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

*Tap In goes and reads own posts*

woops! guilty as charged

 

Shifty - I agree and I apologize for not offering much to the discussion. However, This topic has been bantered back and forth many times prior. While initially it is good to put forth concepts and ideas and relate them back to actual evidence either on the market or on the horizon I do find it redundant to "chase your tail" when the obvious is staring you in the face.

The frustration comes from the conversation not going in new directions and I am guilty of a bit of that myself on my post. But I thought the 100%procedurally generated game "the projekkt" or whatever it was called was a good example of what could be done and it had not been brought up at that point. In fact, aside from being mentioned in passing it still has not and while I agree it is not a reference point for what to expect (1mb games) it is a VERY good example of what is possible when devs put their mind to it.

Oblivion while not a perfect game and certainly not the pinnacle of what to expect this gen is another example of a truly remarkable achievement in that it uses roughly half the usable space of dvd and is a hugely detailed world. Does this mean we never have to change optical formats? Perhaps. Perhaps dvd is good enough and by the time we outgrow it, digital distrubution will be a reality.

We'll see, but the Fnabyos can be quite aggrevating in their inability to reason without bias.

 

I know the issues you're talking about and they are memory related. On a beefy PC you can get better LOD and reduce stuttering. But with only 512MB on the Xbox 360, it's going to load more often and more noticeably from disc. But having more room on the disc won't fix it; potentially having faster seek times would, though on the Xbox 360, without a hard disk drive you're stuck with longer pauses in between zones, but I don't believe the stuttering is better or worse.

Too true and very funny!

 

You mean like the period of 1954 until say 1997?

 

And you're completely missing the point, I'm not saying the extra space can not be put to good use, by having extra space developers do not need to dedicate many resources to managing or reducing that disc space. That's beneficial.

I'm arguing that if they dedicated enough resources they can make it work on DVD. 2 pages ago I stated explicitly that a major disadvantage DVD brings is that it will require more development resources be dedicated to reducing disc space and planning for disc constraints. I'm arguing that I don't believe it will really enable anything that is not possible otherwise (other than the obvious like HD video)

Shifty - since you're quoting ERP with regards to decompression power, why don't you alos quote him where he explicitly states that storage space is not a limitation for his team, but rather memory bandwidth, RAM and optical disc speeds.

 

This can only be true up to a point. Whether we will pass that point, time will tell. A few rungs down from capacity as a fundamental enabler, are the questions of whether things can be made work on a DVD - without compromise.

It's arguable anything's possible with enough work, or the seemingly impossible. I mean, Resident Evil 2 was eventually put on a cartridge (with compromises, mind you)! But was that relevant to all those who slaved over the format in the years previous, or dodged it entirely? Not really. I'm not drawing a direct parallel between DVD and cartridge, btw, lest I'm misread - just highlighting the different tolerances that exist, so to speak, for more work to make something work, or make it work 'well'.

 

I agree, it is inevitable, which is why I think that in a number of years we may reach that point. Certainly not any time soon though.

edit to your edit - by make it work, i mean basically without any comprimises, by using their heads. Noticeably downgrading it is a totally different matter, it would certainly make the case for BR being necessary in my opnion. We'll have to see when/if that occurs.

 

The next big thing will be holographic storage. It crushes Blu-Ray in all aspects.

I even wonder if Blu-Ray-HD-DVD have time to get off the ground..I'd rather wait for holographic storage.

I hope the format is not held back by politics simply because it's not from Sony.

 

well the ps already had problems with disc size, a lot of games came on multiple disc everyone knew 1GB wasn't going to be enough. however not one game came on multiple dvd's last gen and only a hand full used the second layer

I don't know the facts but I would like to see a comparision of the largest ps games versus the largest ps2 games

I also would like to know, since they can make bluray disc with 3 layers, can they make dvd's with 3 layers

 

On its merits as a potential movie format, you'd prefer to wait so that you can buy a 2160p 40" television and enjoy the wonders of diminishing returns, perhaps?

Or are you arguing that even Blu-ray is not enough storage capacity for games now?

HVD might be a nice storage technology, ultimately, but both Blu-ray and HD-DVD have technically enough to serve as the next home movie format. As is, 1080p is quite future proof..it'll take some time for the wider market to catch up with that before they start demanding more (if indeed they do, from another physical disc in 10 years time perhaps!). Besides, a movie format is more than technicalities..it requires industry support. The industry has already decided the time is now for a HD format - not in x years for HVD - the only question is which will emerge the winner.

 

I suppose Xenosaga would be the biggest PS2 game, on two DVD9 discs I believe. More impressive perhaps is Champions of Norrath, which filled up a full 9Gb, so not even fitting on the 360's DVD9, which can hold 7.4Gb max.

No. They can make double sided DVDs with 2 layers on each side, but that is about as useful as having two separate discs - you still have to turn it over, after all - and much more expensive to make.

