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XBox (Games)

360 Discs Large Enough For Content? 112

Posted by Zonk from the kids-have-to-have-space-to-grow dept.
heartless_ wrote to mention a GamesFirst article exploring whether or not Xbox 360 Discs are large enough for their expected content. From the article: "The first Prince of Persia occupied 2.44 gigs, the second 2.88, an increase of only 18%. Knights of the Old Republic went from 3.65 gigs in the first installment to 3.99 gigs in the second, a 9% increase. The Splinter Cell series went from 3.71 gigs in the first to 3.05 gigs in Pandora's Tomorrow, a reduction of 18% (though it should be noted that Chaos Theory, after switching development houses, ballooned into one of the largest games on the Xbox at 5.62 gigabytes). So the assumption that games, by their nature, grow in size as they evolve is not absolutely true. They do become more complex, but not necessarily at the expense of filesize."
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360 Discs Large Enough For Content? More

360 Discs Large Enough For Content?

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  • HD (Score:4, Insightful)

    by dq5 studios ( 682179 ) on Friday January 20, 2006 @05:33PM (#14522225) Homepage
    But how many of those sequals had to include the now mandatory hi-res textures for HD resolutions?

    • Re:HD (Score:3, Interesting)

      by vune ( 810736 )
      Indeed. A more suitable comparison might be the difference between Tekken 3 and Tekken Tag.

      • Exactly (Score:2, Insightful)

        by Anonymous Coward
        Exactly. Sequels over platform upgrades are the relevant thing here. Picking random ROMS it seems that. NES to SNES was 256 k to 2 meg. SNES to N64 was 2 to 16 meg. N64 to GC was 16 meg to several hundred.

        This is very approximate, e.g. for the GC some games are multi-disk (i.e. over 2 gig), whereas Ikaruga is under 20 meg (for the DC version at least).

        Still, A factor of 8 seems to be the norm. Of course, many Xbox games were on CD, and CD to DVD-9 is a decent jump.
        • Well, I am not a genius enough guy to do it myself...

          But what about comparing Project Gotham 2, to Project Gotham 3?

          Since PGR 3 is considered to be one of the better looking Xbox 360 titles, it might make a good comparison.

          Or, Call of Duty vs. Call of Duty 2.

        • Actually NO XBox games were on CD. They were all on dual layer DVDs, because that's how the copy protection works. Some early PS2 titles were on CD, but these days, not so many.

    • Re:HD (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Keeper ( 56691 )
      When was the last time you bought a PC game that wouldn't fit onto one DVD? They've been targeting > HD resolutions for years now.
      • PC games are for some reason MUCH smaller than console titles. Some PS2 games span 2 DVDs yet they don't have nearly the texture sizes PC games have while among the PC titles only FPSes and console ports seem to exceed 2GB.
      • PCs decompress things onto the HDD during the installation process.

        Can't do that on a 360, a HDD isn't standard.

        • Re:HD (Score:2)

          by Keeper ( 56691 )
          Generally with consoles you decompress data on the fly. It allows you to read data off of the disc faster and it takes up less space in ram. The compression algorithm used by PC game installs is actually rather inefficient (good 'ol cabarc), and in a modern console it certainly isn't difficult to top. It also doesn't hurt that the graphics hardware natively supports dealing with compressed textures on the fly.

    • But how many of those sequals had to include the now mandatory hi-res textures for HD resolutions?

      If developers can use procedural synthesis [wikipedia.org] to fit code, maps, models, and textures for an at least current-gen-quality first-person shooter for PC called .kkrieger [theprodukkt.com] into 96 KiB, then who needs even a DVD?

      • Procedural texture generation is good for noisy stuff and stuff that can easily be described mathematically, but you wouldn't use it for a brick wall or scratchy gunmetal - it wouldn't be easy to find a formula for those things simpler and smaller than a compressed bitmap, and even if you did you would have wasted development time doing it. It also sucks up GPU time that could be put to better use. Moreover, I don't know what kkreiger -you- were looking at, but the one I played isn't anywhere near on par wi

        • but you wouldn't use it for a brick wall or scratchy gunmetal - it wouldn't be easy to find a formula for those things simpler and smaller than a compressed bitmap, and even if you did you would have wasted development time doing it.

          How would you draw a brick wall or scratchy gunmetal texture otherwise? That takes "development time" for which artists must be paid.

          It also sucks up GPU time that could be put to better use.

