata has to be lower than 7,8gb or equal.
What about the dbm files? They may be audio aswell, as alot of them have "theme" in their names?
13gb demo.dat + 1.7gb bgm.dat + 3gb movie.dat + 1.8gb vox.dat + 258mb speech.dat
= 19,758 GB.
That leaves close to 10 GB left on disc
MGO is 2.2gb
So now we are left with 7,8 gb. So gamedata has to be lower than 7,8gb or equal.
What about the dbm files? They may be audio aswell, as alot of them have "theme" in their names?
Yes, they looked like the iPod musics to me. Looks like 8 GBs of rather uncompressable content, and 20ish GBs of media content that could be compressed further or reduced. A halving of that would be enough for 3 discs, which sounds about right to me.
I've not read this thread but the last few posts.
But it seems you people are forgetting there actually is quite a lot of video on the MGS4 disc.
The fake advertisements and TV-shows that take place before you first start the game, there must be at least some 15 minutes of full motion, high definition video and high quality audio there. How much space do they take?
But it seems you people are forgetting there actually is quite a lot of video on the MGS4 disc.
The fake advertisements and TV-shows that take place before you first start the game, there must be at least some 15 minutes of full motion, high definition video and high quality audio there. How much space do they take?
Megadrive1988
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No way. The hardware that ran the realtime TGS 2005 trailer had a full GeForce 7800 GTX card. The RSX in PS3 is weaker. It's not merely a 10% drop in GPU clock and graphics memory clock. It's the external bus width being cut in half from 256-bit down to 128-bit resulting in a huge drop in bandwidth from 54 GB/sec for 7800 GTX to 22.4 GB/sec for RSX.
It's also the number of pixel rendering pipelines (not pixel shaders) meaning the ROPs, being cut in half from 16 down to 8. Those are major factors right there, nevermind everything else, such as RSX having half the amount of graphics memory (256 MB vs 512 MB), a quarter the amount of main system memory (256 MB vs 1 GB) etc.
I am pretty confident that the evaluation system with a single 7800 GTX card could've (and did) pulled off that realtime TGS 2005 trailer @ 60fps with its high polygon models, environment, high-end lighting and overall high quality of graphics -- While the PS3 with its significantly weaker RSX GPU with less rendering performance, much lower bandwidth, less RAM, etc simply cannot -- not in gameplay or realtime cutscene.
It wasn't a sham, it was simply running on more powerful hardware than what was in the final PS3.
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they might have it running in fp16 at that time ,but the main difference is mostly artistical approach of color saturation .
They could ,(and should,IMO) have kept the same colored rendering instead of going all unsaturated (at the texture level ?) ,and most people wouldn't even have seen (and/or complained about) downgrade.
A couple of things to remember with multiple discs: Some assets (unknown in size) are needed throughout the game and therefore will be required on all the discs. Just to pick a figure out of the air to make an example, if we say 2Gb of data is needed for recurring characters, items (weapons, vehicles, props), and other textures and sounds, then that's only 2Gb from the total blu-ray data size, but that 2Gb needs to be on every DVD, reducing the available free space down to just under 5Gb per disc, with 33Gb-2Gb=31Gb left to fit. Obviously those numbers are just made up for illustration but it's a factor.
Another factor is multi-disc royalties. Possibly MS would be keen to deal on this, given the potential for one-upping Sony in the press as another exclusive goes crossplatform.
Irrelevant if you require a install...
user542745831
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Wanted to write the same. But as far as the information goes, NXE will only offer a complete install, not an 'incomplete', won't it?
So it wouldn't be possible to install three discs on a 20GB hdd, wouldn't it?
You would have to have at least the 60GB hdd to be able to 'copy' three discs to your hdd. Which likely would make it harder to require an installation.
Feel free to correct if something is wrong.
Is it possible to require installs on 360 now?
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