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."

Comments

HD

[dq5 studios]

But how many of those sequals had to include the now mandatory hi-res textures for HD resolutions?

Re:HD

[vune]

Indeed. A more suitable comparison might be the difference between Tekken 3 and Tekken Tag.

Good!

[Eightyford]

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.

it's all about HD

[AkaXakA]

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.

Re:it's all about HD

[MobileTatsu-NJG]

"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."

Faster CPU == more compression on the textures. Quadrupling the res on the textures doesn't necessarily mean quadrupling the size requirments. Imagine using a 640 by 480 Gif image for the old console, then using a 1280 by 960 JPEG image on the next console. In one case I tried here, the .GIF was 155K and the JPG awas 197K. 4 times as many pixels, but it was only 30% or so bigger in terms of file size. This is more or less what happens when new consoles come along. More CPU == better compression etc.

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.

wrong comparison

[OleMoudi]

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.

We are talking here about a gaming platform which has to last by itself for ...what? 5-6 years like the PS2 did (does) ?
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.

It's FMV, not cutscenes that are the problem..

[Channard]

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.

Re:First Prince of Persia

[Anonymous Coward]

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