What's your opinion on Blu-ray technology?

[Bobbler]

I don't think disc size is really that big of a deal. Will developers probably run into the problem? Sure. Is it going to be the end of the world? Doubtful! Will devs probably use more than a DVDs size on PS3? Sure.

Last gen, developers dealt with the small GC disc size just fine (and the games that used multiple discs I never heard complaints about). I think worst case there are games which use multiple discs... it isn't a big deal. With the target release of X360, there really wasn't anything they could do -- and if that was the biggest loss they (we) took from releasing early, I don't see how it was all that bad of a decision.


With that said, I'm happy PS3 is coming with a BR drive -- I want me some HD movies, and I don't want to dump 500+ this year on a standalone player.

 

[scooby_dooby]

But of course, waiting and seeing is the way to go when things look dire

Right...instead we should just pretend we're psychic and all predict the future.

 

[scooby_dooby]

Forget about what it will or will not do for games for a minute.

For little marginal price increase over the price at which the X360 premium launched at, you get a next-gen blue-laser disc player.

What's not to like, especially if you have or will have an HDTV?

That marginal price difference will be far less than buying a standalone HD-DVD or Blu-Ray player.

Hmm....well I wouldn't have wanted to wait until x-mas 2006 to start gaming on my HDTV(well into 2007 if you're not lucky), and that right there IMO is a unacceptable drawback to HD-DVD format. I got an entire years worth of gaming...and 2nd gen games already almost here, personally that's worth the tradeoff.

Not to mention, the system would surely have been scaled back in one way or another had they included HD-DVD and still aimed for the $400 pricepoint.

 

[thenefariousone]

The curve has already started based on three things:

1. Game Audio.

The sound capabilities of both the ps3 and the xbox 360 are virtually identical (Digital 5.1 surround sound). There's no reason to believe that the revolution's sound capabilities will be any different. The difference in audio capabilites between the xbox and the xbox 360 are also quite small.

On the software side - thanks to compression like mp3, audio takes up less space now than before. Everyone wants more unique voices for speech and play by play, but voices compress quite easily.

2. Game code size stabilized long ago, and there's no reason to believe that games made exclusively for any single console will be have a significant increase in game code size.


3. Production costs.

10x production of unique assests costs a lot of money, and takes up time. In order to reduce costs and development time, companies are now trying to reuse existing art assets and intellectual property. Or porting games to multiple platforms.

Well that's assuming that the jump between generations remains the same. Which it won't. Obviously the curve will flatten. Do you expect disc space to increase 10x's every 5 years? Do you expect 100gb games in 2010? 1tera-byte games in 2015?

We can see the actual jump in size from xbox to 360, instead of theorizing about it, and most 360 games seem to be between 4-6gb. I think games will continue to grow, but DVD will remain sifficient for a long time, especially as developers use better asset management and best practices to conserve space.

 

[wco81]

Blu-Ray supports lossless audio tracks, including newer surround sound formats.

Not that most gamers would care that much but is it possible to mix in these movie mode audio with game data?

Of course bitrates would be higher than whatever audio codecs are used for game audio and there may be a tradeoff if you use higher bitrate lossless codecs.

 

[NANOTEC]

And all I said was that they needn't be which would need to be taken into account for your tool.

And all you did was state the obvious.

I would say Yes wholeheartedly! It just needed to be pointed out that games deal with all sorts of textures with many different characteristics unlike the photo processing work you do. That's all, I'm not performing a character assassination, I'm just saying that you can't assume your tool would work for the assets used by a game.

Ever heard of photographic textures like those used for PGR3? Let's get this straight you don't know what I do and you don't know what tools I'm using so it would probably be better for you to not assume...like your erroneous assumption that those tools don't exist..maybe not at your company.

You're trying to turn the argument around. You're the one who made the argument that instead of doing it by hand like Faf mentioned, we, the games industry, could just push a button on a tool like yours.

I never said everyone in the the industry had those tools. Faf made a blanket statement. I simply refuted it.

Then I simply said that I didn't believe that tool existed (I was referring to 3rd party tools actually) and later on simply asked you how your tool works.

And I was talking about inhouse tools. What don't you understand?

Uhh...all I asked for was a bit more information to find out if your tool could be used in the manner like you said it could.

