[PS3] LittleBigPlanet Impressions

[patsu]

Thanks for that. Sounds like people have jumped the gun a bit.

Yap ! I jumped the gun too. Am still rather wary at Sony corporate badging into the LBP world.

Would be nice for some details. It wasn't made clear that the moderation was in response to griefing, and I accept that griefing should be followed with instantant censorship until the content is removed. Also the content can be modified. Where exactly did all the noise about lost work come from then? Were people plain lying, or did they delete their own levels off their HDD and now blame Sony?!

It's also possible that people can't find their created levels. I heard it takes some time to publish, and searching is tedious. So many things and people crying for attention ^_^. Hope they can break away from these growing pains after a few weeks.

I personally think the last, machinery-heavy levels are the best, but the Temples are more attractive. The next-to-last one, particularly, makes it feel like the whole level is one massive contraption.

Thanks ! Look forward to the machine levels. ^_^

 

[rounin]

Is this game going to be released as a PSN pay to download game? I for some reason thought it was and am wondering why its not up.

 

[Cornsnake]

I just republished my level. It now includes a race to see who can complete the level fasted, so no more 0 points leaderboard. And the jetski also has a faster boost now. But nicest feature I've added are all the sounds. It took awhile to get them right, but I adds a lot to the level.

I'm really loving this game. It takes some time to experiment with everything to see how works, but after that you can create amazing things. I'm adding far more to my level then I had initially planned, and its really nice to see your creation improve every step of the way. I put about 18 hours into my level, which can be completed in about a minute as long as you don't die. But I'm still not finished yet.

 

[Jaeyden]

Is this game going to be released as a PSN pay to download game? I for some reason thought it was and am wondering why its not up.

They had originally said it would be. The beta weighed in at around 1.5 gigs but the video was compressed and 95% of the items and stickers were not included. I think the retail version might be a little too big to make it feasible. Either that or it's a money thing. I think people might be turned off of 60 bucks for a game without physical media, instruction manual and case.

 

[Arwin]

The retail version ended up filling at least one side of the BD disc.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

This actually surprises me. I'm not seeing that much content. There's a load of 2D stickers, a moderate number of 3D models, and a lot of textures for the materials. A costume is ~1 MB as shown by the DLC. Levels aren't that large. So I'm really not sure where all the capacity is being used.

 

[catisfit]

This actually surprises me. I'm not seeing that much content. There's a load of 2D stickers, a moderate number of 3D models, and a lot of textures for the materials. A costume is ~1 MB as shown by the DLC. Levels aren't that large. So I'm really not sure where all the capacity is being used.

There are quite a few (as in, dozens of) prerecorded videos used in/as tutorials, and music is split into independently mixable tracks (around 7 or 8 tracks for each music piece).

I've not tried blowing up the stickers to see what kind of resolution they are but I'd guess they have fairly large maximum resolutions as you could stretch a sticker across an entire level - like I said I haven't tried so this might not be the case.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

Let's say 8 instrument tracks for each of 10 songs. At 4 minutes a song, that'd be CD quality uncompressed, that'd be 320 minutes. At ~600 MB per hour, that's ~ 3 GB of a 25 GB layer. I remember it being 6 tracks per song though, and pictures back me up. So give or take, we're talking a few GBs for music, if it's uncompressed CD quality. Nothing siggests uncompressed 5.1 to me, and everything points to compressed audio being used because it takes less RAM and loads faster, though it could be streamed.

Videos are mostly quite small. Again they'd need to be overzealous on the quality settings to pad them out to many GBs.

The stickers are also going to be as small as possible to fit them into RAM. There's no reason to think they're 1024x1024 uncompressed bitmaps at 4 MBs each! Looking at the materials, I don't know what texture layers they are using. Clearly a colour, normal, specular, and probably a couple of funky things to boot. If there are 100 unique materials, that'd be maybe 500 unique textures, which I can't see amounting to many gigabytes.

Has anyone actually got numbers on how much space LBP is using? All I recall is Alex Evans saying 'we're filling a BRD up with stuff' and what we've received doesn't tally at all with his numbers (60 levels, 60 minigames, 60 tutorials...). Do we actually know that MM are using >20 GBs? Or even >9?

