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

I think that with the graphical fidelity expected these days, in some cases FMV may actually be a win in terms over storage space over a realtime cut scene. Realtime art assets are so damn huge these days. In some pathological cases, one could even consider FMV a compression method.

 

Yes, but that means not using new high-compression formats. If done this way the idea that next-gen can use more complex compression like JPEG2000 to reduce storage needs won't work. Or the data is stored on disc as JPEG2000 or whatever, loaded and decompressed into DXTC files in RAM, which adds that overheard I was talking about. And isn't this the case with PGR3, using a core for decompression? Not that you could do it any other way probably as the disc speed is more likely the bottleneck than the storage in this case. But moving on to more content in more ways, streaming+decompressing means a more overhead than just streaming, and the harder the compression, the more the overhead. This only won't be an issue if as you say streaming is periodic, but if a constant background task you will be eating up a quantity of CPU cycles. I've no idea how much though. If all of 5% of CPU time it's probably not worth fussing over, but if 30%, it'll be having an impact on what the rest of the game engine could be doing and gives a reason why greater storage and less concer for compression could be better.

 

from the killzone board:

"We'll be putting the BD full with much more sound, the textures are more than ten times larger than on PS2 and we simply will have much more content to stream off the disk." - Michiel

the difference is that ps3 devs will most likely have to make larger games, they HAVE to go forward, to make bigger, more quality games. It's funny how you people would still rather play pong. Hey, it is fun, really, tetris too. I can play that all day on my cell phone. Why play something else, this is entertaining enough.

 

Not at all. Oblivion proves the point. It's more expansive than anything even shown in video form on PS3 thusfar. DVD will be fine for 99% of games. Bigger games will use multiple discs on X360. It's fine. The sky isn't falling. X360 will be fine.

 

Just being expansive doesn't tell much of the variety of content.
Oblivion recycles much of it's assets, the expansive outdoors for example feature very little unique elements. The speech is recycled a lot, to the extent that some character might have samples from two very different sounding voice actors (which can sound a bit funny).

It's great game though, and proves you can get a well working illusion of extremely large scale with relatively few assets, and as such does prove DVD can be host to large expansive games.

One genre I can see requiring a Blu-ray or HD-DVD is games like "Singstar".
If the included videos are in HD, and sound even in CD quality stereo, I don't think a DVD could hold enough songs. True, you can download additional content, but if the initial purchased game was too limited it would not be acceptable.
It's not all just online mulltiplayer fps games, sports games and such, there's many other genres I can see that require a much bigger storage than DVD.
Does a game like "Singstar" need HD video, can be questioned. It sure won't hurt to see (insert your favorite sexy artist here) in HD though!!

Another could be future movie tie-ins, if they feature movie cut-scenes in HD, or there might even be a totally new genre "interactive movies" that would be fully HD ( )

 

Not even... they will just go dual sided. one DVD two sides man!

 

I was under the impression that DVD-14 and DVD-18 cost more than two DVD-9s.

 

I pitty the load times.

But we are not talking about spong here are we? I can understand that you can fill a whole BR disc with loads and loads of textures and what not, having high res unique textures for more or less every object in the game, I can appreciate all that, but two questions come to mind.

Will gamers really appreciate it? Will they go and look att all those walls, and streets and lamp posts and marvel how each and every texture is unique, will they actually pay attention to details like those.

The other is how much whould something like that cost?

Maybe Guerilla should concentrate on the gameplay/game design aspect more and less on extravagand textures, people still talk about pong and tetris till this day, I wonder if their killzone will be remembered the same way...

 

I disagree with downplaying the benefit of a larger storage size that Blu-ray discs offer, since I think with a budget 2-3 times the size of a developer could make something 2-3 times larger/better/more detailed than a comparable game made for a system with only DVD storage and this would be a Good Thing.

And we will certainly see games come on Blu-ray that exceed the maximum that can fit on a DL DVD. The questions are:

1) Is the game going to be multi-platform?
2) If so, is it technically feasible to break it across multiple discs?

If number 1 is yes and known upfront, then I think number 2 will be designed into the game. This is not an intractable problem.

 

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I don't expect every surface to have a separate texture that players can go looking for, but importantly we won't get repeating textures. Take a look at GT4 for some painfully obvious little grass tiles. If you want the same game but without the repetition, you'd want to mix up maybe 5 tiles. You get the same problem with buildings where you'd want to at least mix up enough buildings that you don't get two identical ones in the same view (unless their MacDonald's!) and you'd want enough variety in the graffiti that there's more than 4 slogans on the walls. Requirements over this gen would thus be, in the texture department, maybe 4x the size and 3 layers (diffuse, normal, and lightmap) and 5x as many textures, for 60x the storage requirements...well, we can see compression is needed no matter what! The question is what, and how that eats into other resources. Some will be smaller, some will be compressed differently. The question is whether XB360 versions of the same game will have more repetitions in the grahpics department. Does it matter? It doesn't affect gameplay, but it is something the eye is drawn towards. Humans are very good at recognizing repeating patterns; in crowds, buildings, grass textures, it all stands out and gets in the way of the illusion.