If you don't know how your tool really works, no biggie. If you're confusing Winzip for your in-house tool, no biggie.

If you don't work for my company and don't know what we do or the inhouse tools we use then no biggie. If you think I'm talking about winzip LOL then no biggie.

Just a hundred bucks? Not very confident are you?

Mr Benjamin Franklin in my wallet looks pretty confident.

I agree! So what does that make us?

Anonymous online entities.

Well sure, likely because they were/are you! Like the U-Com fellow who also got banned.

It's kinda fun watching you blindlessly swing in the dark like a desparate madman so I'll let you futily continue.

Yep, and that's all we're saying. That in the end, you need the human eye to look over everything to make sure what compression is doing to your assets.

And like I already said, with enough experience you don't need to sit there for days hand tuning like you thought everyone in the industry does. Speak only for yourself and you'd be much better off.

 

[NANOTEC]

Blu-Ray supports lossless audio tracks, including newer surround sound formats.

Not that most gamers would care that much but is it possible to mix in these movie mode audio with game data?

Of course bitrates would be higher than whatever audio codecs are used for game audio and there may be a tradeoff if you use higher bitrate lossless codecs.

Sure it can be done but what would you achieve by going lossless other than waste huge amounts of space? Game music is just stereo anyway whether you use 2 channels or 6 channels. There are already lossless audio codecs out there that gives 2:1 compression..Free Lossless Audio Codec. Even Apple has developed their own called ALAC.

 

[DemoCoder]

A lossless codec that guarantees 2:1 compression is mathematically impossible.

 

[aaaaa00]

Blu-Ray supports lossless audio tracks, including newer surround sound formats.

Not that most gamers would care that much but is it possible to mix in these movie mode audio with game data?

You want to blow disk space and precious system memory on LOSSLESS MUSIC!?

Well ok, you have 2 basic options: you could either stream it from the optical drive, which means it's hard to use the drive for anything else at the same time (seeks will kill you) which means all of your other assets have to fit 100% in memory OR you'd have to reserve some precious system RAM to buffer that losslessly compressed background music.

So let's consider if we encode our soundtrack with 5.1 Dolby TrueHD/MLPLossless at 6 mbit/s. (24bit * 96khz * 6 ch * 0.5 compression average) That means you're talking close to 850KB per second of music. Say a level has 6 minutes of music... that's 300 MB of precious memory gone already, JUST FOR MUSIC. (Not even considering that this is average, not worst case for your codec, where it won't be able compress anything at all.)

Let's say for argument sake you have a 54 mbit/s BD-ROM drive. To buffer that 6 minute piece of background music into memory, you'd be loading music for 46 seconds when your level starts.

Compare this to just encoding the music with a lossy codec like WMAPro at say, 768 kbit/s... only 34.5 MB, and you can load that in just 5 seconds. Sure the quality is not quite as nice, but if your game is any good the player isn't going to notice anyway. And even this is overkill, most game music doesn't need to be that kind of bit rate or have 5.1 channels to begin with.

You'd have to be completely nuts to bother with lossless game music.

Now of course, depending on your game's design (say a purely linear shooter) you could probably come up with some clever system where you interleave all your assets together including the music and stream them from the optical drive as you need them -- but that doesn't work for all game designs (and definitely not the sandbox games that are in-vogue right now).

You could also try chopping up your music into smaller segments and load them on the fly, but it's still a lot less efficient than just going with a lossy codec, reclaiming the memory for something else, and forgetting about the audiophile videogamers.

 

[NANOTEC]

A lossless codec that guarantees 2:1 compression is mathematically impossible.

Maybe but it doesn't stop some lossless codecs from getting up to 4:1 compression on some types of music.

http://www.losslessaudio.org/

http://www.lossless-audio.com/

 

[zed]

this is no doubt old news but i saw theyre starting to work on 200gb blu-ray disks
http://news.teamxbox.com/xbox/10706/TDK-Ships-Bluray-Disc-Media-Starts-Work-on-200GB-Disc/
im guessing the original ps3 wont be able to play them?

 

[Phil]

I don't think disc size is really that big of a deal. Will developers probably run into the problem? Sure. Is it going to be the end of the world? Doubtful! Will devs probably use more than a DVDs size on PS3? Sure.

