What are the odds that 9 GIGs WON'T be enough for Next Gen?

[jvd]

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.

thought it was a game about cars. Not videos to look at the cars .

Because GT games are about cars

Right games. YOu play games you don't watch movies . They are called movies and not games .

Yes, and I did[/q] 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.

To me I don't care . When I switched discs i got up to make popcorn or use the john .

Not to mention that going from a 3.4 hour movie to a 20 hour games is leaps and bounds diffrent. Or are you going to sit there and tell me you can play a game 20 hours strait with out needing to take a break or get up once .

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

and a good developer can make a game that doesn't requirer disc swapping esp with the help of the hardrive .

I've really never got it how the fmv in games is supposed to break the experience

You go from crappy graphics in a ff game to beautifull cgi . That breaks the game . IT be like starting to read a book and then every other chapter u have to go and watch part of the movie and then back to the book and then bakc to the movie . It breaks the game . Square should pick. Either movies or games. I personaly don't want to watch a game . I want to play a game .

in the movie Kill Bill, the anime inspired sequence didn't "break" the movie for me

for you , yet for many it did .

Fmv takes away from games . It breaks the suspension of disbelief .

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.

to bad your psone ffs made u get off your ass huh .

Its funny watching you and your double standards . You say it was okay then because of x y z but its bad now cause of x y z . The only diffrence is that it was once your beloved and now it is your mortal foe .

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.

or you would pause your movie and go and take a break. Which ironicly involves you leaving a chair or couch . At which point u can change the disc .

Oh my god. No way !!!!

Now this is of course if they ever need more than 1 dvd .

It seems like u didn't mind doing this with your psone . Yet now its a problem .

Funny but what i expected from you

 

[rabidrabbit]

What the...jvd ??? You're disagreeing me on things I'm agreeing you with

I never said I would play a 20 hour game in one sitting.
I never said I would mind if in a linear 20 hour game there were a programmed break every few hours
I never said I'd watch a 20 hour movie in one sitting.

If you talk about "suspension of disbelief" I'd say the crappy craphics in FFVII gameplay
can have an effect on that too.

There are books that have pictures in them, I don't see people complaining the pics" break the suspension of disbelief" for them Hell even adult magazines have text and pics and when people read and watch them their attention is very much focused

GT is about looking at the cars as much (if not more) than racing, I'm sure you agree on that

Maybe I'm just becoming jaded to the same old gameplay gen after gen, but I do welcome a more wholesome experiences next gen. Guiding some polygons, evading "enemy polygons"... I don't mind some well integrated audio visual "breaks" for that.

But changing a disc is not an audiovisual experience, it's a chore no matter how you want to twist it.

 

[Bjorn]

Never played Half Life 2, have you? The game pauses frequently in the middle of a level to load the next section.

That's rather crappy streaming in that case. But the fact is that Gears of war is still a console game and you can't really compare RAM usage between PC and console games. Especially since the PC also has to load the entire bloated OS.

 

[Bjorn]

As for your rpg arguement. It is valid and i've said that would be a problem. Your also suggesting a game that would need 4 dvds . At 7.4 gigs each your talking about a 29.6 gig game .

Well, i wasn't necessarily thinking about a 4 DL DVD game. But the problem still remains if there's two discs. Oops, forgot one thing on world A, swap disc, get the item, back to world C, swap disc agains. Aah, now back to world B to finish that other quest...

 

[PARANOiA]

Well, i wasn't necessarily thinking about a 4 DL DVD game. But the problem still remains if there's two discs. Oops, forgot one thing on world A, swap disc, get the item, back to world C, swap disc agains. Aah, now back to world B to finish that other quest...

I've played multi-disc games like that. Last one was Leisure Suit Larry V. Can't say I've played one since FFVII certainly did not.

 

[Sandwich]

That's rather crappy streaming in that case. But the fact is that Gears of war is still a console game and you can't really compare RAM usage between PC and console games. Especially since the PC also has to load the entire bloated OS.

When you have 1 GB of RAM the space used up by windows is no concearn.
XP may be big but some people just overreact.

The 512MB total in xbox360 can't beat a PC with 1GB RAM + 128MB DDR3. Windows doesn't magically gobble up 512MB.
PC games have always had and I expect always will have bigger textures, bitmaps, samples. That's always been the lazy way to use up big blocks of ram.

