Slashdot Mirror
Certain Xbox 360 Titles May Fill 4 DVDs
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.
Sure, not having to swap discs is kinda nice, but not if its going to add $200-$300 bucks to the price of the console to cover the price of an HD-DVD drive. I'm just not that lazy.
Besides, this isn't exactly breaking new ground here. There were plenty of Playstation 1 games that came out on multiple CDs.
When they span more than a disk, the 2nd/3rd/4th disks all contain overlapping contents from the very 1st disk anyways. Don't know what there is to brag about.
Not only that, but the pc version is shipping on only one disc.
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.
High-res textures and higher polygon counts causing more disks? That is kind of hard to believe. In general even if a model is very poly that shouldn't take up too much space. If they really need more then one DVD for models and textures they need to learn about data management. There are lots of ways to reuse texture and make the games look good.
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 pre rendering thing and think about scripting things with the game engine.
Games should not have to use 40 Gigs of space. Look at kkrieger (can be found at http://www.theprodukkt.com/). This is a first person shooter demo that is on par with most first person shooters today, and it only takes 96 kilobytes. That can fit on a floppy disk!
If you need more then a DVD for your game there is defiantly a ton of optimizing you can do.
well for computers its different because your not running the entire game off the disc. In computers games most of the game is compressed on the disc and then is installed on your computer taking up several gigs. so with computers the games are able to read of the HD and the disc so its faster.
Yep they ship on 1 or 2 CDs/DVDs but the data on these is usually compressed. The games then unpack onto the PCs harddrive and take up sometimes double the space they did on the discs. Not really a practical solution for a console.
To err is human. To forgive is not company policy.