What's your opinion on Blu-ray technology?

[thenefariousone]

We already have two examples that represent the technical extent of next-gen console games: GRAW and Oblivion.


Oblivion PC Recommended System Requirements:
3 Ghz Intel Pentium 4 or equivalent processor
1 GB System RAM ATI X800 series, NVIDIA GeForce 6800 series, or higher video card
Space Required: 4.6 GB free hard disk space

GRAW
2 GHz Pentium® IV or the equivalent with 1Gb RAM
NVIDIA® GeForce 6/7 or ATI® Radeon® 9600-9800/X
Space Required: 5 GB of hard drive space

Both games have fantastic reviews, are represent technical aspects of next-gen games, and are available today, on dvd or cds.

You could have used the argument with the transition to any new disc media. And current PC games do not represent the technical extent of next-gen console games, not by a long shot.

 

[pc999]

As i said, the fact that the guy actually took the picture of the TV screen means you'll never see it properly, for obvious photographic-related issues (colours bleeding into each other being the most obvious issue). The same goes for the HD image too though.

It just showed the difference between a crappy pic of a SD feed and a crappy pic of a HD feed.

I am asking this because if this is a pic from a 480i then in the pic there is only 640x240 (still our eyes percive it "somewhat like 480") and we will be comparing a 640x240 vs a 1280x720.

I think it is probably from a 480i for the reason I gave early.

 

[Titanio]

We already have two examples that represent the technical extent of next-gen console games: GRAW and Oblivion.

...

Both games have fantastic reviews, are represent technical aspects of next-gen games

You have absolutely got to be joking If this is as good as it gets, stop the planet, I want off.

You'll see things even in the next 12 months that blow both of those games away, not to mention over the next 5 or 6 years.

 

[London Geezer]

I am asking this because if this is a pic from a 480i then in the pic there is only 640x240 (still our eyes percive it "somewhat like 480") and we will be comparing a 640x240 vs a 1280x720.

I think it is probably from a 480i for the reason I gave early.

It's a DVD feed upscaled, so probably shown at 480p.
Anyway, i didn't want to start a big argument, i just thought the GIF looked cool

 

[one]

Do you REALLY believe that?

Any subsidy is going to be paid for you (and me for that matter).

IF BD costs 100$ you can be 100% sure we are going to pay for it. It can be royalties in games, in films, or in adquisition price, but we will pay for it.
We were discussing about games. I would like to know the opinion of developers if they would rather prefer, for making a better game, to have 1GB RAM and 8 pixel shaders more or a 256 bit bus, instead of a BD drive. All of them are going to improve their lives, but I don't see the BD drive is going to give me more, as a game-player, than other options by the same price. Not even close.
Now, if we want to look at PS3 as an High Def player, fine, it makes sense. If we want to place in Sony's position and the massive amounts of money on royalties they can earn, fine. But as a player, I don't want to pay for it.

Believe it or not, my argument is that your scenario is as hypothetical as the scenario I illustrated unless you know the retail price of PS3. Plain and simple.

 

[Ty]

You don't seem to get it...what I'm saying is that some companies develop proprietary inhouse tools..and no there's no name for it..why would it need a name? Hey maybe we should design a logo for it too eh?

Maybe this is news to you but for those companies that design their own inhouse tools, it's business as usual. ILM is just an example.

Maybe, I never claimed to "get it".

Anyhow why don't you tell us what exactly your tool does and we'll see if it applies to games and not static 2D images.

 

[DarkRage]

Believe it or not, my argument is that your scenario is as hypothetical as the scenario I illustrated unless you know the retail price of PS3. Plain and simple.

I don't need to know PS3 retail price. BD is getting PS3 significantly more expensive to build = more expensive to get.

And for the extra money I am receiving zero to very little improvement in games.

For Sony it is a key technology, as it pushes High-Def, more TV sets, royalties and loads of money. I don't blame sony for trying it, even if it means delaying and getting a higher priced PS3. Benefits are potentially huge for them. But for me, as a game player, they are not.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

Why in the world would you assume a 5x increase in ALL assets. In a last gen game, majority of the assetts will be audio and video. There's no reason for these to grow too much, other than the video being HD.

I'm not assuming anything, just taking a ball-park figure to work with. 5x sounded good based on the quality improvement we're wanting/expecting over current gen. If the consoles have 10x the resources, 10x the polygon drawing, 10x the RAM, etc., the games will have 10x as much stuff, no? So I just took a very approximate figure to consider an argument's feasibility.

Meshes and textures are likely to increase in number and resolution. Audio should increase in number and quality, with more diversity of sounds and better quality, unless that's not to improve at all next gen. Video going HD is going to be 3x the size of SD video. Unless things aren't getting better next gen, they're getting bigger. Which is where I asked the question how much bigger...

Is next-gen likely going to need in the order of only 3x the space for 3x the assets, or perhaps as much as 10x the space (ignoring alternative compression schemes such as lossy texture compression)?

If audio takes up 50% of storage requirements, and audio increases only by 20% in size nexet gen, that's going to lower the average increase considerably. But there is still an increase. I don't know id that average is 5x, 3x, 10x, or what, which is why I'm asking for ideas of what the expected growth would be. From that figure we can make a better guess as to requirements. It's certainly a more logical approach to estimate impact on next-gen games than picking one single title and deciding that shows next-gen does or doesn't need any more than 4.5 GB...

