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360 Discs Large Enough For Content?
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."
But how many of those sequals had to include the now mandatory hi-res textures for HD resolutions?
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.
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Look at the size of games for PS1, most were under 700 megs, becuase thats what u had to work with, then when you had more space, you filled more. Maybe the game sizes dont grow because you know you have to work withing a certain size. If you know u have 4.7 gigs to work with, you design a game to fit that. If you know you have 50 gigs to work with, you dont have to limit your game because it might grow past the acceptable size. Giveing the designer more space to work with, will result im them using that space. If they dont have the room, obviously they will not expand.
The example that some games only grow by 10-20% is because they know they cant make it bigger then the disc can hold. If they had the option to add 2 hours of high deffinition video to the game because they got all the extra space they can do it. The games dont grow, becuase they dont have where to grow
Take a look at PC games, 5 years ago, you had games fitting on 1 cd, and that was it, now your lucky to get a game on 2 or 3 cds, or on a dvd, the size grows, its just that on a Console, there is no room to grow, so they sizes dont vary too much becuase you have to be careful with what you put in the limited space
-EL
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.
If I remember correctly during last years E3 content developers were complaining of not having enough space with standard DVD technology.
The content developers should be the ones tell us what is enough space, not the other way around.
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.
The disks are probably large enough, but the issue is whether that content is worth playing. Judging from the list of future Xbox 360 games, all that's upcoming is jack shit. The real question is: how much longer can M$ keep up this charade before cutting their losses and discontinuing the 360?
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.
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.
...what? 5-6 years like the PS2 did (does) ?
We are talking here about a gaming platform which has to last by itself for
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.
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Thinking never hurt anybody --MacGyver
Greater disasters? 3D0. Jaguar.
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.
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,
:D
I'm pretty sure that the first Prince of Persia was about 2 megabytes.
Don't forget the Sega CD & 32X!
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 on DVD. DVDs will remain cheaper than Blu-Ray discs for most of the PS3's lifecycle, and fitting a game in 9GB of space just isn't that hard, "HD" textures or not.
Microsoft's choice of DVD was the right one. The XBOX 360 is out there, right now, capturing marketshare and selling games. Microsoft is fixing bugs in the hardware, improving the online software, and gaining momentum in the 3rd-party development world. Meanwhile, PS3 is nowhere to be seen. The samples presented at CES and E3 are identified as "Conceptual Designs", meaning that the hardware isn't finalized or even in the prototype stage. Blu-Ray drives are beginning to appear, but they are extremely expensive and the media is nowhere to be found.
Building a system around a technology that doesn't exist is a foolish move. NEXT tried it with a Magneto-Optical drive, and when the technology was late, expensive, and buggy, NEXT took it on the chin.
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.
Virtual Boy
Beware the fury of a patient man
- John Dryden
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.
Or maybe they didn't grow because they were constrained by disk size?
CD-i
At least 3D0 and Jaguar had fun games. I can't say the same about The Phillips CD-i
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
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 games don't need the wasteful 512mb of next gen systems, sure as hell don't need multiple core processors that run at several ghz, and really don't need a better graphics engine. After all, each sequel ran on the same hardware as its predecessor. In fact, everyone who's bought a 360 is clearly an idiot by this reasoning.
That's utterly flawed logic. As disc swapping kills games, developers do everything they possibly can to avoid it, including culling content. So, when CD-ROM was the best anyone had, sure, most people managed to release sequels on a single CD-ROM. When DVD turned up, they quickly stepped up and used the five times as much space - not because they were wasteful but because they'd been holding back previous games to keep them on a single disc.
When a game like Oblivion comes out, sure, you can cram it on to one DVD but think how much more freedom the designers would have had to use unique textures if they had the space of HD-DVD or Blu-Ray. Sure, they can cram everything in to one DVD and we can tell ourselves that a single DVD is still plenty but the truth is, they're making decisions based on limited space and having to choose things to cut. Given the choice, I'd rather my game had the extra textures, additional music scores, more unique pre-recorded dialogs, etc. than have to keep reusing them to fit a single disc. Can they squeeze it in to a single disc? Sure. But that doesn't mean they aren't making trades to do so and it certainly doesn't mean games wouldn't get larger if they possibly could.