 

[Bjorn]

The 512MB total in xbox360 can't beat a PC with 1GB RAM + 128MB DDR3. Windows doesn't magically gobble up 512MB.
PC games have always had and I expect always will have bigger textures, bitmaps, samples. That's always been the lazy way to use up big blocks of ram.

It can't beat it but that's not what we're talking about here either. It's that you can't compare RAM usage on consoles vs PC's , mostly because of the simple fact that PC developers doesn't need to worry that much about it, at least not in comparision to console developers. Though PC developers have their own share of problems, the multitude of different GPU's and so forth, so it's not really fair to blame them either.

 

[scooby_dooby]

Here's some numbers on Forza:

ROOT
  dashupdate.xbe - 57MB
  default.xbe - 5.9MB
  downloader.exe - 1.1 MB
  update.xbe - 2.3 MB
 
MEDIA
  AUDIO - 90mb
  CABS - 732MB (each car MODEL has a cab file, they average 2.8MB, 
		one model may represent many cars in the game)
  EVENTS - 110MB (endurance, point to point, online career, etc)
  FONT - 1 MB
  FRONTEND - 316MB (mostly intro videos, actual system files ~30 MB for8 regions)
  LOC - 6MB
  TRACKS - 1.6GB (tracks average 43MB each)

 

[jvd]

Well, i wasn't necessarily thinking about a 4 DL DVD game. But the problem still remains if there's two discs. Oops, forgot one thing on world A, swap disc, get the item, back to world C, swap disc agains. Aah, now back to world B to finish that other quest...

well first your example goes from 2 discs to 3 .

Other than that there are ways around it . I.e disabling dungons , oh you've cleared the dungon of evil it is now clensed and make no reason to go back. Then for the areas you need like say your home village u can keep it on the second or third disc or save it to the hardrive .

As for bluray . We don't yet know the cost of a disc. It may be that even some ps3 games will come on 2 dvds depending on the pricing between the two

 

[goonergaz]

my 2 pence worth (if anyone's interested! lol):

I have 'skimmed' over this thread, but from my understanding (from reading about this on many forums)...

1) X360 will use a lossess compression that will mean they won't (for 99.9% of games) require more than 1 DVD.

2) X360 is geared towards this comperssion system and suited to doing it unlike PS3

3) as PS3 is not suited to all the compression mallarky a bigger medium will help it out, meaning the CPU can concentrate on the game rather than the compression

4) however if only x1 is used (on BR) it will mean slow loading BUT ONLY ON GAMES THAT USE THE BIGGER MEDIA

5) that is only expected to 'affect' *some* games, I'll pluck out a 5-10% figure from my backside!

So in summary, X360 doesn't need a bigger medium because it can easily handle lossess compression whereas PS3 can't so will utilise the bluray format to help out the CPU.

Also of course Sony will be using PS3 to push their 'next gen video format', and, like the PS2 when it was released could be purchased as a 'cheap' bluray video player or a games machine which will save the extra expense of buying a bluray player...or ceratinly mean you can buy the films on BR when you might have bought them on DVD...all which will help Sony (IMHO).

 

[London Geezer]

Just one thing... What exactly is stopping PS3 from using any of the compression methods the X360 is using?

If it can, then it means PS3 will potentially be able to store up to 6 times as much compressed material as a X360 game. Not sure why, but the option is there.

Also, compression only takes you so far.

 

[Farid]

N64!

The N64 magical space saving lossless compression algorithm myth still lives on? Heh heh.

XeCPU does indeed have some transistors dedicated to datas unpacking, but we're talking about bandwidth saving technology more than medium space saving technology.

Sure it helps, but the things that require the most disc space, like videos, textures, vertex datas, are already in a compressed state and therefore can't be compressed futher.


All in all, about the original subject, I think that only overly ambitious free roaming type of games could need anything else but a DVD9 support.
Other games, will either fit on a DVD9 or use multiple discs. No big deal, really.

 

[Sandwich]

Nothing stops PS3 from using the best compression available.

FMV cutscenes: all cpu power you'll ever need 100% available
sound and music compression: mp3 playback utilizes my old athlonXP for 1%, so that's no issue
textures: there's no reason not to assume nvidia will support texture compression

 

[Bjorn]

well first your example goes from 2 discs to 3 .

Not if world 1-2 are on disc 1 and 3-4 on disc 2.

 

[jvd]

Not if world 1-2 are on disc 1 and 3-4 on disc 2.

then your explaining it wrongly or i'm not understanding your explination .

