Shifty, you have to be more careful with the quote blocks. Now you end with a paragraph that is TheChefO's, but especially in this case it's easy to mistake it for a line of yours.
Anyway, on to your post:
A photo isn't a painting. Having access to a Canon DSLR isn't going to enable you to replace the contents of the Louvre.
No, but what now if you wanted to have the contents of the Louvre embedded on this page? Or what if you wanted a virtual louvre in a game? What would you do? And, given your budget, what can you do? Those are the two important questions, and in different contexts (budgets, art requirements, and so on), you are going to get different answers. If you're in a hurry or you want to do a whole lot, then photo textures in 3d frames are going to be the most efficient. If you need something that looks good in the style of the game, then you could redo the painting in that style as well (think the Simpsons for a simple example where it comes up). If you want to have just one of them done really, really well, then having an expensive artist making a 3d model of not just the painting but the actual paint may be more effective. If it needs to be 100% accurate, then maybe a 3d scanner can help the artist out. If you need to create a 3D digital encyclopedia of the future and you have 3000 paintings you want to get in there, then maybe the latest and most expensive 3d scanner is your best option. Etc. etc. etc. etc. etc.
A 3D scanner can provide you with some content. I think SOCOM on PS3 is using this. I know one title for Sony's is, and it was doing an amazing job in the video I saw. But a 3D scanner isn't going to create the content for RnC or Fable 2 or anything which deviates too much from the real. There's a limit to what technology can get you.
Why do you feel you need to stress this point? Can you point out in which post I'm saying that there isn't a limit to what technology can get you? But there are also limits to what humans can do. It's a matter of choosing your battles wisely.
To give an example from Uncharted's art team:
Evan Wells said:
IGN AU: In terms of the art design, how much were you focused on realism versus a slightly stylised aesthetic?
Evan Wells: Yeah, I mean we knew that we wanted to stop short of photo realism. We didn't do any scans or photos for our textures or our character maps - everything's been hand painted. We wanted to make sure that our characters didn't fall into the uncanny valley; our character modellers got down to amazing detail, making sure the eyelashes were right, I mean, I just had to stop myself, check myself - I can't believe I'm talking about the eyelashes in a videogame! It's just mind boggling. We really focused early on on the mouth, making sure that we could express the emotion through when they're talking or smiling or grimacing, but then we really quickly realised that it was the eyes we had to focus, almost more than anything, because the human eye is drawn to looking at other humans eyes, and we actually convey a lot of emotion and expression through the eyes.
source:
http://ps3.ign.com/articles/830/830514p2.html
If you want a photographic likeness, a camera is far better than a painting. If you want a painting though, there's no quick solution. The artist has to be given time. A lot of games fit much more the artists painting requirements than the photorealistic-through-any-means. PGR has done a great job with photos too, but again that hasn't dropped the budget. It's only allowed them to do more within the budget.
Budget's don't drop. You go over them or stay under, but typically, you spend it all. In PGR's case, they had a budget, and using photos managed to do more with their budget. So they got more per dollar using photos. How obvious a case do you need?
But on the other side of the story, Heavenly Sword, has some beautiful hand-drawn character art and environments, that were then lovingly recreated in 3D by hand. You can unlock them in the game and some of them are stunningly beautiful. It's an effective technique, and the results in the game too are absolutely beautiful. And they require some very talented and dedicated artists, I'm sure. Still, even with this part of the work, surely both artists get better and faster at their jobs as time goes on, and part of that is getting to grips with the tools better, and part of it is getting better tools. Even if this is for now almost evenly matched in terms of what they can now do with the tools, and how many different texture layers they can apply, and what kind of different materials/shaders they can apply to each surface, and all the work that goes into deciding where to use pre-baked shadows and where to use realtime lights, and so on and so forth, the end result will not be that future games will get shorter and shorter. Even if there's been a trend towards this, there's a line somewhere and a solution will be found if art content alone is going to be responsible for games lasting a mere 4 hours, or 2 hours, and so on.
For BRD to be worth it, it needs to be something that more than a choice few games can make use of. If every third party development could add BRD content at little extra cost, it'd make sense, but as long as the cost is still there then BRD isn't any advantage.
