Speculation: lack of a next gen media format may be a big problem

[scooby_dooby]

What you are overlooking here is that developers are also smart enough to figure out good stuff to do with more than 8gb when they are working on a platform that has that extra space free to use.

Ya well we'll see what that actually turns out to be. So far all I see is alot of room for 1080p video, and lots of room to duplicate data for streaming (to make up for an already slow optical drive.)

We'll see, I think DVD will lose it's legs near the end of the generation, and we may quite a few multi-disc games, I'll have a ps3 by then though, since they'll be dirt cheap, and be looking forward to x720. I don't see it be a problem for the 360 for the majority of it's lifetime, DVD has too much room left and developers are still limited by memory bandwidth and RAM.

 

[NavNucST3]

50MB and Live Arcade rules them all!

 

[Crossbar]

The "costs of using multiple disks" argument really doesn't apply considering the miniscule cost required to press dvds. Using multiple bluray or hd-dvd disks is another story.

I think the discussion concerned CDs which up until recently were the major distribution media for PCs. Packing 5+ CDs may require non-standard size boxes etc. and bring some other troubles.

Space is not an issue at all on a pc.

Probably not at your home, but let me assure you there are quite a few PCs out there with 80 GB drives and less, having 4 games taking up one quarter or more of that space might not be that popular. Everyone does not buy a new PC every second year, I don´t.

If game developers would target only the high end PCs they would commit suicide. But as the years go, we will see more content. Mark Rein promised 20+ GB of content for UT2007, it sounds like a lot, but we'll soon find out.

 

[NANOTEC]

They sure would. But you can downsample hi-res CG and it looks fantastic anyways, so if that's the worst thing that happens (i.e. 360 doesn't get fully HD cut-scenes) it's an extremely minor problem.

FMV is soooooo last gen. Give me realtime cutscenes during the game so that it doesn't make the realtime gameplay look bad.

 

[kyleb]

Ya well we'll see what that actually turns out to be. So far all I see is alot of room for 1080p video, and lots of room to duplicate data for streaming (to make up for an already slow optical drive.)

And again the only reason you don't see more already is becuase you aren't looking very hard. I already explained how MGS3 would easly run over the space avlable on DVD if redone with high res textures, hheck Subsistence takes 2 DVDs already just to fit the additional content. I suppose you can cling to the idea that this comes down to a matter of opinion as long as you want, but the simple fact is there is plenty of use to be had from game disks with higher capacities than DVDs.

 

[quest55720]

FMV is soooooo last gen. Give me realtime cutscenes during the game so that it doesn't make the realtime gameplay look bad.

That is exactly how I felt since the ps1 days I have hated cgi movies in games. It pulled me out of the immersion of a game seeing a movie that looks 10x better than the game its self.

 

[Tap In]

FMV ....just say NO

 

[Platon]

Only as an example of how Platon's ideas of limiting developer creation being a good thing, he's point being reduced medium size caps developer effort required to fill it.

I agree that, that the god sent remark was a bit too much and realy was not the way I ment it. On the other hand, I wouldn't go so far to say limiting developers creation either. I mean there are a lot of limits already, the CPU, GPU, RAM all pose limits to what is possible to attain, not to mention the most important part, developers them selfs.

Many times it feels like, unfortunately, that the creative part is all about just throwing more and higher res textures into a game and well more "stuff" in general. Feels a bit like the movie industry, where ususally in sequel movies what increases are the amount of explosives and special FX used and the way to make movies better are just having "more". And what does "bigger" games mean actually, is it the same as thing as "high drama".

The absolute most games still are still failry linear in their nature and I can not for the life of me see any problem if I have to change discs once in a 20 hour game. There is no way of denying that having more space would be a problem/limitation less, and I can see senarios where maybe the DVD would not be big enough although I can see the costs being an even bigger one...

 

[Shifty Geezer]

Except this ignores the fact that the last generation consoles had very weak CPU's and not very much decompression power, especially the PS2, so many files can now be compressed that otherwise weren't last gen.

According to ERP, compression/decompression performance for simple methods is of the order of 2x.
http://www.beyond3d.com/forum/showpost.php?p=751363&postcount=45
So unless you're using whacky tricked-out compression, there isn't a huge leap to be used*, and AFAIK that whacky tricked-out compression doesn't exist in lossless formats. You can lossy compress images and audio for sure, and maybe that's enough to free space for everything else? But if it isn't, there isn't much space saving to be had elsewhere, unless new methods will appear.