Having 2 discs you can use the hardrive to store info and do quick loads . Also they might stop quick hopping from dungon to dungons and make u actualy have to travel back through the whole world to where u droped the item . Thus stoping that quick disc change

 

[Bjorn]

then your explaining it wrongly or i'm not understanding your explination .

Having 2 discs you can use the hardrive to store info and do quick loads . Also they might stop quick hopping from dungon to dungons and make u actualy have to travel back through the whole world to where u droped the item . Thus stoping that quick disc change

Ok, a b = disc 1, c, d = disc 2. I go from c, a, c then b = 3 disc swaps. Quick disc changes could probably be avoided, but it's enough in my book even if there's 1 hour in between. And having to travel back to a level (without flying, portals and such) for 1 hour in a level you've already seen doesn't seem to be that much fun imo. Not to mention the fact that what you're talking about now is that the game developers needs to adapt the game because of (possible) media limitations.

 

[Java_man]

Well,if 9 GB is not enough then perhaps MS could rely on a technolgy such as VMD:
(http://www.dvd-intelligence.com/main_sections/news_archive/2003_free/3_wmd_demo.htm).
Moreover to save palce,MS rely on high level of compression to reduce the need of very important space for HD next gen games as the XeCPU ahs hardware optimisations for this purpose.
It is sure that many of the best games won't have any space trouble as they would be first party games and certainly use MS hardware optimisations to save space.
Btw,wasn't one advantage of procedural synthesis to reduce bandwidth need thus certainly storage space on the disk ?
If so MS would certainly push developpers to use this feature as much as possible.

 

[function]

"What are the odds that 9 GIGs WON'T be enough for Next Gen?"

Won't be enough for what? Good games? Squaresoft? Zealot spec wars?

9GB won't be a hard limited for anything next generation, not only because there are ways around many of the current big uses for ROM space (such as in-engine cutscenes and (HOPEFULLY) the return of skillfully made chip generated music) but also because you can simply use multiple disks, even if that means replicating some or much of the data on each disk.

Less HD-FMV? Fewer games packed with dozens of ill-fitting, or low quality lisenced music tracks? I'm crying inside, I can tell you. If 1 out of every 100 games next gen would genuinely benefit from BR, rather than using multiple disks or doing without flow-breaking or superficial FMV, I'll be suprised.

 

[MODEL 3]

One of the major reasons Dreamcast failed it was because it hadn’t DVD-ROM (not because it had GD-ROM).As everyone can remember At the time SONY launch PS2, there was a commotion because at 300$ PS2 was a cheap DVD-ROM player and this alone add market value to PS2 leading to extremely good early demand (actually there was a lot of PS2 advertisement by SONY that promoting it as a DVD-player).About cost SEGA could have easily picked up a 2X DVD-ROM (16X cd-rom) which will be faster than the 12X GD-ROM and selling the dreamcast at 300$ instead of 200$ with higher profit. Now think what you would prefer to buy in 1999 a 200$ standard dreamcast or a 300$ DVD-Rom enabled dreamcast?
About the R9 capacity I think will be just enough because:
PS1 (3,5MB, 230X224 most common resolution) most games used 1CD (650MB) , some games used 2 CDs and only a handful of games (RPG mainly) used 4 CDs.
PS2/XBOX (38MB/64MB, 640x480 most common resolution) most games use 1 DVD (4,5GB) but they are not covering the whole capacity, some are using 1 DVD and they are using the whole capacity, and only a handful of games (mainly RPG) they are using 2 DVDs.
So although we saw an increase in main memory of 11X or 18X we only saw an increase in storage mediums of 4X.
XBOX360 (512MB, 1024x720p most common resolution (speculation)) and in relation with the previous generation we have 8X in main memory in relation with XBOX and I speculate that 4X increase in storage mediums will be again enough (just), So will have most of the games using the full capacity of a R9 DVD (9GB), some of the games using 2 R9 DVDs and only a handful of games (mainly RPG) will use 4 R9 DVDs.

 

[jvd]

Model 3 . The dc failed for 2 reasons . 1 is sega pulling the plug dispite being at 12+ m units worldwide and 2 ) piracy .

Not space issues . Owning a dreamcast and mayn pirated games. I could put 90% of all dreamcast games on one cd . The only one I believe i couldn't was shenmue but it could have been another game was so long ago