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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.
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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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.
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.
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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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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Perhaps Sony thought about this, and thats why they "loose" extra money for putting a Blueray drive into it.
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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.
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