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Games Already Filling Blu-Ray Discs
Eurogamer reports that according to Sony's Phil Harrison, PS3 launch titles are already getting close to the 25 GB limit on Blu-Ray discs. He views this as a positive thing, and suggests that the company will up the limit on the media format to 50 GB sometime next year. From the article: "Harrison also responded to questioning about the claim that the capacity of Blu-Ray will be used simply to provide more high definition movie sequences, effectively filling the discs - and games - with non-interactive content. 'It's not just about graphics,' he said. 'It's about 7.1 audio, it's about speech, it's about having up to 1080p movies built into the game; it's high-res textures, it's animation, it's everything that goes into making a very rich and varied next-gen experience. Partly it's visual, partly it's sound, and partially it'll be down to gameplay benefits as well - more levels, more detail, richer experiences.'"
HD-DVD movies are filling their disks, without the extras, already too.
It's kind of like a law, give them space, and it will be filled.
Let's just hope the game play is good enough to justify all that additional sound and 1080p graphics.
You can lose something that is loose, so tighten the loose item so you don't lose it.
People piss and moan about Blu-Ray, "You don't need it!" or "Most people don't have HDTV's!" Well, some of us do. And if you don't, I'd hope that you'd prefer a format that will upgrade with you should you ever choose to get a 7.1 audio system or HDTV. When you're posting your Sony flames, just think of the irony in Slashdot posters arguing that we don't need a new technology.
Caffeine is my anti-drug!
Duranin - A NWN2 Roleplaying Persistent World
Maybe, due to the compression problems of the Blu-Ray disc (or PS3, I forget which and too early in the morning for me to look it up) the discs are being filled because they simply aren't compressing the data as much as something that they would put on a DVD. Alternatively, maybe they are filling the discs by not compressing them simply for propaganda such as this... I don't doubt that Blu-Ray/HD-DVD discs will, indeed, eventually be necessary and very beneficial to games (short of everything being downloaded to the HDD)--especially for full 1080P. I just doubt that any game currently being made REALLY fills the entire thing using the same level of compression as a DVD (especially since I was under the [mis]understanding) that few, if any, of the launch titles would actually be full 1080p.
Read my blog posts on usability.
Two main reasons... firstly, the ingame cinematics that actually played at that resolution were almost always rendered in real time using your graphics card's rendering power. If you take a look at the cines in a game like GuildWars, for example, you'll notice that until recently there's no lip movement at all, and even now, the lip sync leaves a lot to be desired. I mention that the cines that actually played at resolution were rendered on the fly... that's because a *lot* of games packages low-res movies to play. The movies in Civilization 2, for example, were 320x200 resolution. In KOTOR, they were 640x480 stereo. And they were all short. The Mechwarrior series? They were all short, low-res movies. If you played the game at high resolution (back when I played those games a lot, I had a 21" CRT, and usually played at 1920x1440), it became glaringly obvious when they dropped the res to play a movie full screen, then increased it again.
The other reason that they could fit those games on a CD is that there's a *huge* difference between a series of sound effects that get played back in 5.1 and an actual 5.1 soundtrack. The latter requires 6 channels of cd-quality audio for the full duration of the recording, while the former requires short audio clips and information about which speaker(s) to play them through and which volume level to use. Think of it as the difference between a MIDI file and an MP3.
If you believe everything you read, you'd better not read. - Japanese proverb
Check it here. A fully modern-looking first person shooter, in 96kB. Procedural synthesis for teh win!
Circumcision is child abuse.
I've always thought that "building bigger roads just causes more people to move there" argument was flawed myself. Those people didn't appear out of nowhere, they were going to have to live somewhere, the fact that they filled in the area just as the road expanded probably doesn't mean that much either, since road expansions are often correlated with new housing developments anyway.
It drives me nuts when the anti-suburban-sprawl types try to argue that everybody should live in the city along the mass transit lines when nobody can actually afford to do that, and they can't afford to do that because the new housing growth has been choked up so much that demand far outstrips supply and the prices skyrocket. Couple that with the fact that renting is a losing proposition monetarily and your choices for living in the city are basically nonexistant.
I read the internet for the articles.
Prerended cutscenes are so 90s. I though the PS3 was powerful enough to give us high quality in game rendered cut scenes.