Designers use whatever they have access to. If you have a single DVD, you'll only use a single DVD and keep cutting back your vision. When that option doesn't change for a whole generation, games won't up their requirements much during that generation - because they're hitting the same ceiling, not because they don't want or couldn't use the extra space.
And, even assuming quantities of content don't change... From Xbox 1 to Xbox 360, you've swapped from FD to HD. That means full screen videos are ~7x the resolution and thus, to use it, require ~7x the storage. That means textures need to scale up just as much as you can see that much more detail in each one. Even if there're no more levels, no more textures used per level, no more cinematics, the same quantity of resources still takes up several times the space if you want it to fully use HD.
Thus an appropriately textured Splinter Cell for the 360 should likely take 20gb of disk space - which just isn't going to happen as the publishers know five disks would kill the game. Without that as an option, they're forced to use the same resolution textures and console owners finally see the crap PC users have been putting up with, playing ports of console games: just how bad FD textures look when displayed on an HD screen with HD res polygons.
But how many of those sequals had to include the now mandatory hi-res textures for HD resolutions?
If developers can use procedural synthesis to fit code, maps, models, and textures for an at least current-gen-quality first-person shooter for PC called .kkrieger into 96 KiB, then who needs even a DVD?
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.
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.
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 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). And pay a studio orchestra to perform them.
more unique pre-recorded dialogs, etc.
And pay writers to write them. And pay voice actors to perform them. And pay competent translators to translate them, which is important in order to sell an E- or T-rated game in Europe. And pay other voice actors to perform them in other languages.
Pay, pay, pay. You say you want a Revolution?
From Xbox 1 to Xbox 360, you've swapped from FD to HD. That means full screen videos are ~7x the resolution and thus, to use it, require ~7x the storage.
Xbox ran in EDTV, or 720x480. Xbox 360 runs in HDTV, which is usually 1280x720 on LCD and plasma displays. That's only 2.67 times.
How'd FFXI get approved then?
Until May 2006, when Final Fantasy XI for Xbox 360 is released in the United States and Canada, Final Fantasy XI is a PS2 exclusive. PS2 releases are approved by SCEA, not Microsoft Xbox Division.
Just because PC games can be run at higher resolutions doesn't mean that they have been optimized for higher resolutions. Think of it this way, just because it is possible to play Quake at 1600x1200 doesn't mean that id developed textures to make it look better at 1600x1200.
The fact is that most PC developers have targeted 800x600 (or 1024x768) with their Base textures and included slightly higher definition textures for higher resolutions (usually, just a computer tesselation to limit how noticable the pixelation of the textures are). True HD textures have not really been done yet because of the cost of maintaining textures that will look good at 1600x1200 as well as textures that look good at 800x600.
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...
Slashdot Burying Stories About Slashdot Media Owned
A DVD limits the texture size. Textures, normal maps, height maps, everything.
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 generated tentacle animation physics will have a full 512 MB of ram to look like a dystopian nightmare, but wouldn't fit on disk on the X360.
Current games fit in 2 - 3 GB because that's what we've got: publishers are surprisingly loathe to use double-sided disks. We'll use all of that available space, don't you worry. If we had 30GB disks today we could fill them.
Oh, and the PS2 / Xbox 1 has good texture compression.... The "Emotion Engine" is a bit beyond GIFs. You might be able to eke out a few more percent, but don't expect a 50% file size reduction. We've been through that part of the curve already.
The ______ Agenda
.."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 someone not into coding/graphics, but the idea seems nice, -if it saves some space-, IMHO..
A horse can't be sick, you know, even if he wants to.
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.
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.
Hell, we could let it render the lightmaps at load time! Just wait an hour until the radiosity simulation is complete!
Doom 3 renders the lightmaps at runtime using the Creative's Reverse algorithm.
True, and I almost included it. But the CD-I wasn't intended soley as a videogame platform but more of a computer for the tv.
...
I did finish "Escape from Cyber City" though
with the *remote* controller. Agaaahhh!
Though nothing haunts me like the "na na na na" sound that the little enemies made in the hideous "Dark Castle". Reward for finishing the game? Playing it again exactly the same! Woo!
This is entirely factual. As such it cannot be a troll. In addition, it's not even flamebait! There is a moderator on my ass, and I don't know why.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"