News & Rumours: Playstation 4/ Orbis *spin*

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I was reading an article linked in the PS4 hardware thread and came across this. I thought it might be in line with the discussion of the light reflecting off the screen:

“With the very first prototype,” he tells us, “we had the light bar more out, so that you could see it from a top view. But several people mentioned that a lot of gamers play in the dark, and they don’t want something to be too visible. If it’s too bright and distracting, it can break [the game experience], especially if it’s a horror game. So we made it pretty subtle, more secondary. If gamers see it off their hands or on the floor, it’s nice to have, but they don’t have to look down to check on it.”
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That link is here for reference. It looks like they thought of glare and took steps to minimize glare at least.

For me, I play in a very bright room with a skylight that shines down on my screen. I'm pretty sure glare from the lightbar is the least of my problems. But I do understand the concern. When I had a dedicated gaming room, I had taken a lot of care to set things up correctly and would have been more than a little annoyed if there was bad reflection on the screen from the controller.
 
So now that we know that the 500GB drive included in the PS4 is a 5400rpm drive, and we also know that KZ has no load times according to previews (which I'm assuming is based on the included 5400rpm drive), I'm curious if the people that are planning on getting a new HDD for the PS4 are getting a 5400rpm or 7200rpm drive. I don't buy as many games as most here so I figure a 750GB would suffice, but I'm also considering a 1TB just in case.

I've narrowed down my options to:
WD 750GB 5400RPM Scorpio Blue - $57
WD 750GB 7200RPM Scorpio Black - $67
HGST 1TB 7200RPM Travelstar 7K1000 - $79
 
djskribbles said:
So now that we know that the 500GB drive included in the PS4 is a 5400rpm drive, and we also know that KZ has no load times according to previews (which I'm assuming is based on the included 5400rpm drive), I'm curious if the people that were planning on getting a new HDD for the PS4 are getting a 5400rpm or 7200rpm drive.
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I'm going for a 1TB SSHD. Still a 5400rpm spindle but the 8GB of SSD combined with 64MB cache should make all the difference. It's pretty cheap too.
 
Ya, the Seagate or Toshiba SSHD would be ideal, but they are ~$30 more than the Hitachi 7200RPM drive (edited my post above with my options). I went this whole time with a 5400rpm drive in my PS3 and it seems like load times will be much lower now that games are fully installed. If KZ SF is anything to go by, it seems that the new systems benefit less from faster drives this gen. But it's probably too early to make that call. There might be less texture pop-in, too, I suppose.

I'm leaning towards the HGST 1TB or Scorpio 750GB then. I'll decide which one to buy when I find out the install sizes of all of the launch games.
 
patsu said:
Ha ha, was talking more about the 7.5GB initial install. To alleviate the wait, either schedule the download via the iOS/Android Playstation app, or pre-order it. Hopefully PS4 will auto-download the game when it's released.
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Yeah, preloading and remote initiation will help, but 7.5GB is a lot less than I expected. Anyone who thought they'd be able to play the game immediately, or after downloading only a few hundred MBs probably wasn't thinking very hard about it. This machine has 8GB of RAM. You'd need a partial download to at least match the size of the initial load, right? On PS3 with The Last of Us you had to wait for about 20GBs to download before you could play, and that download couldn't happen in the background. 7.5GB is a remarkable result for a launch title.
 
So that points to a 45MB pr sec 10x speed Blu-Ray drive, or at least a system able to copy and install 7.5GB in 164 seconds = 45MB pr second. That is pretty good. The same amount of data would take 30+ minutes with some PS3 games. 30 seconds would be 2.5GB or so loaded when the game is ready.

We might have been a bit pessimistic about the next gens loading times :)
 
Brad Grenz said:
Yeah, preloading and remote initiation will help, but 7.5GB is a lot less than I expected. Anyone who thought they'd be able to play the game immediately, or after downloading only a few hundred MBs probably wasn't thinking very hard about it. This machine has 8GB of RAM. You'd need a partial download to at least match the size of the initial load, right? On PS3 with The Last of Us you had to wait for about 20GBs to download before you could play, and that download couldn't happen in the background. 7.5GB is a remarkable result for a launch title.
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I think the same amount was mentioned for Knack somewhere.
 
