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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.
No wonder they cost so much to make. I thought Myst 4 was huge ( 2 dvd9s). I bet the "highly anticipated title" is Oblivion.
I play no games which do not fit on a 5.25" floppy.
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.
Until they start filling those 36 gigs with AI, Physics, Ginormous dynamic levels, or dare I say it, Gameplay, I'm not biting.
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Xbox 360 games are likely to get more detail and more complex over time, so being limited to 9GB per disk is going to become more and more of a problem.
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...
I'm not sure I quite understand this.. PC games have been high res for many years. They don't seem to require multiple DVD-9s...
PC games have been using higher resolution for years and rarely need multiple DVDs. I haven't really paid attention to how the 360 compares to a PC, but if they're about on par, then something's amiss.
./ readers have likely seen the .kkreiger game that fits in like 96K. This is of course an extreme tradeoff while you wait for the game to recreate all its textures from high level combinations to bitmaps. But texture compression is nothing new and is often seen in 3d hardware. Again, I haven't dug into the 360, but I would imagine there's one or two texture compression options available and build into the hardware. Either the company isnt using them, or the compression isn't enough.
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
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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.
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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.
MS got ass raped at E3? By pre-rendered videos and a god-awful controller? And MS made very few mistakes with the Xbox, reading Opening the Xbox by Dean Takahashi would offer insight into the thought that went into the console and the intentions of those who were instrumental in ensuring that the console not end up as a WebTV box on steroids (pretty much what the PS2 was pormised to be, the 360 ended up being, and the PS3 is going to be).
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.
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If they used 9GB discs instead of 9Gb discs, they'd be able to cram those 4, and 4 more onto a disc.
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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.
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Maybe what's taking all this room is pre-rendered cutscenes! It seems japanese developers love to fill discs with them... and Microsoft's decision to stick to DVD could help them break out of this vicious circle! There was a time when CGs made sense, but no longer; rendering all cutscenes in real time is now feasible - and it even adds a sense of visual coherence to the game.
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Either is potentially correct. "A full four" is used to emphasize the number, e.g. "But this new, fuller footage shows Bush sitting for a full five minutes after he'd been told that 'America is under attack.'" On the other hand, "four full" would imply that each of the discs is full.
Um did you play MORROWIND?
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
it's a good thing they didnt use blue-ray discs... i mean, it would take less discs to store more data. they should just go back to CDs so i can have a mountain of CDs to swap.
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Anyone else remember when three entire game discs were filled with storyline and had a real emotional impact on you? I'm referring mostly to games like FFVII. It seems the problem with the game designers today is that they're so stuck on graphics that they miss some of the most importent elements of a game. A storyline that moves you. Ok I'm done being sappy, but this is one thing that has been bugging me about quite a few of the "next gen" games.
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A few megabytes? Are you Icelandic or retarded? We're not dealing with Nethack here, dipshit. You have basic engine code, physics code, animation code, menu code, shitloads of scripts, AI routines, gun code, vehicle code, and who knows what the fuck else.
:P And what the hell is "gun code"? Dude, coding CSS doesn't make you a programmer, so don't pretend like you are one.
* 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 portion of the game. And by the way, if you compile the "shitloads of scripts" into the game binaries, you MUST be retarded.
And just how much sound do you think is in a modern game? Your average Grand Theft Auto probably has 12 hours of audio just in MUSIC.
* 12 hours of MP3s... and he said 1 gig of sound, and you basically told him he was an idiot. I can use a calculator, can you? Unless you think GTA uses raw, uncompressed music. In that case, you would be a moron.
You've apparently never done any 3d animation. The models are small, sure, but the animation certainly is not. Even in-game cutscenes take up far more space than you'd think.
* Uh, hello keyframes? Have YOU done any 3d animation?
Perhaps Sony thought about this, and thats why they "loose" extra money for putting a Blueray drive into it.
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The actual code should -not- take up very much space after being compiled. Sure, complicated scripts often do take up space and such.. But that's not really his point, and not always compiled with the base code. The -base- code is not going to take up much space, and as he said it didn't matter anyway.
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 much space unless you were idiotic and lazy about it, leaving it completely uncompressed.