The Blu-Ray disc can and will do 4 layer. Not only that, but TDK has already succesfully created a 6 layer Blu-Ray disc, which in fact manages to hold 200Gb, through some new tricks: http://www.cdfreaks.com/news/13360

It's not certain yet though what the PS3 will be able to max out on. Could be double-layer, could be quad-layer. We're certain of double-layer, at least (54Gb).

 

You were saying "]Clearly this demonstrates DVD's are inadequate for next generation games" and rolling your eyes in you last post I suggested how the extra space has been put to good use.

Or 7gb of compressed textures and sounds to go along with all the meshes and code.

 

just pointing out what a meaningless statement it was. MGS was never designed with disc constraints in mind.

ya, and that will be a problem when that type of storage actually becomes necessary for modern's games, which it isn't now, and probably won't be for quite a few years. Not to mention a little thing called multi-disc games.

This debate is so old, lets just wait and see whether this actually becomes a limitation instead of trying to see the future. Sony's hype machine has convinced alot of peope we 'need' HD storage for this generation, I don't really buy it and it's just that simple. We'll have to wait and see.

 

There you go again. It's not "we 'need' HD storage" just as it isn't "DVD's are inadequate" its just that more space means more freedom, and more space on a single disk means more freedom than designing a multi-smaller-disk game. Smart developers will make amazing games that fit in the 50mb limit of Live Arcade, but all the same games that could never be flawlessly compressed or or even just seprateded to fit on 32mb thumb drives. Yet the same time, smart developers targeting a platform that has 25gb disks will inevitably wind up createing games that couldn't rightly be reduced down to DVDs.

 

Well, that is a bit like past gen. The standard HDD in the xbox would let game developers make games that would not be possible otherwise, giving them immense freedom in their game creation, we all know how that went, the HDD was nothing more than an oversized memorystick...

 

Thing is, most games are mediocre at best in just about every respect. However, some developers did find good uses for the HD on the orignal Xbox and quite a few were disappointed to find the same functionality isn't standard on the 360. But yeah, like the HDD on the Xbox is like the extra storage offered by blue-ray in that many developers won't find much use for it. Yet also just like the HDD on the XBox, some PS3 developers are bound to make good use of Blu-ray disks. Again, I'm not trying to argue that DVDs are too small, I certainly wouldn't have bought a 360 if I thought anything of the sort.

On a side note, I was actually thinking it is a bit like last gen too, but in the sense that there are a lot of Xbox and PS2 games that couldn't rightly be ported down to GC sided disks. And there as an even larger gulf in the gen before that between CDs and cartrages,

 

Sorry, was replying more to what he said about that they had much more to stream of the disc, if they have 10 times as big textures the streaming must be a pain as the transfer speed for the optical media has not been increased 10 as well. As for the variety you point out I don't really know what you mean as I said nothng about it, but all things being equal, it should take less time to load 1 texture than 2 and with the 12xDVD being faster than 2xBR the difference should be even bigger

Well, that was more of an assumtion of my part, that except for increasing texture res and size that they will increase also the amount of textures, because even if high res, a repeating texture is a repeating texture.

Don't know either, other than that the creation of art assets is very expensive and the more you create the more it costs and although better and better tools might be comming along of course the requirement also increases, it is not only about making high res textures, it is about making them bump mapped or parallax mapped, applying shaders and what not. I thinkt that Cliffy B said something along the lines that it took before an artist 6 days to make a model, now it takes 6 weeks. I just find it hard to believe that just because there is more space now, the developers all of the sudden also have so much biggers budgets to use that space.

I was comparing the PS2 killzone with tetris, and I was talking about a developer, not a system, but yes, I do believe that atleast Halo will be remembered, atleast more than killzone.

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I don't downplay the larger storage size at all, in the end it is better to have it and not need it than not to have and need it, but I do believe that there are other things that will come in the way first, like budgets...

 

Love it how these same cornerstones like 'oblivion' or 'xenosaga' appear in every next gen storage capacity discussion to prove someone are right.

People have been repeating this for months but I'll say it again then:
What advantage does an enormous virtual world with hundreds of castles, caves and ruins have when every damn cave/dungeon/tree looks the same?
Therefor oblivion is not exactly a good example.

Btw I've been playing oblivion for weeks and I played daggerfall and morrowind for months. Not that it matters in this discussion....

The only thing I can say is that I hope disc storage won't be a bottleneck for x360. But at the same time I hope PS3 games will take advandage of the larger storage capacity.

 

Bigger textures doesn't necessitate bigger budgets. In many cases making larger textures is less work than trying to create smaller ones. As for how long it takes to make a texture; it takes anywhere from a few moments to however much of eternity you care to spend on it before scarping your work and starting over. How that averages out varies widely from artist to artist, but in general the move to higher resolutions isn't going to do much to slow things down and the studios that filled up big chuncks of DVDs with last-gen resolution textures are obviously well within their means to overflow the space of a DVD with the high res textures of this gen.