          You mean for drawing the "Now Loading" screen? Because that's when the texture

          • 1. Kkrieger took longer to develop than most commercial titles (though admittedly they used a smaller team) and the procedural system is VERY limited.
            2. Many games use streaming to avoid loading screens, if you do that you'll need that CPU power for the game (unless you're not using the system's full power normally).
            3. Kkrieger takes longer to load than e.g. Earth 2160 on my system.

            • Many games use streaming to avoid loading screens

              If you don't use procedural synthesis or at least procedural enhancement of smaller textures, then you'll get a lot of annoying disc switch prompts whenever the game tries to stream something from another disc.

              • Well, we have three options here:

                1. Go multi-disc. Not really an option when streaming but maybe it'd work with something like SSX3.
                2. Use procedurals, utilize only a fraction of the machine's power for gameplay while the rest is spent on generating the graphics data.
                3. Just downsample the textures, keep disc costs and development effort low and framerate high.

                • Just downsample the textures, keep disc costs and development effort low and framerate high.

                  This might work for Revolution, where it is rumored that some games will support only up to 480p, but would this work for Xbox 360, where Microsoft requires support for 720p or better in all games?

                  • Of course. Noone can tell you your textures aren't allowed to blur. It doesn't look as good as non-blurring textures of course but if the hardware can't do it any better without making even bigger sacrifices that's the only way to do it.
    • RTFA next time moron. The article goes into depth about how the next gen games don't even come clost to filling up a single DVD9 disc. And if we apply the same game size growth compared with the previous gen we still come up short of filling a DVD9 disc.
    • .."They" should try to i[nv/mplem]ent Scalable (Vector?) Graphics for both 3d and 2d content in games, so that there would only be one graphic file to load for any resolution(s).

      Perhaps it would even be possible to "limit" the scalability to _only_ the few (two/three, etc.) resolution schemes that are actually used, so as to not waste space with SVG's that bear resolutions that are outside the actual frame of display-usage (or only cache _only_ the size(s) that _are_ being used)..

      Yeah; easy to say for someo
    • It would have been a saner to compare sizes of PS1 games vs sizes of PS2 games. Sequels on the same hardware needn't grow much because the original game tries to make as much use of the hardware as possible. I don't think a game made for tnt2 would occupy as much space as a game optimised for lets say gef3 class of hardware...

  • Good! (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Eightyford ( 893696 ) on Friday January 20, 2006 @05:45PM (#14522327) Homepage
    I think this is great news. It may just force some developers to work more on gameplay, and less on cutscenes. I do appreciate the awesome soundtracks of the Tony Hawk, Madden, and Gotham Racing series but I'm sure compression take care of most filesize problems.

  • it's all about HD (Score:5, Insightful)

    by AkaXakA ( 695610 ) on Friday January 20, 2006 @05:47PM (#14522351) Homepage
    Seeing as how Next-Gen is supposedly going to bring us HD, they key thing to remember is that the textures have to scale up too. Those bigger textures are going to take up quite a lot more space, so using current game sizes with current texture sizes to figure out if next-gen games will require more than the XBox discs can manage, isn't very useful.

    Comparing them to install base sizes of new PC games (think HDR Half-Life 2) is a lot more useful.
    • Comparing them to install base sizes of new PC games (think HDR Half-Life 2) is a lot more useful.

      Right, but, um...don't those all fit easily on a single DVD?

    • Re:it's all about HD (Score:4, Informative)

      by MobileTatsu-NJG ( 946591 ) on Friday January 20, 2006 @06:09PM (#14522546)
      "Those bigger textures are going to take up quite a lot more space, so using current game sizes with current texture sizes to figure out if next-gen games will require more than the XBox discs can manage, isn't very useful."

      Faster CPU == more compression on the textures. Quadrupling the res on the textures doesn't necessarily mean quadrupling the size requirments. Imagine using a 640 by 480 Gif image for the old console, then using a 1280 by 960 JPEG image on the next console. In one case I tried here, the .GIF was 155K and the JPG awas 197K. 4 times as many pixels, but it was only 30% or so bigger in terms of file size. This is more or less what happens when new consoles come along. More CPU == better compression etc.

      I am having a hard time believing the idea that the media is going to make all that much difference between the PS3 and the 360. Both systems only have 512 meg of RAM to fill.

