Certain Xbox 360 Titles May Fill 4 DVDs 107
MBCook writes "A Joystiq post says that certain 'highly anticipated' Xbox 360 titles will fill four discs-worth of content. From the post: 'From the high-res textures fit for an HDTV to the higher polygon counts befitting a next-gen console, the space available on standard DVDs is suddenly in increasingly short supply. [...] According to Game Informer, nearly every developer they talked to at X05 expressed difficulties fitting their launch titles onto a single disc. One unnamed yet highly anticipated game in particular is said to currently occupy a full four 9Gb DVDs.'" Relatedly, Microsoft has announced that mainland Asia should expect a March 2006 launch date for the 360 console.
Re:Never (Score:4, Insightful)
My guess is that game developers will bite the bullet and learn how to use procedural textures to make smaller but better looking games, and in the end we will see huge games with great graphics that fit on a single DVD9.
Re:Never (Score:2)
Daggerfall (it's predecessor) had approximately 100,000 dungeons in it.
If these have to be generated BEFORE they ship out then yea it's gonna be a problem
Re:Never (Score:1)
And it was on a single CD-ROM. We're talking about DVD-9s here (about 12-13 times as much room as on a CD). The expansions each had their own CD, but none of them were filled (I think the Morrowind CD had about 600MB, Tribunal about 300MB, and Bloodmoon 500MB). The install was about 1.3GB on the hard drive, after installing Morrowind AND its 2 expansions.
Most of the dungeons and towns in Daggerfall were
Re:Never (Score:2)
You can't compress all audio in the game. It's a tradeoff between disc space vs. CPU time and running MP3 decoders for fifty entities screaming, firing and exploding all over the place is going to kill your performance. Alternatively you can decompress at load but that increases load times a lot.
2. Textures:
While it may be possible to create procedural textures for some things, that's not only complicated and impossible for most (since irregular details will require a LOT of variables to be consid
Re:Never (Score:1, Informative)
* Whoa, no need to go ape-shit on him. Have you ever compiled something significant and saw how large the file is? Yeah, games wouldn't compile down to 2 megs. But he IS right, the compiled code is definitely not a significant porti
Re:Never (Score:1)
As for music, come on.. I have much more than 12 hours of music in loosely compressed MP3's on my computer here, and it only comes to so many GB.. 12 hours of music properly compressed would NOT take up very m
Re:Never (Score:1)
Re:Never (Score:1)
No wonder (Score:1)
Re:No wonder (Score:1)
Re:No wonder (Score:2)
Re:No wonder (Score:1)
> that they can still release it as a one-DVD game.
Not if they used decent protection it wouldn't. I don't know about PC games but there was some pretty hairy Amiga protection being used about 15 years ago.
Re:No wonder (Score:2)
So okay, maybe not three minutes more, but the "end-user" is still not gonna notice a significant difference in the available of the illegal cracked release.
Re:No wonder (Score:2)
Re:No wonder (Score:5, Informative)
All of the "oh no, the sky is falling in because HD games need higher res [foo]" talk is just rediculous. PC games have been running at > HD resolutions for years, and they still manage to ship on one or two CDs.
Re:No wonder (Score:2)
Re:No wonder (Score:2)
Regardless of that point, I personally doubt I'll lose much sleep if the next rpg I get doesn't play like a choose your own adventure book.
Re:No wonder (Score:2, Informative)
Re:No wonder (Score:2)
Most game data is compressed in some form, and a lot of time is spent dealing with compression. It reduces load times and allows you to pack more data in ram -- the processor is fast enough that it is more efficient to deal with most data in a compressed form than it would be to constantly hit the disc for it in an uncompressed form. Hell, it is preferable to actually calculate d
Re:No wonder (Score:1)
The bit I really like about this document is this bit about advice to developers working on games for their console:
Design for controller input, not for keyboard & mouse input. Console players press simple buttons--they don't move the mouse or tap a keyboard
I can just see some Microsoft exec sit
Re:No wonder (Score:2)
Re:No wonder (Score:1)
It would seem that the "high def texture" argument is a sort of red herring...
Re:No wonder (Score:2)
We'll see if that pricepoint sticks; ultimately, if people buy it they'll continue to charge that kind of money for it.