 

Procedural mixed with repeating patterns can be very convincing. There are amany methods around this issue that are bandwidth/cpu/ram intensive but doable on next gen machines. Don't discount the advantages of procedurally generated content ON ALL FRONTS. Not just textures, but animation and geometry as well.

Does anyone remember that game called "the PROJEKKT" or some such? It was a full fps game with beautiful graphics and in total was less than 1mb.

Procedural generation along with traditional and non traditional compression methods will make this a non issue.

 

I'm sick of these remarks. This is a discussion forum where we discuss points. There's no flat-out accepting DVD is enough for next-gen games, or flat-out accepting XB360 is nerf'd because it hasn't got BRD or HDDVD.

For anyone wanting to argue the points one way or another, actually present an intelligent case. It's all very well people saying 'compression will get better' but if they can't cite examples, it's just guesswork. Likewise commenting on procedural creation, citing a 48 KB source is all very well but that's not indicative that all next-gen games only need a 720 KB floppy disk! Some actual intelligent refernces to use of procedural creation would be preferable, including CPU demands as the point being suggested is lack of storage capacity can be made up, but only by eating into processor cycles that could be used for other things.

For the record I believe there's lots of scope for workarounds. In fact I don't know why repeating grass textures didn't disappear 5 years ago as there's workarounds using multiple texturing. However, I actually want to consider this on an intellectual level, considering the real-world relevant examples and trying to figure out what extra storage space could or could not provide. Anyone who doesn't like the idea of talking openly about the pro's and cons of storage system vs. compressiona and alternatives should go leave the forum instead of making inane absolute assertions like 'I say it's not a problem so it isn't and everyone who disagrees with me should belt up.'

 

Is Oblivion not a GOOD ENOUGH example for you? You referenced my example later and then accused me of not citing an intelligent example of the usefulness of procedural synthisis. What is the problem?

 

Have you played it?

 

My problem is this

Citing an example for your argument is well and good and part of debate. Telling people to stop trying to discuss the matter because you have stated your opinion isn't. After your Oblivion example, you should be open to people raising points about how accurate that is or isn't a basis for determining all/average disk requirements for next-gen games, not telling people to shut up discussing the matter. Having seen Oblivion I think that's not the be all and end all of what next-gen games will be looking like or needing. A load of generic caverns and medieval villages doesn't show the same level of requirements as a city-based game for example. As for procedural synthesis, saying it's going to fix all our problems is lovely, but how's about presenting at least some intelligent points how that can be done without heavily impacting the rest of the system? In a GTA/Getaway type game with up to say 30 people on screen at a time, driving down a street so new characters are appearing all the time, how much of an overhead is generating firgures on the fly going to be compared to loading pre-made characters off disc? Want to argue cost of producing a thousand different characters on that disc in the first place? Fine. How's about pre-generating those character procedurally offline and save them onto disk. Want to argue that compression will save the day and these thousand characters of 2MB models and textures can be compressed to useable sizes on a DVD? Okay, go do it. Give examples of current mesh compression schemes that are showing 100:1 compression or what have you. Don't cite a single freak procedurally generated FPS created for a competition as evidence that all games can be compressed and procedurally created to fit any size medium. Point of fact the world record for petrol consumption is in excess of 10,000 miles per gallon, but no-one in their right mind is going to reference that competition as what to expect from a normal-use automobile, Want to debate the relevance of a 2MB per character figure and suggest that in reality the most a game will need is 50 components that with randomized texture colouring and transformation at load time can provide all the people you could ever want with negligable processing overhead? Please do.

But don't say everyone should stop discussing this topic because you deem it closed and obvious, or everyone who disagrees with you is just plain wrong.

 

I didn't miss that. What I was trying to say was that whoever posted that probably confused some statement about data capacity for something about yields.

I wouldn't be too sure of that. The thing with FMV is that it tends to grow in size pretty linearly with the length of time. Whereas realtime cutscenes, the part that grows in size with time is the animation sequence, which is comparatively small to the cost of whole models. Certainly, the shorter the cutscene, the better off you might be with FMV. The main thing FMV gives you is animation fidelity that would be a pain in the neck in realtime.

If all you needed was *A* texture, that never needed modification or fine tuning or extra polish at the end, no one would care. When you need 5000, it can get a little iffy on the cost side of things.

 

Right answer. I never played Morrowind but I have never played any game as big and varied as Oblivion. But the real question is... does bigger make it better...? The answer is maybe. Not from a technical standpoint and maybe not from a gameplay standpoint unless you have lots of time on your hands...

 

IMHO there is still ample space to add extra variety and more detail to games on DVD, as there still is ample space available to do so on the disks. If many pc or console games were currently using multiple dvds, then it the benefit of extra storage space from blu-ray or hd-dvd would be welcome.

For example: Half-Life 2 is a little less than 5 GB. Even if you added replace the existing game resolutions with higher resolution ones like the ones here: http://www.gamedaily.com/download/info/?rp=49&packageid=0078700874 you are only adding about 0.8 GB. The need simply isn't there.