There are different ways of adding content. Multi-platform game development, as I've frequently said, is going to be a bottleneck. That is partly
because of Microsoft's choice to go early and DVD only, and in that sense it's to Microsoft's advantage. Eventually though, as is the nature of competition, the even some multi-platform games will spill Some parts may end up coming out on PS3 on disc, but being downloadable on the 360. Then maybe the 360 game on multiple discs, and so on. Perhaps, for multi-platform games, we will never see a 50GB game at all, and that will then be Microsoft's gain and Sony's loss (and ours!).
I doubt anyone wants to argue the worth of BRD's inclusion for games on the strength of only a handful of games (BTW - I like the idea of BRD inclusion and I'd have gone with it myself.
Isn't that just it though? Doesn't it sometimes just take a handful of games to make all the difference? What if the Wii didn't have Wii Play? What if Xbox didn't have Gears? Etc.
Who wants old outdated technology! I'm sure some games will benefit to good effect. Whether it was the best economical choice from a games only perspective is a different matter).
Of course. The question is, is BluRay an advantage that we will see? And of course the answer is going to depend on the software we will see. It will take more than Ratchett & Clank probably, but the real question is how much more? And there's no easy answer to that, or we wouldn't still be having this discussion.
Also to complicate matters is that as technology progresses and we hope and expect art tools to improve to make content creation easier to fill those discs, we also have other technology in the form of in-game procedural synthesis that solves the same problem but using CPU cycles instead of disc capacity. I'm not sure we can discuss the worth of disc capacity and its future costs without regard for potential algorithmic technologies too.
Absolutely. So far, I've been working on a common assumption that compression efficiency is a linear factor - i.e. every bit that compression gains, is lost to increasing complexity and efficiency at the core, i.e. graphics cards that can work with compressed textures and so on reduce the advantage of being able to keep the textures compressed on your disc in the first place, and so on.
For every new form of compression, there are other forms of compression that have reached their maximum efficiency. If compression had been more efficient, then we wouldn't have needed to upgrade our media in the first place. And there have been huge incentives to use good compression methods in the previous generation, because the read-speeds of DVDs (particularly on ye olde PS2) were a huge bottleneck and loading times were quite a pain. So the desire and drive to use better compression techniques has always been there already. Now I will never exclude the possibility of another breakthrough, but for now, it's not really there yet, and so probably belongs with the set of arguments stored on the shelf with the value of content creation tools that make content creation easier in ways that do not yet exist today.
While being on the subject of PGR and their use of photos, it reminds me of the Sony GTA clone London tech demo. They were taking similar approaches. If they felt they were being held back by the limits of DVD, it could be interesting to see if they will attempt something that uses a full BD. Maybe not, but it's not impossible at all. But while I enjoy fantasizing about what studios may be able to do with 50GB (a GTA game for this generation should really be able to use it to good effect, imho, even if it just means you'll have a year's worth of unique radio in the game
), I think the energy is probably better spent on keeping track of the here and now.
All I need to do is think of the best way of setting this up properly. Should I open a 'examples of BluRay use in games' thread here? Or maybe create a Wiki? I'm not sure.
One other example I've forgot to mention is user created content. With LBP and Unreal coming up, a 50GB yearly compilation of the best user created levels and such could really work. Ditto with the Sing Star HD video uploads. I'm thinking with those kinds of developments, current console HDDs will be too small far too quickly (though external HDDs are a good alternative of course). Well, I'm just throwing it out there because both LBP guys and Epic mentioned this option themselves.
So maybe create a current use section, announced use section, and suggested uses section.
@Chef: the HDD was also essential for building up to what Live is now. Without the HDD, Live would never have become as good a service (downloadable demos, online content, expansion packs, etc). Also very popular then but because of this even better known now, is custom in-game music, for which the HDD has been essential too.
So at least part of what it cost them in the previous generation has helped them in this generation. Additionally, the fact that Halo 2 was the only game that actually used the HDD for more than savegames says a lot both ways. On the one hand it's been Microsoft's most important game so far, and on the other hand it shows that perhaps they missed some big opportunities by not releasing more games that used the HDD for more than savegames (and online content).
Also, your examples of in-house are actually flawed (possibly on both sides though). They were games paid for by Sony perhaps, but Insomniac is still an independent company, and Motorstorm's guys have only recently been acquired by Sony.
