What are the odds that 9 GIGs WON'T be enough for Next Gen?
- Thread starter BenQ
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scooby_dooby said:
I don't think RPG's lend themselves to multi-disc gaming. At least not the ones i play. Though to be fair, i've only played PC RPG's, BG, Neverwinter.., Planescape Torment and such and i remember playing some of them without installing the games on the HD. A disc swapping nightmare.
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jvd said:
I'm guessing that he was talking about a game with a lot of movies in it.
IMO, only if the FMV is there to hide crappy in game visuals. I don't have any problem with using movies in games as long as they're there to add to the game. F.e cut scenes in RPG's.
I don't see the relevance in bringing this up since we're talking about movies here. You watch a movie from start to finish, let's say A to D for arguments sake. Not, A, B, C, D, C, C, D, C, A like you sometimes move in RPG games, A-D would be levels/worlds then incase that's unclear.
Johnny Awesome
Veteran
It'll be fine.
Alpha_Spartan
Regular
There's no bigger oxymoron than "future-proof console". Any machine that has a life-time of 5 years and comes in under $500 isn't future-proof by anyone's standards.madmartyau said:Well sorry for having an opinion.
Maybe my facts are off, but I personally would rather pay an extra $50 for a future proof console.
As an Xbox 360 owner, I'd feel better knowing I spent $300 for a system with a DVD drive where 5 games out of 500 have multiple DVD's than spending $350-$400 where 5 games out of 500 actually fill a 15GB HD-DVD.
Apoc said:
A fair point. I just wanted to note that half of Halo is pretty much repeated, and Gearbox did some efficient reusing of game data, so it isn't too surprising to see the actual game size being smaller (this can be pretty much applied to any game that revisits older parts of the game such as RPGs...). Most of that 4.4GB is probably strategic copying of data for quicker loading.
Alpha_Spartan said:
You also have the the problem with redundant data to speed up load times. As was just mentioned, Halo apparently took up 3-4 Gb's on the XBox because of that. And only one CD on the PC. What if it turns out that load times on the XBox 360 ends up a lot longer then on the PS3 just because there's not enough space to do this efficiently, wouldn't you consider that an advantage ? Not that i know if this is going to be the case, but i don't think anyone can deny that it's a probability. Though perhaps some developers here knows more about this.
zidane1strife
Banned
jvd said:
There must be redundancy or filler in the gt data then, the PGR3 compression's proven very effective or both. It's impressive that PGR3 fit(though IIRC they've halved city number and diminished car numbers-dunnoh how much- from their previous title, as expected being their first-next-gen racing project.), the question is how tightly/loosely did it fit? Certainly a next-gen gt4 size racing game(not likely gt5 if gt3's anything to go by, it seems polyphony's to scale down content when transitioning from one generation to another.), would feature substantially far more content than PGR3. Multiplying content by several fold is surely to substantially increase the size of the data.
zidane1strife said:
You are making the incorrect assumption that all data is equal.
Yes, PGR3 has about half the cars of PGR2, but those cars are using 6-7 times more polygons each, with fully rendered interiors right down to working guages, and individually placed and animated drivers.
Yes, there are half the cities, but each city is roughly 4 times larger than the ones in PGR2. Also, the cities use 4 times higher resolution textures, and all of the buildings are individually modeled, instead of using blocks of non-descript placeholder buildings like PGR2.
scooby_dooby
Legend
Forza came in around 3.0 gigs. That was with no special care taken to minimize the data, i.e. it was a non-issue so they didn't do anything to reduce file size.
Arguabley the most realistic racing simulation game ever made on a console, in terms of physics and overall feel, weighs in just around 3GB. It must be a a fairly uncompressed 3gig's as well, i.e. why would they increase load times through extra compression when they still have a good 5 gigs of free space? So you would think, that had they done their best to reduce filesize we could see it much lower than 3GB.
On the issue of x360 having slower load times due to extreme compression, any PS3 based DVD games will suffer from teh same issues, and the blu-ray games will most likely have read speeds of 36 or 72mbps, much less than the 120mbps offered on the compressed DVD, so I wonder how that will come into play.
Blu-Ray will have less compression but slower transfer speeds, 360 will have higher compression but faster transfer speeds. That's of course on the 2% of games that I expect to use blu-ray, the rest will just use DVD and both platforms will be equal.
I think it really truly is a non-issue, on ps1 there were many multi-disc games, it was clear that the CD format was inadequate and something bigger was required. There's 2 huge differences here, First, during the life of xbox the game sizes have not even grown, i.e, they're the same now as they were in 2001. Secondly, 95% of the games do not even use up HALF of the available data. Looiking at those two facts, it's obvious that DVD is nowhere near being too small.
Arguabley the most realistic racing simulation game ever made on a console, in terms of physics and overall feel, weighs in just around 3GB. It must be a a fairly uncompressed 3gig's as well, i.e. why would they increase load times through extra compression when they still have a good 5 gigs of free space? So you would think, that had they done their best to reduce filesize we could see it much lower than 3GB.