 

[wco81]

Multilingual perhaps?

 

[rounin]

Okay, so whatever the case, it seems too big to be a downloadable game then?

That means I have to buy it on BluRay and swap discs??! The horror

 

[JPT]

Okay, so whatever the case, it seems too big to be a downloadable game then?

That means I have to buy it on BluRay and swap discs??! The horror

I agree its a horror, why couldn't I just get to download the games and store them on my hdd. Heck if they would let me buy a game on disc install it, feed it with a one time key to activate it which bound it to my account only, I would be happy with that.

 

[patsu]

SCEE lay down LBP user content rules

http://threespeech.com/blog/2008/11/littlebigplanet-community-content-update/

Ensure that the content you share with other users is suitable for all ages - everybody has access to your level if you publish it. Please respect other people’s intellectual property rights. For example, don’t use images, brands or logos that you’re not entitled to use. If you come across any content that you feel the need to report, then please do it responsibly. Hoax reports will be considered inappropriate behaviour.

That's their official position. Brand owners when be mad when people damage their images. If fans treat them with respect, I think it should be fine.

I think I'll go ahead with my Nausicaa level regardless. It won't be ground breaking (probably something simple). Will see what happens.

 

[obonicus]

http://threespeech.com/blog/2008/11/littlebigplanet-community-content-update/



That's their official position. Brand owners when be mad when people damage their images. If fans treat them with respect, I think it should be fine.

I think I'll go ahead with my Nausicaa level regardless. It won't be ground breaking (probably something simple). Will see what happens.

Don't call it Nausicaa. Call it Sackicaa or LittleBiSicaa or something nauseating like that.

 

[Silent]

Multilingual perhaps?

I think that is the explanation. My canadian copy has dutch movies and speech on it.

 

[patsu]

Don't call it Nausicaa. Call it Sackicaa or LittleBiSicaa or something nauseating like that.

May be worse or makes no difference. However it would defeat the purpose of self expression and my test. It should be fine if it is done in good taste and intention.
[size=-2]Famous last words[/size]

 

[tha_con]

May be worse or makes no difference. However it would defeat the purpose of self expression and my test. It should be fine if it is done in good taste and intention.
[size=-2]Famous last words[/size]

I think he was making a joke. Looking at the levels, there are far too many "LittleBig" renditions of games, and the titles are stupid. Seems most of the best levels do not involve "LittleBig" (well, there are some exceptions).

 

[obonicus]

I think he was making a joke. Looking at the levels, there are far too many "LittleBig" renditions of games, and the titles are stupid. Seems most of the best levels do not involve "LittleBig" (well, there are some exceptions).

Mostly a joke, of the bitter kind. But even the Gradius level isn't called 'gradius', but something else, LBP-related.

I was watching BBC World News and saw a few adverts for an episode of Click that'll focus on the games out during this holiday, with a special focus on Sackboy.

 

[catisfit]

The stickers are also going to be as small as possible to fit them into RAM. There's no reason to think they're 1024x1024 uncompressed bitmaps at 4 MBs each!

My point was, if you can stretch a sticker to be the width of an entire level, then there must be some pretty high resolution versions of all the stickers stored on the blu-ray, along with copies down to small sizes. When you paste a sticker the game would then decide which resolution to use based on the size you have selected, where larger size = higher resolution = more memory (thermometer) usage.

I don't know if this is the case, but it seems like a reasonable way to do it if you have a ton of storage space and stickers which can be stretched to gigantic proportions.

It might not be the case at all though. When I get home I'll try scaling up some stickers to see how they hold up resolution-wise.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

I remember seeing blur on textures at large sizes. No tests, but they weren't pin-sharp at all resolutions. Even if so, a lot of them would be all of a few kb on disc as a .png no matter what resolution.

 

[AntShaw]

Saw the DLC updates on the NA PSN last night. All I can say is WOW.

Way disappointed in the pricing. 1.99 just seems rather excessive for a costume.

With that said, my wife and I are def getting better at this game and have some fun. We have tried to play with 3 and 4 people some more, and it's still just a mess. I wish they would of done more with that form of co-op.