And also all your decompression work is taking away from what you could be doing elsewhere. So if, in the case of XB360, you're using one core on decompression, that's a lot of juice not powering animation and physics and such. So not having to worry about that side of things is good, but of course things want to be compressed to save loading times. At which point I guess if XB360 is going to be doing that anyway, it's not going to make much difference perhaps if you go with better compression that likely won't be much slower as these systems aren't super-fast at normal compression work.

* I presume this is peak decompression throughput, rather than processor usage. So you'll still have free resources on the CPU to run other stuff okay, but won't be able to decompress much faster - the rate of loading files will be capped by decompression throughput and there'll be a balancing of size for RAM consumption versus speed of access.

 

[Dave Baumann]

And also all your decompression work is taking away from what you could be doing elsewhere. So if, in the case of XB360, you're using one core on decompression, that's a lot of juice not powering animation and physics and such. So not having to worry about that side of things is good, but of course things want to be compressed to save loading times. At which point I guess if XB360 is going to be doing that anyway, it's not going to make much difference perhaps if you go with better compression that likely won't be much slower as these systems aren't super-fast at normal compression work.

Decomression of data is only going to require CPU time when the data is being loaded. If you are not streaming, and just loading levels, then this isn't an issue. If you are dynamically loading then, generally speaking, thats done at transition points within a game where there isn't much going on in the first place, so it not really likely to it impact much at all.

 

[Crossbar]

Decomression of data is only going to require CPU time when the data is being loaded. If you are not streaming, and just loading levels, then this isn't an issue. If you are dynamically loading then, generally speaking, thats done at transition points within a game where there isn't much going on in the first place, so it not really likely to it impact much at all.

Games based on the UE3-engine will not have transition points in the traditional sense. You will be able to move seamlessly over huge maps and the different parts are loaded in the background as you approach the border of the loaded map AFAIR.

 

[Dave Baumann]

When I talk about transition points, I mean transition points in terms of what is actually going on in the game - when you're wandering through a large level in an FPS its unlikely that there's going to be significant action points at the "borders" of the maps. i.e. there's not going to be a model/physics heavy area at areas where data is streamed of the disk.

 

[NANOTEC]

When I talk about transition points, I mean transition points in terms of what is actually going on in the game - when you're wandering through a large level in an FPS its unlikely that there's going to be significant action points at the "borders" of the maps. i.e. there's not going to be a model/physics heavy area at areas where data is streamed of the disk.

Agreed..unless you're chasing/racing through different areas.

 

[Crossbar]

Agreed..unless you're chasing/racing through different areas.

People playing on the net tend to have a pretty random pattern of behaviour.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

When I talk about transition points, I mean transition points in terms of what is actually going on in the game - when you're wandering through a large level in an FPS its unlikely that there's going to be significant action points at the "borders" of the maps. i.e. there's not going to be a model/physics heavy area at areas where data is streamed of the disk.

At the time of writing I was thinking PGR3 as a situation of streaming data. I guess on average that's a different demand to most games. High speed traversal of the scenery is going to need more streaming of data, and most games you'll only need load at a 'walking pace.' Still, I know a lot of PS2 games seem to be constantly loading stuff while playing and they give the impression content is being accessed at all points, rather than loaded in contiguous blocks. And I've known that be the case even when music is disabled so I presume that's not just streamed audio. Anyone have any info on how much real console data is realtime streamed, especially on XB360 as that's the machine to try and peg down how much compression overhead there would be to streamed to data?

 

[Dave Baumann]

People playing on the net tend to have a pretty random pattern of behaviour.

And thats why you'll find that multiplayer maps are usually designed to a size to fit into memory.

 

[Dave Baumann]

At the time of writing I was thinking PGR3 as a situation of streaming data. I guess on average that's a different demand to most games. High speed traversal of the scenery is going to need more streaming of data, and most games you'll only need load at a 'walking pace.'

If you are streaming texture data then this can already exist in a compressed state on the disk and use no CPU time as they can still be a native texture format for the graphics processor to sample from.

 

[Crossbar]

If you are streaming texture data then this can already exist in a compressed state on the disk and use no CPU time as they can still be a native texture format for the graphics processor to sample from.

That's a good point, but that implies we are not talking JPEG class compression rates.

 

[Crossbar]

And thats why you'll find that multiplayer maps are usually designed to a size to fit into memory.

I hope this will change, as I would like to have more detailed and real environments in games like BF2.

 

[Johnny Awesome]

This whole issue is overblown. It's not going to be a problem until 2008 at the earliest, and then developers will probably just move to using two discs for the last couple of years of X360. The next Xbox is likely coming out in 2010, to put pressure on Sony yet again, and will probably use a much larger format.