Sony Gamescom 2013 conference

[-tkf-]

Yes, yes, "PlayGo"
I had forgotten about the name.

It sounds like the data on Blu-ray and servers are organized to facilitate fast loading for the first level.

But when the game is installed to HDD in the background, does the system (or game) organize/optimize data for fast loading later ?

I would guess they do as pr default, since they should optimize all games for digital downloads, like knack apparently is. According to a Cerny interview, with a 8Mbit connection you should be able to start playing in 90 minutes, which is something like a 5GB download before you can start you game. However, it is still a 60 second load on a hard drive.

From what i have seen from the GC demonstrations, there is a strong tendency to use subtle loading screens, simple cutscenes that hides the loading. Just like GT5 where entering a circuit is quicker than when the game is released, however, when you can see the circuit, the game is still loading data like cars etc..

 

[Deleted member 11852]

I would guess they do as pr default, since they should optimize all games for digital downloads, like knack apparently is. According to a Cerny interview, with a 8Mbit connection you should be able to start playing in 90 minutes, which is something like a 5GB download before you can start you game. However, it is still a 60 second load on a hard drive.

Optimising a download package so that a linearly progressive game can be played quickly from the start is a different problem to quickly starting any game from the UI as we seemingly saw Shuhei do on Tuesday.

The first problem is relatively simple and requires packaging all the assets needed for the early single player levels or multiplayer and downloading those first so the gamer can get going.

The second is much more complicated and which can't be solved by simply putting certain data on the outer tracks of the drive. A gamer may want to drop into in game, at any point, potentially at any level, which means no level or set of assets have higher priority than others. And across multiple games. You can't put everything on the prime HDD real estate and the size of installs will likely make it impractical to move huge volumes of data around much.

I really can't fathom how PS4 will deliver on the demonstration across all or even most games. I'm certain they are loading assets of installed games when you're viewing friends multiplayer streams - on the off chance you might want to join up, but beyond that?

Perhaps Sony have some sophisticated asset tracking and management tools which will allow devs to package game assets very differently so that assets are loaded on a first-needed basis. That would certainly help. But I'll believe it when I see it with my own eyes.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

Could be a case of he had previously played that level and it was cached. There's going to be a minimum minutes wait from trying to join a game to getting in, I'm sure. The only way that couldn't be the case is if the game is already running in the background, or it's a Gaikai streamed game and you can join the server and it provides the visuals.

 

[Arwin]

They could do it like Playstation Home, where they leave a certain number of slots open in each world instance for friends. I think it was something like 64 players per instance, where only 48 would be filled randomly, and the rest could only be taken by friends. And that is then continuously rebalanced (e.g. don't allow new random players to join until the total is lower than 48 again). I think Killzone mentioned something like 22 player online, but since Killzone 3 supported 32 players, they could be using the 10 'lost' slots the same way.

 

[Deleted member 11852]

Could be a case of he had previously played that level and it was cached. There's going to be a minimum minutes wait from trying to join a game to getting in, I'm sure.

Could be. And to be fair to Sony, they never claimed anything about the demonstration, but you can understand how people having seen it, could take away the impression that dropping into multiplayer games is going to be that quick - on that's on Sony for not explaining or qualifying the demonstration.

Unless they deliver, it's disingenuous at best and misrepresentation at worst. While I can't work out, technically, how they could deliver this across all (or most) games, I recall immediacy was the point being pushed at the February event. Maybe they have developed technologies allowing games to get going with only a fraction of the game being loaded, with the remaining rapidly loading as the gamer gets going.

 

[Arwin]

They measured it to be about 32 seconds. It seemed shorter, but that could be doable if the harddrive performs well enough (32x100MB = 3,2GB). But the game could also be running suspended in the background already of course.

Essential is that this is possible without going through all sorts of loading screens, apparently.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

I could well believe that. They could save some loading time by removing the need to load the front-ends to the multiplayer. Take U3 for example. It has to load the core interface to select games before it ever loads the game data itself. Moving that side of any game to the OS could shorten the time to enter the game by removing that step completely, requiring only time to load the level and gameplay engine, and not the time to load the menu interface.

It'd be interesting to here from any devs what they load when, how much of the initial load is redundant to gameplay or essential to it, to see what opportunities there might exist for shaving off seconds. If gameplay engines are a small part of the game, and assets are the greatest hog, would it not be possible to keep the game resident without content, and only load the content as needed? Maybe it's possible to have two or three last played games resident in RAM with a quick launch steaming in the data for where the game left off?

 

[-tkf-]

Optimising a download package so that a linearly progressive game can be played quickly from the start is a different problem to quickly starting any game from the UI as we seemingly saw Shuhei do on Tuesday.

-snip-

I really can't fathom how PS4 will deliver on the demonstration across all or even most games.
-snip-

I thought i had typed up a response but maybe i forgot to press submit, or maybe i added (by accident) a porn link.. anyway..

As i see it, we all know that it simply can't be done with straight loading from fresh. Simply because loading a 4GB game @80MB pr sec would take something around 60 sec.

However if we use a few tricks it might be possible to cut that down by alot.
We have the fast option, that when you leave a game you simply choose to pause it, that is more or less instant resumes, save for a level that might have to load. I think that was what we saw..