      • You will never see a respected developer use jpeg compressed textures.
      • I am having a hard time believing the idea that the media is going to make all that much difference between the PS3 and the 360. Both systems only have 512 meg of RAM to fill.

        That's funny, I have the opposite reaction. 512 megs means that you can fit 8 - 16 "ramfuls" before you run out of space. Levels in most current games load in 2 - 3 sections, so you have space for 6 - 8 levels on disk. That means that the kick-ass boss with the super-detailed intricate spline patterns and the programmatically genera
        • You're ignoring that a lot of stuff isn't level dependent, e.g. the player character and most of his equipment, repeating enemies, textures that were in another level as well, etc. Plus there's the gamestate that takes up RAM and is not part of the disc content.
      • Unfortunately, the GIF/JPEG thing has already been done for regular textures via DirectX Texture Compression(aka S3TC [wikipedia.org], introduced in 1998 with the Savage 3D), and 3Dc for normal maps(introduced 2004 with the ATI X800). To my knowledge there has not been any further effort on these fronts, and I'm sure Microsoft has been using DXTC on the Xbox(the NV2A GPU supports it), so the only further compression they can use for the 360 versus what they've done on the Xbox is 3Dc, and that's a more limited scenario.

        N

    • Again another RTFA. It goes very in depth to tell you how much space is being used on the current DVD9 series. HD textures does not mean it will take more space. Blah... /. is more worthless by the month.

  • The flaw of the article (Score:3, Insightful)

    by NeMon'ess ( 160583 ) <flinxmid&yahoo,com> on Friday January 20, 2006 @05:49PM (#14522367) Homepage Journal
    Is that when games with lots of hi-res textures for the 256MB+ of RAM to get up to 8.5GB, some content will have to be compressed or left out. It'll be a limiting factor on how pretty the games can get. Most people will never notice, but the developers will know how much extra variety of graphics was left out for space reasons.
    • Umm, no. They compared the size of launch XBox games to current ones to get an idea of how much games grow over the lifetime of the machine. Then they measured the size of current 360 games (which already have those shiny textures you want), multiplied by the growth factor and found that the size they got would still fit on a single DVD-9.
      • Umm, no. They compared the size of launch XBox games to current ones to get an idea of how much games grow over the lifetime of the machine. Then they measured the size of current 360 games (which already have those shiny textures you want)

        And three of those four games are at or above 4GB. Two of them are 4.5GB, right at the edge of the capacity of a single layer DVD.

        Developers by and large don't want to use a second layer if they can avoid it, both because streaming becomes a problem when you have to swit

  • wrong comparison (Score:3, Insightful)

    by OleMoudi ( 624829 ) on Friday January 20, 2006 @05:55PM (#14522425) Homepage
    The thing is the examples provided are between games which share relatively common periods of time in which the technology applied to sequels does not suppose a big leap between first installments.

    We are talking here about a gaming platform which has to last by itself for ...what? 5-6 years like the PS2 did (does) ?
    Consider most games released during first 1 or 2 years of life of the PS2 fitted in a single CD almost without ripping any content.

    The article should consider the weight progression of games along the full life of a console. If we take PS2 as a good example of this, I would expect size of games to be increased by a 3x factor in the next 2-3 years.

    Clearly we'll see a HD-DVD or Blu-ray adapter for the current 360. Maybe because of high-def textures, lossless sound, maybe for videos and extras or maybe only because there is room... but developers definitely are going to use everything they've got available sooner or later.
    • I hope that I am not the only one who thinks that the article was hopelessly naive.

      When people started working on games for the xbox they knew roughly what they could expect from the hardware because it was comparable to something already on the market (the PC and the PS2). It didn;t contain any radical new model of computation, or graphics hardware that was any significant change from what had gone before.

      Now look at the goals for the "next generation" hardware. If all you want is shovelware that looks a l
      • Another RTFA... no developer has even come close to using a single DVD9 disc up. So your whole arguement falls short... again. Does anyone on /. RTFArticles anymore?

        Developers aren't working with a restriction... ever since the DVD9 series was adopted developers have been developing with a storage medium that THEY COULDN'T POSSIBLY FILL.

        Sony and their blu-ray disc seem to be following the tradition. The blu-ray disc choice is going to make the PS3 cost $100+ more and make games cost $10 more each.
        • I've bumped into the DVD size limit on two of my projects.

          If you look, everything is basically at the maximum for a single layer disk. Publishers simply won't let you go above that, because the manufacturing costs and defect rates both sky rocket.

