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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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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.
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.
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
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?
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.
2 megabytes? not even. it fit on a single floppy. I would be supprised if it was more than 256k
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.
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.