Re:No wonder (Score:2)
Re:No wonder (Score:1)
Re:No wonder (Score:2)
Re:No wonder (Score:1)
Pshaw (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Pshaw (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Pshaw (Score:2)
This is so silly! I can't wait until my disks h
Wouldn't be the first console (Score:2, Informative)
Besides, this isn't exactly breaking new ground here. There were plenty of Playstation 1 games that came out on multiple CDs.
Re:Wouldn't be the first console (Score:1)
Re:Wouldn't be the first console (Score:2)
Everything else being equal*, a 9GB game on one DVD is more convenient than a 1GB game on two CDs.
*In other words, assuming the additional 8GB doesn't impede gameplay itself.
Re:Wouldn't be the first console (Score:1)
What's actually in those 36 Gigs? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:What's actually in those 36 Gigs? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Grammar Police! (Score:2)
A problem that's going to get worse too (Score:5, Interesting)
Anyone want to bet Microsoft do an "updated" Xbox with higher capacity DVD and other tweaks...?
Meanwhile, PS3 developers get to use a whole Blu-Ray disc...
Re:A problem that's going to get worse too (Score:1, Interesting)
A 360 with a new disc storage format that is incompatible with the existing installed base is effectively a brand new console from developer point of view. Even a company as clearly incompetent in the console space as Microsoft is wouldn't be as foolish to even consider trying something like a format switch.
The sad fact for 360 owners is they are going to get:
1) PS3 ports that were borderline potentially profita
Re:A problem that's going to get worse too (Score:2)
Re:A problem that's going to get worse too (Score:2)
So, you expect game developers to publish HD-DVD games which won't run on the 1.5-to-3 million Xbox consoles Microsoft claims they want to sell by year end? Or how about the millions more consoles they'll sell next year before HD-DVD drives actually, possibly become available?
No game maker is going to cut off their own nose like this. HD-DVD in XBox360 is a dead topic.
Re:A problem that's going to get worse too (Score:2)
Re:A problem that's going to get worse too (Score:2)
Splitting up your market between core and deluze is already bad, then splitting it up futher with HD-DVD/DVD spells death You know why Atari died? Partially because of shit liek that splitt
Re:A problem that's going to get worse too (Score:1)
Re:A problem that's going to get worse too (Score:1)
Re:A problem that's going to get worse too (Score:1)
Re:A problem that's going to get worse too (Score:2)
for the average hardcore gamer, thats simple and
PC Games? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:PC Games? (Score:2)
Of course in the PC's case some of the data can be compressed as much of it is copied to the hard drive during install and uncompressed. I believe the GTA games on the consoles needed a full DVD-9 for all the radio stations, whereas the PC version compressed the radio stations to MP3s (or Ogg in San Andreas IIRC).
With the extra grunt of the 360 I would think real time decompression of data when l
Re:PC Games? (Score:1)
This is what I was thinking as well. Also, why don't consoles include an audio decoding chip (to decode MP3/Vorbis) with onboard buffer goodness? This would allow 5 megs of audio data to be sent to it instead of spinning the disc to stream raw, CD-quality sound, and it wouldn't burden the CPU at all.
Re:PC Games? (Score:1)
Re:PC Games? (Score:2)
As far as I understand, it's not a price issue. There may not even be any decompression chips (or research) that will allow more than one decompression at a time. Sure, maybe you could run the music throught the chip, but then sound effects and voice would be sacrificed. We're talking about timing here.
MP3 doesn't take a static delay in decompression, so you would have to buffer every possible sou
Re:PC Games? (Score:1)
Something's not right here...
Re:PC Games? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:PC Games? (Score:1)
Re:PC Games? (Score:4, Insightful)
It helps... to read... TFA.
Whiskey Tango Foxtrot (Score:3, Interesting)
Of course, if the 360 boasts larger texture capabilities, or more polys, that's potentially more texture sizes and more geometry data to store. It's also possible that console games include more full motion video cutscenes than a PC game, which 360 owners would naturally prefer at HiDef resolutions.
