Why isn't streaming used more predominantly in GC/PS2 games?
- Thread starter Li Mu Bai
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Only if the game supported streaming to begin with. Lazy8 summed things up pretty spot on. There are different types of streaming that can be used, predictability of direction is a issue that can't be easily solved in all games, and that's IMO is probably why it isn't used nearly as often.
Alstrong:
Bungie strung sections of a level together by relying pretty much just on the speed advantage a hard drive gives over managing the optical disc drive. Had they even tried to have the game engine buffer ahead and stream when the player neared a checkpoint, they could've easily avoided the little hiccup it does have and instead ended up with totally seamless levels (especially since the game uses long corridors at some checkpoints - an ideal situation for facilitating streaming more readily). It definitely shows the usefulness of a HDD, though hard drives might be a bit out of place within the economic model of console design.
Yep. And a related benefit of using the hard drive to cache levels is being able to quickly re-enter the maps even after having turned the machine off... a big time saver when continuing your current level in the Xbox version.
Bungie strung sections of a level together by relying pretty much just on the speed advantage a hard drive gives over managing the optical disc drive. Had they even tried to have the game engine buffer ahead and stream when the player neared a checkpoint, they could've easily avoided the little hiccup it does have and instead ended up with totally seamless levels (especially since the game uses long corridors at some checkpoints - an ideal situation for facilitating streaming more readily). It definitely shows the usefulness of a HDD, though hard drives might be a bit out of place within the economic model of console design.
marconelly!
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For BGDA/CoN - yes they actually did. SSX3 is an obvious one as you can go down the mountain for ~45 minutes without any loading pause, but for PoP or ROTK I don't have any definite proof, except for hearing the game load during some of it's emptier corridors, which were placed there to hide the loading.
Qroach said:
in the case you quoted. Room loading / non-open arean loading should be able to benefit nicely (ground up to take advatage of 48MB of fast storage of course).
I just see that segmentation of memory in this manner in a closed(read non-generic) manner can be advatageous.
Actually, I had an idea of segmenting memory types for something like Gamecube 2 a while back...
It would go like this: 36mb or so low-latency (1t-sram or successor) for the CPU scratchpad, 96mb of the highest bandwidth stuff available for Texture and other sequentially loaded storage, and a 200mb pool of the the cheapest ram around for streaming and other misc purposes.
Of course the amounts of each are just guesses and can be adjusted according to costs.
Also, should have some built in NV ram for saves.
Possibly unrealistic, but the best of all worlds!
It would go like this: 36mb or so low-latency (1t-sram or successor) for the CPU scratchpad, 96mb of the highest bandwidth stuff available for Texture and other sequentially loaded storage, and a 200mb pool of the the cheapest ram around for streaming and other misc purposes.
Of course the amounts of each are just guesses and can be adjusted according to costs.
Also, should have some built in NV ram for saves.
Possibly unrealistic, but the best of all worlds!
So it is figured more predominantly on the PS2 exclusive & cross-platform games, as I initially thought. Why not the GC exclusives? Is it that much more inherently difficult given the GC's architecture? Given the A-RAM already being used as a very effective cache, especially between the slow disk and main ram if you have assets that don't need instant access, but you don't want to wait for seeks/loads. Developers choice?
Some types of games won't really benefit from streaming, games like Soul Calibur... Unless you were to restructure the whole game map to be able to navigate it and stream the levels in real time, which would be nice (SC2 loading and menu structure is a bit irritating)...
Also, any level-based game such as GT3 would have to be heavily restructurised in order for someone to, i don't know, simulate a "real world" that lets you choose the courses and loads them in real time...? Not sure whether that would do the game any good...
Exploration games such as Primal (and similar) and JAK2 (and similar) (see: non-level based) are all going for a streaming approach already...
Also, even if the game IS level-based, the "level" can be large enough to need streaming. So in that case one would still see loading screens, however the game will initially only load a part of the level, and stream the rest on the fly, which i think is what happened in SSX Tricky (not sure about SSX3, as there were some "dead" moments i'm sure were used to load stuff...)
Much as I'd love that to be true it's not Quite THAT fastTagrineth said:
Under realworld rates it's possible to fill the entire memory in 10-15 seconds on any console reading only from the optical disc (no help from HDDs or whatever).
In reality no game usually comes even close to loading the entire memory (more like 40%-70%) and add in compression and you can get the job done in half the time or less.
Difference between good/bad loading scheme&data organization can go into order of 100s. It doesn't help that there's also people working in the industry that don't quite understand that fact.
Not to my knowledge.Li Mu Bai said:
PS2 arguably has a slight advantage because IOP can pretty much run&control streaming process entirely with virtually no interaction from EE. But relative to the other work and considerations associated with getting the streaming scheme to work reliably, hw issues are pretty minor thing really.
Occasionaly you will see a slight(half a second or so) glitch when you are going through the area connecting two different areas. Anyway SSX games have an immense advantage over most other game genres - you can only move in One direction, which pretty much makes them the simplest possible scenario for using streaming of graphics data.
Fafalada said:Much as I'd love that to be true it's not Quite THAT fastTagrineth said:
Under realworld rates it's possible to fill the entire memory in 10-15 seconds on any console reading only from the optical disc (no help from HDDs or whatever).
In reality no game usually comes even close to loading the entire memory (more like 40%-70%) and add in compression and you can get the job done in half the time or less.
I never claimed my memory was accurate.
But it's still quite fast.I can't help but think of Saturn here...
marconelly!
Veteran
I've just remembered - Rise to Honor is another game that streams everything, it supposedly has no visible load screens. I've only played the demo, and that holds true in it.
While slightly diffrent, DOA3 managed to have seamless load times by loading the next areas and characters while fighting, and this held true to the DOA3 demo of which didn't use HDD caching, but that is the advantage of xbox's extra RAM and does need the whole game to be structured around it.
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