It's easy to imagine that you could make a menu with a VR mission as the initial download or something with a really small environment to start with, so that you would have something to do (set your preferences, get used to the controls, do a tutorial, play a high-score game against friends in some limited setting) while the next mission is downloading.

In fact, that could be a great idea - design a small score chasing thing to do with friends list integration that combines what a tutorial usually does but gives experienced players a way to enjoy that as well.
 
Every game could ship with Evoland where you spend the first few hours grinding your way up the generations before it bumps you up to next gen status.
 
Arwin said:
It's easy to imagine that you could make a menu with a VR mission as the initial download or something with a really small environment to start with, so that you would have something to do (set your preferences, get used to the controls, do a tutorial, play a high-score game against friends in some limited setting) while the next mission is downloading.

In fact, that could be a great idea - design a small score chasing thing to do with friends list integration that combines what a tutorial usually does but gives experienced players a way to enjoy that as well.
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That'd work. Or you get dropped into a land corridor and need to walk 3 minutes to get outside. With NPCs every now and then stopping you to talk about their athlete's foot and home renovations.
 
Shifty Geezer said:
That'd work. Or you get dropped into a land corridor and need to walk 3 minutes to get outside. With NPCs every now and then stopping you to talk about their athlete's foot and home renovations.
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A endless tunnel with the download state textured on the wall every 5 meters, comparing them to your friends download speeds and the name of their provider ... Could definitely be fun, but I think I prefer the more active score chasing solution with more gameplay ;)
 
"The games are going to be distributed digitally and you can start playing them before the whole package has downloaded.
That means you need to be careful about how you arrange your data in download packages so that the data that you access first is downloaded first and the game can start while it's still downloading.
This could be tricky for an open-world game because theoretically the player can go anywhere, so it's hard to know what data we should be downloading first. There is some flexibility in the system in that you can decide the order to download the packages based on what the player is doing, but basically to get a quick start we've had to build that into the design of the game so you will start with only a limited area of the game open. But I think that's quite usual in open-world games anyway, to get the player used to the world.
You need to think about where all your different bits of data live, in which chunks you want them to be arranged for download, which is really quite similar to disc-authoring on previous generations where you need to start thinking about where you're putting all your data for effective access. It wasn't a big issue to do that [for The Crew]."
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How The Crew was ported to PlayStation 4

I am curious to see how AC IV or Second Son will handle it.
 
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Yeah, though the the rest of the map/area would have to be "ready" by the time you complete the tutorial/s so I was thinking that maybe, maybe the initial download package for open world games will be much bigger to allow a seamless transition.
 
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-tkf- said:
What about having a game while it loads...!

Maybe Namco has something that we can borrow? :)
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There used to be such things all the way back to the 8bit days. Mini games to play whilst you waited for the tape to finish... I'm sure that would go down better than watching Snake smoke a cigarette - with no health warning!!
 
london-boy said:
That's a buzz kill if I ever saw one... Do they give any timelines on when this will be done?
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We will provide additional information about system software update version 1.50 and features available at the PS4 system’s launch, and features that will be available after launch, in the near future.
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Whilst it's a buzzkill, it's not a core feature, and the downside of a bug in suspend/resume is rather extreme. (failing to resume, and so losing your game state [or even potentially damaging the hardware] = bigger problem).

OTOH, this sounds intriguing (all previous signs pointed to little progress/focus on this)...

Furthermore, users can use either the microphone of the Mono Head set connected to DualShock 4, or PlayStation Camera to navigate through the PS4 home screen (PlayStation Dynamic Menu) with voice commands to start up games and shutdown the system, among other features; please refer to PS4′s online manual for recognizable voice commands.
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london-boy said:
That's a buzz kill if I ever saw one... Do they give any timelines on when this will be done?
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On the forum complaint list that one is way down on the list, but the voice thingy, recording and broadcast features are important features to launch with..

Imagine coming home and saying, PLAYSTATION NUMBER FOUR , KILLZONE 4 SHADOW PLAY

Man it's going to be fun to use those voice commands for everything.. well i guess some commands will be better done using a controller.. :)
 
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