Naturally there is a compression tradeoff between space and time. By now many
Re:Whiskey Tango Foxtrot (Score:2)
Re:Whiskey Tango Foxtrot (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Whiskey Tango Foxtrot (Score:1)
Completely unnecessary (Score:2, Informative)
To me it seems like the problem is video based. Videos take up a lot of space on a disk, especially since they now have to be HD videos. They should rely less on p
Re:Completely unnecessary (Score:1)
Okay, that's neat as a demonstration of techniques, but saying that it's on par with most first person shooters today is incredibly disingenuous.
There's no challenge, it's about 10 minutes long, the sound is as good as nonexistent (there is sound, but it's awful), I could go on, but that'll miss the point. It's nothing like modern first person shooters.
Re:Completely unnecessary (Score:1)
True it is a demo but this demo took 10 minutes, well make the game 100 times longer and the file size is still only 9.37Mb (9600 kilobytes), ad 300Mb for good sounds, maybe pad on a
Well.... (Score:3, Funny)
Bunch of whiners... (Score:1)
I seem to remember having to do this for some PS2 games, PS1 games, whole bunch of compgames, and just about anything that used a floppy.
Of course Higher-Res stuff is going to take up more room.
Re:Bunch of whiners... (Score:2)
Re:Bunch of whiners... (Score:2)
"Tricky Dick" was:
a) A slang term for "Chlamydia"
b) President of the U.S. from 1969-1974
c) A tasty snack from Japan
d) CowboyNeal
Re:Bunch of whiners... (Score:1)
Death to pre-rendered cutscenes! (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Death to pre-rendered cutscenes! (Score:2)
In most (if not all) of the first party games, cutscenes were rendered by the engine at the time of display (the Zelda games were this way). Of course, they were forced to do this by the limitations of the cartrige format.
You're right about staying in the moment, too. It's much more atmospheric to transition from the cutscene directly into game play without hearing the crunch and grind of a disk, and seeing a "now loading" screen (yes PS1, I'm looking at you).
Re:Death to pre-rendered cutscenes! (Score:2)
Actually, one of the Resident Evil games was ported to N64, and they crammed all of the FMV onto the cart.
Re:Death to pre-rendered cutscenes! (Score:1)
From what I've heard, GTA:SA hits the limits of the format as well and it doesn't seem to use much video, either.
Non-buggy cutscenes only KPLSTHX (Score:2)
The problem with rendered custscenes with the in-game engine is that you're stuck with the in-game limitations and small bugs can really add up. Playing No One Lives Forever is very difficult for me now because of the lack of lip movement. And VTM: Bloodlines... enough with the skating characters! Something glitched in my models, I guess, beca
the good olde days (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:the good olde days (Score:1)
I remember watching that movie on my playstation - it was sort of cheesy japanese soap opera style pop culture crap. Don't remember it as a game though - are you sure something was produced by that name that had an actual game attached?
Re:the good olde days (Score:1)
Re:the good olde days (Score:2)
Re:the good olde days (Score:2)
Blueray (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Blueray (Score:1)
Re:Blueray (Score:2)
Procedural? (Score:1)
Big Whoop. (Score:1)
Storage problems are inevitable (Score:2)
Procedu
Re:Worst Console Ever (Score:4, Interesting)
Sony seriously dropped the ball but luckily was able to build enough unwarranted hype around its PS2 that by the time people noticed that they weren't coming through on any of their promises, they'd sold millions of the things and good games were on the way. As a console, the PS2 isn't impressive at all. The Xbox was designed for developers, and MS went to great lengths to make sure it was what developers wanted and needed, and provided them with tools to create games for it. Sony? They were busy designing a machine that performed better on paper than in the real world.
I really don't agree with the direction MS and Sony are trying to take console gaming. Nintendo's not exactly right, but they're a lot closer than the other two. Since MS is trying to invade homes worldwide and Sony's trying to milk the industry for all it's worth before possibly destroying it and probably bailing out, they're naturally going for quick earnings rather than looking out for what's best for the market. The charm of console games is all but gone, I feel that the generations that follow will see even more pronounced "multimedia machines" that play games as almost a side-effect, then maybe a small company will release a dedicated gaming machine that turns some heads and grabs the attention of some developers so the process can start anew.