Then there is the possibility of pre-loading games. For example, if the PS4 OS simply pre-loads 40-50% of the 3 most played games that would cut down the loading time by 50%.

Insert a disc that is among the 3 games and you flush out 1 and start to pre-load the game that is in the drive. If the game on the disc isn't among the 3 pre-loaded you flush 2 and start to pre-load.

The moment you get a request to join a game from friend the OS instantly flushes out 1/2 games and pre-loads the game that was requested you to join. Even before you have responded the game will have been pre-loaded some more

Since we have 8GB to spend and the XMB hardly will use more than 2GB to navigate it shouldn't be a problem. The same mechanics can be used for anything else on the XMB, apps, videos etc..

We are not cutting down on the time it takes to load the game, we are simply using the time while the user is doing something else, or nothing at all. Deny he request and the OS instantly pre-loads the original 3 games again.

 

[BoardBonobo]

Perhaps it's just an extension to the technology they developed for the vita. After all that allows you to have a game in the background and you can jump in and out when you want.

Unless they developed standard functions threat the os supports so that games don't have to load them. Just assets and rendering pipeline.

 

[Brad Grenz]

I thought the implication that Killzone was suspended in the background during the UI stage demo was obvious. Since the game is already in memory all that you'd need to do to join a match is negotiate a connection to the server and load the specific level being played. That would take far less time than trying to load the full game since some assets would be common against all the levels. The PS4 could even employ a predictive loading scheme where it starts to load a level if you're watching a stream of a game you own. The time that elapsed at Gamescom would still represent a best case scenario since the game you're joining won't always be the last you played, but it's certainly not a deception.

Obviously games will also be designed to account for this social functionality. In the better quality videos of the demo you can see on the streaming screen the number of slots in game that are open and who is allowed to join. It appeared that when @yosp entered the game he took control of a bot rather than having to wait to choose a loadout or for a respawn opportunity. Other games might handle it differently based on their own design goals, but immediacy and instant gratification have obviously been a major focus of the system design.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

It appeared that when @yosp entered the game he took control of a bot rather than having to wait to choose a loadout or for a respawn opportunity.

If that's a default for all PS4 games, I'll be very pleased!

 

[patsu]

In KZ3, you can always join a warzone in the middle of a round.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

It depends whether you have bots or not as to whether this is something exciting or not. Possessing an existing game entity would be very cool. Give it 5 seconds inside the bot's head and then pick up exactly midway. That'd mean fully populated games (even if dumb bots) and instant in, as opposed to sparse games waiting for people to join (who don't join, because it's an empty game and they'd rather play a more populated one) and a minute of character setup and waiting for the next reinforcement drop to join, type things that make online gaming disagreeable.

 

[patsu]

Yes, auto bot generation would be most welcomed. When I play KZ3, sometimes I get allocated to a brand new warzone. The game would continue to run through the different modes with me winning by default.

 

[Brad Grenz]

I believe they've already confirmed robust bot support for all the custom match stuff.

 

[Shortbread]

Feels like the PS1/PS2 days...

http://www.polygon.com/2013/8/26/46...e-gamescom-awards-2013-attendance-hits-340000

The Gamescom 2013 winners were announced today, crowning the PlayStation 4 with Best Hardware of show, giving Destiny the most game awards — including "Best of Gamescom" — and pinning Titanfall, Mario Kart 8 and The Elder Scrolls Online with two awards each.

Glad to see Sony doing well across the board... from the media to the electronic/gaming conventions.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

So either Kinect wasn't on show, or MS have nothing worthwhile to show on it, which sadly tied in with people's expectations that it's not going to do much and won't contribute much to the system. Did any XB1 titles showcase Kinect intergration? Body tracking in Titanfall? Face recognition in Ryse? Head scanning in Madden/NFL?

 

[Arwin]

Only Sports Rivals and Project Spark. Project Spark has some pretty cool features, but I don't know how well those were shown off in GamesCom. Even then, I don't know that Kinect 2.0 would easily win hardware awards over the Playstation 4 in such a crowd (340.000 this year! that's a lot ... )

 

[patsu]

I believe they've already confirmed robust bot support for all the custom match stuff.

That's good to know !
I remember the bots in Unreal Tournament was pretty good. But most importantly, the user can try out different custom setup in KZSF and see if it plays well.

 

[BoardBonobo]

Only Sports Rivals and Project Spark. Project Spark has some pretty cool features, but I don't know how well those were shown off in GamesCom. Even then, I don't know that Kinect 2.0 would easily win hardware awards over the Playstation 4 in such a crowd (340.000 this year! that's a lot ... )

After Sony's appalling decisions with the PS3 and how badly they dropped the ball with the last generation they seem to have got their act together 100% this time.

They also seem to have struck lucky in the fact that gaming has suddenly become a lot more high profile is many areas, not just recreation. There are more people looking now than there was before and Sony have been at all the right places with all the right messages.

And now with the emphasis that MS have made about the kinnect being central to the whole XB1 experience and then having nothing to show that 'experience'... It kind of makes out that the central 'experience' of the XB1 is an empty one.

I still believe that MS just struck lucky last generation. They caught the core market that were dismayed with the PS3 and how late it was coming and how expensive. This time around though Sony are back in the game and have made great inroads in re-capturing the core market and haven't been confusing the new emerging none core buyers with mixed messages and sudden reversals to policies.