As for textures.. I personally loathe that textures alone are bloating up so much space. I like pretty graphics sure, everyone does, but I like playing a GAME more.. All this space being wasted on pretty graphics is disgusting.. And there really needs to be something done about it..
Now the models, you said it yourself.. They don't take up much space. Animation wasn't even something he "mentioned" you know? Animation shouldn't be a problem anyway in taking up a lot of space, everything properly compressed shouldn't end up so bloated..
As for FMV's, they're dying out, and for that I am glad.. They're a waste of space for showing something they could do ingame just as easily.
This seems like the perfect time for developers to start using procedural textures/models. They could save enormously on space, and could even be a selling point for a game...
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Swapping to another disc after a few days of play then to another a few days later never bothered me when I played Final Fantasy 7 on the Playstation, so I dont think that this will bother me now. Its not like your going to have to swap discs every 20 minutes is it? And I very much doubt that you'll have to swap backwards and forwards between discs.
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While the commenters above are right to point out that comparable PC games managed to do fine on single disks, this sort of memory-hogging is part and parcel of the sort of games (particularly console games) which are in the limelight right now. The PS3 and 360 hype is mostly about high-definition this and hundreds-of-characters that, so unless there are a series of sudden breakthroughs in procedural texturing, modelling, animation and dialogue, they're going to require more and more storage space.
Procedural assets are probably going to become more important in future anyway, due to RAM limitations (the rendering capacity of these machines is mismatched with the amount of room for things to render).
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
1. Sounds:
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 considered), it bloats your load time like mad. Those demos that have a few kilobytes of data take minutes to generate their procedural data and are VERY limited in what they can do. And it's a lot of work, I don't see companies spending two or three extra years on a game just to boast "We're only taking up one DVD!"
3. Videos vs. Cutscenes:
Maybe I'm bad at telling them apart but the cutscenes in Xenosaga 2 looked pretty realtime to me and that game takes up two DVDs.
Overall it's a tradeoff between CPU time and memory and most will prefer lower CPU loads so they can dedicate more of it to the actual game instead of the trickery needed to reduce the disc count.
I remember a time when games were kilobytes, then megabytes, then hundreds of megabytes and now gigabytes. Space usage increases as technology becomes more demanding. That's not going to stop. It's silly to assume that a medium that hit its limit this generation will be sufficient for the next one.
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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 randomly generated. It was something like a million square miles, but only the main dungeons and towns were hand-made. Morrowind was MUCH smaller, but nothing was randomly generated (and it was still huge, even by PC RPG standards).
The point is, that the landmass of TES 4: Oblivion (an Xbox 360 game, perfect example for this discussion) is only slightly bigger than Morrowind's at about 16 square miles, so Bethesda has about 13 times more room, and the only things that will really take up much more space with Oblivion are the higher-res textures, and the hours of voice-overs, which Morrowind didn't have. I think they can manage to fit all that in the extra 8GB they have to work with now.
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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, because when characters were supposed to move in the opening cutscenes, they'd freeze in a position, and then skid to where they were supposed to go. A pre-rendered scene, you know that it will always display the same way, and you can bypass limitations in the engine. Then again, when well done, those in-engine cutscenes can be much more immersive. Bioware has always done well in that respect, I think, reserving FMV for chapter cutscenes and using the engine for the smaller scenes in-game.
And for Heaven's sake, enough with the attempts to randomize cutscenes... That just leads to situations where invincibility flags get stuck on, cutscene length varies from 2 seconds to 10 minutes, and glitches become all the more evident. Go ahead and script all of the actions. If the user has seen the cutscene before, they'll probably just skip it. The stress on the system is easier too, no AI checking for what to do next, more bandwidth available to preload the next scene. And the scenes where they make it "interactive" by giving you regular control, but having an invincible or, worse, just extremely difficult foe, so as to force you to lose to advance the plot, those drive me crazy. Mainly, you don't know that you can't win, so you'll keep reloading and playing, trying to avoid the loss of your weapons or the like. And worse, some of them actually allow you to win, and then act like you were still beaten. As much as I dislike a lot of the scenarious where you're arbitrarily stripped of your ingame loot, I vastly prefer it when it's just plain scripted, not something I'm made to feel I'm in control of.
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