Last gen, developers dealt with the small GC disc size just fine (and the games that used multiple discs I never heard complaints about). I think worst case there are games which use multiple discs... it isn't a big deal. With the target release of X360, there really wasn't anything they could do -- and if that was the biggest loss they (we) took from releasing early, I don't see how it was all that bad of a decision.


With that said, I'm happy PS3 is coming with a BR drive -- I want me some HD movies, and I don't want to dump 500+ this year on a standalone player.

True, I don't expect exclusive titles to be a problem. If we look at the situation GameCube vs Xbox | PS2 though, how many ports were never made or even canceled on GameCube, perhaps out of storage reasons? Sure, if you put enough effort, time and money towards getting around storage limitations, I'm sure you could get through with it - but how many times did these factors play a role and resulted in a port not being done?

 

[Platon]

True, I don't expect exclusive titles to be a problem. If we look at the situation GameCube vs Xbox | PS2 though, how many ports were never made or even canceled on GameCube, perhaps out of storage reasons? Sure, if you put enough effort, time and money towards getting around storage limitations, I'm sure you could get through with it - but how many times did these factors play a role and resulted in a port not being done?

That will depends though also on market penetration of the consoles. IF the xbox360 gets a significant market share this time around, especially in US and maybe even Europe then the question would be if developers publishers can afford NOT to make their titles mutliplatfrom...

 

[Bad_Boy]

this is no doubt old news but i saw theyre starting to work on 200gb blu-ray disks
http://news.teamxbox.com/xbox/10706/TDK-Ships-Bluray-Disc-Media-Starts-Work-on-200GB-Disc/
im guessing the original ps3 wont be able to play them?

I think the PS3 only allows up to 50GB. Then again, Im not to sure on the specifics of the BRD reading layers. Sony hasnt said too much.

 

[Ty]

And all you did was state the obvious.

And apparently you needed it.

Ever heard of photographic textures like those used for PGR3?

What about light maps? Bump? Alpha? Those aren't traditional texture types you deal with.

Let's get this straight you don't know what I do and you don't know what tools I'm using so it would probably be better for you to not assume...

Actually you're the one who is assuming when you stated that your tool would work for game assets when you stated the following factually incorrect statement:

And if you already have automated tools you don't need to find ways...

Which you still can't/won't explain how your tool could apply to game development. Here's your chance, tell us how it could work with the different types of textures used in a game. I'll even get you started.

1. I get my assets in a build folder.
2. I start the tool.
3. I hit a button on the tool.
4. <Insert Here what the tool does>

 

[Edge]

1. I get my assets in a build folder.
2. I start the tool.
3. I hit a button on the tool.
4. Entire multi-terabyte game is created, fits on a 650 MB CD and no load times!

Is that good enough?

 

[Phil]

In addition to what Ty posted above; Either NANOTEC contributes to the thread in a constructive way (by explaining what the tool does and if it bares any relevance to game-development) or drops the argument all together. He's been arguing with nothing but air and no substance for the last few pages and it's getting tiresome.

 

[zed]

A lossless codec that guarantees 2:1 compression is mathematically impossible.

true but i reckon youll be very hard pressed to find a piece of music that wont compress at least 2:1
similar to lossless textures eg png i betting all real photo pngs are smaller than the uncompressed image (the only ones that wouldnt would be some mathematical, colored noise images)

 

[NANOTEC]

What about light maps? Bump? Alpha? Those aren't traditional texture types you deal with.

They are not a problem. Automatic batch compression is orthogonal to texture types with regards to 2d textures.

Which you still can't/won't explain how your tool could apply to game development.

I've already explained our proprietary inhouse developed tool. It's a batch compression program for 2d textures with some parameters that you can adjust for output quality and size. Sorry can't get into anymore detail than that, but that's the gist of it. We don't give away tools to competitiors.

 

[Edge]

I've already explained our proprietary inhouse developed tool. It's a batch compression program for 2d textures with some parameters that you can adjust for output quality and size. Sorry can't get into anymore detail than that, but that's the gist of it. We don't give away tools to competitiors.

What would be a typical compression ratio? Let's say a level with 700 MB of textures?