 

[scooby_dooby]

I love it when people use these examples. Don't you think Oblivion fit in 4.5GB because it had to? It's not like there was much choice...

They used 60% of the disc space cause they 'had to'? Oblivion had a boatload of disc space remaining if they had needed it they would've used it. Oblivion struggled to stream the low res textures it did use.

 

[Gholbine]

Oblivion is a poor example of disc space consumption. It's not hard to see where most of that free space comes from; high compression, and it's also not hard to see where that high compression hurts the game.

It's also a poor example because of its predecessor, Morrowind. The game took 900mb and was equally 'large' for its time. Then GTA San Andreas came along and munched up 4.5GB of disc space.

If anything, Oblivion is a strike against DVD, not for it.

 

[hey69]

the latest tombraider needs 7.5 gigabytes on my harddrive , eventhough it comes from a dvd5 disc..

 

[Bobbler]

How much of a penalty are we actually talking about when doing a layer switch? I could see developers trying to stay on a single layer at all costs even when having access to dual layer at almost no cost to them, depending on the penalties...

I've seen more than a few games ride the edge of a single layer...

 

[zed]

Why in the world would you assume a 5x increase in ALL assets. In a last gen game, majority of the assetts will be audio and video. There's no reason for these to grow too much, other than the video being HD.

textures at least will increase by 4x (perhaps even 16x)
eg a 128x128 sized texture what looked acceptable on a ps2 will not look good in HD it will need to be increased 256x256 or 512x512. (ignoring compression/pallettes/texture generation ) also the number of bytes per pixel is gonna be higher on average. i easily see textures requiring 10x space then last gen

 

[scooby_dooby]

It's also a poor example because of its predecessor, Morrowind. The game took 900mb and was equally 'large' for its time. Then GTA San Andreas came along and munched up 4.5GB of disc space.

GTA: SA on XBOX is only 2.8GB. Less discspace than the previous 2 games , while also being a much larger game content wise. Probably not a great comparison, XBOXS2 games, as it seems PS2 games don't use nearly as much compression.

 

[NANOTEC]

Maybe, I never claimed to "get it".

Anyhow why don't you tell us what exactly your tool does and we'll see if it applies to games and not static 2D images.

You claimed there were no such tool as if you've worked for every company on the planet. Textures are static 2d images.

As for the rest of the others who say BD50 will be needed for movies, let's wait and see how many movies are released on BD50 and what and how they'll be using it.

 

[rounin]

GTA: SA on XBOX is only 2.8GB. Less discspace than the previous 2 games , while also being a much larger game content wise. Probably not a great comparison, XBOXS2 games, as it seems PS2 games don't use nearly as much compression.

Extrapolating further with this example lol: ) we can conclude that GTA4 is going to need roughly at least 3 times Oblivion's size (Morrowind xbox -> GTA:SA xbox), making it around 13 gigs. But if we play around more lol: ), we see PS3 has the techinical edge this time, so we can say that 13 gigs minimum for PS3 and maybe 16 gigs for X360. In both cases, it wouldn't fit on a single DVD which would be quite sad for a large expansive game of this nature

</ridicule of extrapolations>

 

[DemoCoder]

As for the rest of the others who say BD50 will be needed for movies, let's wait and see how many movies are released on BD50 and what and how they'll be using it.

BD50 will find its biggest usage in one of Hollywood's biggest cash cows: re-releasing old and current TV Series on DVD after their first run. How many discs are needed for Seinfeld, Star Trek Whatever, or 24 Season X?

A VC-1 or H.264 encoded stream at 12mbps could fit almost 10 hours to a disc. For SD content (like Seinfeld, authored in video) they could probably fit multiple seasons per disc at greater than DVD quality. Also, BR recorders for PVRs will benefit from BR's superior capacity.

Someone once said only 7 computers will be needed for the entire US and only 640k RAM was adequate.

 

[aaaaa00]

BD50 will find its biggest usage in one of Hollywood's biggest cash cows: re-releasing old and current TV Series on DVD after their first run. How many discs are needed for Seinfeld, Star Trek Whatever, or 24 Season X?

That will only happen if one BD50 is cheaper than two BD25 discs (packaging inclusive).

Also people have expressed a preference for multi-disk collections due to their higher "perceived value". So that's another factor content providers will have to weigh when considering releasing a dual BD25 vs a single BD50.

 

[Ty]

You claimed there were no such tool as if you've worked for every company on the planet.

No, I claimed that I'm pretty sure it does not exist so it was not a claim about every company.

Textures are static 2d images.

Textures don't have to be static images. Furthermore when you have lighting, it changes the appearance of your textures.

Do your images deal with dynamic lighting? I thought you worked at photo lab or something?

Again, please explain what your automatic compression tool does so we can see if it can be applied to games.

 

[rounin]

Why you continue to argue rationally with this nanotec person is beyond me. He has clearly shown that he is not in the industry, his arguments are weak, and the coherency of his arguments is simply shameful. You would think he would have dropped the point when Fafalada said

There's no automated way to do lossy compression of everything - you'll always be balancing space vs. quality.
And lossless compression gives no guarantess for compression ratio, so you still have to verify results and again, balance things to fit by hand.

Its a dev's word versus that of a person who cant even make logical arguments (read earlier in this thread). I say we move on to another point already.