          DVD size is, to game developers, 4.5 GB. Most developers are already pushing up against that limit. Remove the RAM and CPU barriers of current systems, and disk size becomes the major bottleneck.

  • What is so bad about multi-disc? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Guspaz ( 556486 ) on Friday January 20, 2006 @06:06PM (#14522520)
    Didn't Final Fantasy 7 ship on 4 CDs? Of course, they probably could have fit that onto once CD if they had more powerful hardware to use more modern (or just more complex) compression. Still.

    Anyhow, I would imagine it costs less to press two DVDs than it does to press one BD-ROM.
    • What? Multi-disc? Are you crazy? Then I'd actually have to stand up, move from the couch to the cabinet, pull out the new disk, bend down and swap disks, put the old disk back in it's case, walk back over to the couch and sit back down. That'd take maybe 5 minutes total with load times and require minimal exercise.

      No, multi-disc is no way to go. I want to be able to sit on my couch for no less than 30 hours without moving an inch.

      • Naw, multi disc games isn't the problem. We still need to get up to change games. What we need is someone to wise up and make a game machine with built in 300 disc changer.
      • Just load all but one disc onto the hard drive. There. No swapping.

        • Just load all but one disc onto the hard drive.

          Microsoft will not approve your game if it does not function properly on an Xbox 360 Core System.

          • On the Core, you swap. On the real system, you don't.

      • That'd take maybe 5 minutes total with load times and require minimal exercise.

        True, more realistic disc swapping would take 30 seconds, but with free-range games that aren't really divided into distinct walled "maps" or "scenarios" such as the Grand Theft Auto series, how often would you have to get up and switch discs when the game wants to stream a map from a different disc?

        Only procedural texture synthesis will save us now.

      • No, multi-disc is no way to go. I want to be able to sit on my couch for no less than 30 hours without moving an inch.

        Somebody please mod this +funny, i'm dying here.
    • 4 CDs for the PC version, 3 CDs for the Playstation version. The majority of that space was used by FMVs.
    • I dont understand all this fuss about swapping discs. Hasn't it worked before? Look at Resident Evil 4 for the Gamecube, it has two discs but that hasn't stopped it from an average score of 96% http://www.gamerankings.com/htmlpages2/535840.asp [gamerankings.com] or receiving Game of the Year awards http://www.gamespot.com/pages/features/bestof2005/ index.php?day=6&page=1 [gamespot.com]. I understand that some games wouldn't suit multidisc that well, for example "free-roaming" games like GTA or RPGs, but some games (FPSs) could do well
      • Multilayer is already used for, IIRC, virtually all modern games. Anything that needs more than 4.5GB is going to be multilayer. Nobody is complaining about that.

        People are complaining about multi-disc. The complaint seems to not be gameplay related, but manufacturing cost. It costs more to press two CDs than one. It isn't just the cost of pressing a disc, which is pennies, but the cost of setting up the manufacturing pipeline for two seperate discs.

        The singleplayer/multiplayer split may or may not work out
  • I for one am against bloatware. If they can make a better game in a smaller package, what's wrong with that?
  • The first Prince of Persia occupied 2.44 gigs,

    I'm pretty sure that the first Prince of Persia was about 2 megabytes. :D

    • Re:First Prince of Persia (Score:3, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      2 megabytes? not even. it fit on a single floppy. I would be supprised if it was more than 256k
  • I keep hearing arguments about how textures for "HD" games will take a lot more memory. But remember, PCs have supported HD (or even greater) resolutions for many years now. Games like Half-Life 2 or Unreal Tournament 2004 already have high-resolution textures (certainly enough for the 1680x1050 resolution of my LCD) and they certainly don't require an insane amount of space. UT2004, for example, with its 100+ maps, is still only 5.2GB. That's about 1/2 the space of a DVD-9.