On the issue of x360 having slower load times due to extreme compression, any PS3 based DVD games will suffer from teh same issues, and the blu-ray games will most likely have read speeds of 36 or 72mbps, much less than the 120mbps offered on the compressed DVD, so I wonder how that will come into play.
Blu-Ray will have less compression but slower transfer speeds, 360 will have higher compression but faster transfer speeds. That's of course on the 2% of games that I expect to use blu-ray, the rest will just use DVD and both platforms will be equal.
I think it really truly is a non-issue, on ps1 there were many multi-disc games, it was clear that the CD format was inadequate and something bigger was required. There's 2 huge differences here, First, during the life of xbox the game sizes have not even grown, i.e, they're the same now as they were in 2001. Secondly, 95% of the games do not even use up HALF of the available data. Looiking at those two facts, it's obvious that DVD is nowhere near being too small.
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zidane1strife
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Powderkeg said:
Well, that doesn't contradict my point, as I've said it's normal to scale-down the amount of models/cities/tracks/content(in a way) when transitioning from one generation to the next, due to the greater lvls of detail afforded by improved h/w.
Question is how much space does PGR3 take? How much are they pushing the format(how compressed)? Depending on these answers would be the possibility of doubling cars and cities for a sequel, or even further down the road reaching gt4- track/car lvls.
zidane1strife said:
I think time and budget restraints will be more limiting than space. I don't think Bizarre has the time or budget to double the cars and/or cities. You figure what they have now is 2 years worth of effort, doubling that would require 4 years, and that would make it an Xbox 720 title.
Realistically speaking, without resorting to using tons of FMV, you could probably count the number of developers on one hand who could afford to fill 9GB of space with non-redundant game data.
scooby_dooby
Legend
Not just blu-ray, but a dual-laser blu-ray to boot. Apparently they are quite a bit more expensive to manufacture since they require both a red and blue laser.
Shogmaster
Regular
Bjorn said:
Never played Half Life 2, have you? The game pauses frequently in the middle of a level to load the next section.
I was talking about linear games . I.e halo 3 . if it needs more than 1 disc worth of room u can use 2 . IF people can deal with a 3.4 hour movie like lord of the rings on 2 discs then they can deal with a 20 + hour game on 2 discs .
As for your rpg arguement. It is valid and i've said that would be a problem . However a good designer with help from the hardrive can minimize this . Your also suggesting a game that would need 4 dvds . At 7.4 gigs each your talking about a 29.6 gig game . Now thats either a crap load of 720p movies . I would say u can put about a good 10 hours of fmv in there and have 7 gigs left over for game data . Or your going to have a game that uses artists to fill that up with textures . Which will result in the most expensive game ver made
Yes, in a Gran Turismo game that's what I'd rather have instead of polygon cars for car presentations. GT is about cars after all.
Because GT games are about cars
Those games are appreciated by car entusiasts, and I'm quite sure anybody but the polygon obsessed nerd wouldn't mind high quality real time footage of those cars instead of polygon models which honestly can't even next gen compete with reality.
Even if the car was modelled with interiors, engine and all and you could rotate and zoom the model at will, it would still give a worse view of the car than carefully selected real video footage of the vehicle and the details, which, if done correctly could be a very good alternative for the player being able to manipulate a polygon model "in real time".
Rotateable and zoomable polygon models are really appreciated only by nerds, the mainstream really doesn't care
In a Gran Turismo game, all this footage does need to be on the same disc as the game because if you've played GT games, you'd know that it would be part of the "carage" or car purchasing sessions.
Yes, and I did find that disc swapping during LOTR's annoying and it did lessen the experience for me. Are you saying if you'd been able to choose, you'd still would have rather taken the "split in 2 pieces" option rather than "in one piece as it was meant to be"? (the content and AV quality being the same in both choises of course).
Episodic content is of course different, as they are meant to be watced in parts.
Yes, in a totally linear, 20 hour game disc swapping isn't much of a problem, like it wasn't in FFVII
IMO the FMV integrated in the FFVII game did not break the game, and is not comparable to disc swapping. I've really never got it how the fmv in games is supposed to break the experience :? True, they are different quality to the in game... different style... not made by game engine... so what's the big deal, they are entertaining in itself and do carry the plot... they are consistent in that they are made with the same style throughout, it's not as if every hour or so you get game play graphics that are done in cell shading and superdeformed characters, every other you'd get game graphics that are done in some other rendering tech and with "realistic" characters, and the fmv's would be of different style too........ like in the movie Kill Bill, the anime inspired sequence didn't "break" the movie for me even though it was in very different style to the movie, it was there because the director meant it to be there for some artistic reasons, it was integrated to the movie without me needing to get up my chair and go put another disc in to see it.or in a 20 hour movie either, if ever there would be such a thing, If there was, it probably would be made intentionally so that there would be breaks every now and then.
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huh ? what's happened to the sig???
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