    Most PS3 games will be released o

  • It's FMV, not cutscenes that are the problem.. (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Channard ( 693317 ) on Friday January 20, 2006 @06:18PM (#14522628) Journal
    Traditionally, a lot of disc space on console releases have been taken up by full motion video scenes, which tend to be rendered in CGI rather than with the in-game engine, because fancy CGI workstations can do things the in-game engines for most games can't. The trouble is that FMV video takes up a hell of a lot of space on discs. Hopefully with the power of the 360, games producers should now have a platform where they don't need to resort to CGI for fancy looking effects. Resulting in less CGI FMV sequences and more scripted cutscenes which should take up less space.
    • People thought that when the PS2 came out too. CGI technology isn't standing still though. Look at the cutscenes in say, FF8 or something. They look WORSE than standard PS2 graphics. But by the time of the PS2 though, CGI started looking much better. Likewise, I expect there to be advances during the 360's lifetime. Otherwise there won't be any reason for a third Xbox. (Imagine: a Microsoft product with a lifetime of more than four years)
      • I do not have to imagine. MSDOS had a lifespan from 1981 through, what, 1995? A 14 year lifespan. Oh, don't give me that crap about different versions, about the only real thing Dos 5 and 6 added was Edit, QBasic, and Doublespace. Oh, and the shortlived MSAV. They added that ANNOYING Dosshell feature. But the primary operating system pretty much remained the same since Dos 3 (well, Dos 4 was a complete loss, we don't talk about that).

        Dos 5 and newer also shipped with games. Nibbles and Gorilla forever!

        On an
        • I retract the Microsoft statement. It wasn't the main point of my comment, and it was really more a bad joke than a sustainable claim.
          On another note, anyone ever played a Squaresoft game here? They have not used CGI cutscenes since Final Fantasy 9, the cutscenes in Kingdom Hearts, Final Fantasy X and X-2 were all done in the Playstation.
          Incorrect. While they may have been rendered off of the PS2 to prove something to someone (though I'm pretty sure a better computer did it), they were probably render

  • Elder Scrolls IV, anyone? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Games like The Elder Scrolls IV shows us what developers can do with the kind of space we have today. Anyone here played Morrowind? Right. Do you remember the size of that game? Right. Now multiply the landmass found in that game with... well, at least 1,5. Then add high definition graphics. Then add at least 50 hours of high definition voice casting. And some nice high definition video as well. The result? Holy crap, you've got a whole lot of game stored on a single DVD.
    • Had you read the article you might have seen that Morrowind was only 900 Meg - one of the smallest (size on disk) Xbox games released. Elder Scrolls doesn't use FMV, it uses the game engine just like any next gen title should.
  • It's true:

    Game A on the Xbox 1 uses <1 DVD and Game A's sequel also for the Xbox 1 uses <1 DVD.

    The same is true for games B, C, D, and E. So clearly we can state that games don't require more than one DVD, right?

    Wrong.

    Game A also used 32mb of ram, as did its sequel. Game A ran on a single cored 733mhz processor, as did its sequel. Game A's sequel even managed to run on the same graphics chipset as Game A. The same is again true for games B, C, D and E.

    So, by this logic, we can establish that newer gam

    • Given the choice, I'd rather my game had the extra textures

      And pay the artists to draw them. Might as well use procedural texture synthesis [wikipedia.org] and save a few bytes.

      additional music scores

      And pay the composer to write them. And pay the forensic musicologist to verify that they are not subconscious copies of existing copyrighted musical works (to avoid the George Harrison issue [slashdot.org]). And pay a studio orchestra to perform them.

      more unique pre-recorded dialogs, etc.

      And pay writers to write them. And pa

      • The artists draw those anyway, textures are usually downsampled at the end when it turns out they don't fit. And procedural synthesis doesn't give you bark if you tell it "give me bark", it requires workers to feed it the proper base data and if it's as versatile as painting textures directly it'll require similar work as well.
    • Not a single line you uttered here is even remotely true. RTFA.

      No culling of content is done because of disc space. There is 3% of the original Xbox 360 games that have used up more than 50% of the disc space. RTFA.

      Your logic is just plain stupid. The reason that newer games can stay on one disc is because of the new technology in the console. Faster CPU and RAM = better compression.

      No one... I swear no one replying to this /. post has RTFA.
  • Microsoft gets a cut of Xbox live content sales, right? What if by forcing developers to limit what they can put in a game when it ships, they increase the probability of more content being available later over Live? Nah that would be ridiculous ;)
  • Don't ask me where I snagged an advance copy of Madden 2007, here it is next to NHL 2001 [wikipedia.org]...
  • Bollocks.

    What happens when a game company wants to use HDR textures for every single surface in a game? That easily doubles the data size of your assets, unless you compress. HDR is coming; anything that gives us more color precision to work with is a good thing. I've heard some compare the move to HDR as important as 16->32bit color.

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