Besides that it's always nicer to stay within the game's world representation instead of getting a completely different view during the game.
For example, instead of using true type fonts that use vectors, and would look nice at any resolution and scale, they still used plain old bitmaps.
Truetype fonts for text and other graphical elements? That's so last-generation...
Also, don't stab me in the eyes for this - but Flash could be an interesting addition for a game's controllable panels, interfaces and so on. Doom 3 was nearly there, but if you manage to get the game to run at a high resolution, you'll soon discover that it's all based around relatively low-resolution bitmaps.
If one of these über-games-consoles dedicated a core to rendering Flash elements where necessary, then there'd be loads of new possibilities. And, being an excessively common design target already, everyone knows how to design Flash animations anyway...
Tedious Bloggy Stuff - hooray?
Already in something like Dead Rising, it is annoying to have to wait for the cutscenes to load. If these scenes are gonna be that much bigger in 1080p (and I have a 720p tv), are they going to take that much longer to queue up? I'm assuming the drive has to read movies fast enough to play them at your standard 29.97 fps (no, wait, progressive scan so I guess its 59.94 fps) when showing the movie, so I'd guess it is fast enough for that. Right?
Say something nice about sony? okay... um... Sony-Ericcson makes good phones.
"Waste not one watt!" - CZ
You sound like a game dev who has actually had to work with streaming content on a console :) I have tried to explain this exact same thing to so many people, and they just don't understand. Like the other response to this message.
:P
In response to the other guy:
Yes, the disc based media used by all consoles has a directory, but no sane developer who wants decent load times would even think of using it. You will notice that most games do not have a million little files in their directories. The files are packed into large archive files. Most of these archive files contain all of the assets needed for a certain level, or zone. The developer will usually have the console read the sector list once, cache it in memory, and then seek to the archive file they want to use. They then do a read of that entire archive file into memory. This is done because Seeks (the drive finding a specific sector) is orders of maginitude slower than doing a read. If you tried to seek across the disc for every little bit of data you needed, your load times would be total ass.
In the PS2, sony went so far as to allow game data to be multiplexed into Cinematic sequences. This meant the game was loading while you were watching an intro. (The next time you find yourself complaining that you can't skip an FMV on the Ps2.. this is probably the reason why.)
As for everyone else who seems to be posting today:
I don't understand why people think that more space is useless. I know they don't like the cost of the PS3, and seem to attribute that to the bluray drive, but, as everyone has seen, optical drives are one of the fastest things to become commodity components. How cheap can you buy a DVD drive for now?
Sony positions their consoles for a 10 year lifespan. They would be shooting themselves in the foot if they were not forward looking. Believe it or not, console software hits peak sales about 5-6 years after the consoles are introduced to the market. Will you have an HDTV in 5 years? Will you expect to have content that supports this? With Blue lasers being commodity at this point in time, would you pick up a PS3 for $150-$200? I'm sure millions will, and this is what sony is banking on. The console race is not about who can sell the most launch units. It's about who has the the consoles the casual buyer wants 5 years after launch. The first 5 years of a consoles lifetime is a time of building userbase, and a title library. Sony understands this. Microsoft chose (at least this generation) to stop driving XBOX sales. Sony will be making money on the PS2 for 5 more years, as they find their way to other consumers as hand me downs. (This is why older consoles have a much larger selection of children's titles)
The anti-sony "me-too" sentiment on these boards really shocks me. Sony has been like a multi-headed hydra at times, true, with each division having different agendas. I assure you, SCEA, and Sony electronics had nothing to do with Rootkit DRM, and were probably not even aware of it. That was a brainchild of Sony Music/Columbia. SCEA has kept the entire corporation afloat for years.
I am just as excited as anyone else here about the wii. I am going to purchase one and enjoy it, and it will sit next to my XBOX360. The PS3 is a little expensive for me right now, so I am probably going to wait a few months before I get one. Does that mean that sony is doomed? Not at all. But 3 years from now, I do believe that the WII will be relinquished to the kids' room, where the only Standard Def TV in the house is. And the Xbox360 will have a whole lot of disc switching, or less content/quality due to size constraints. And the PS3 will be the only one left that really fills the needs of the millions of people who will be purchasing HDTVs because of SDTV's impending obsolesence.
Just my 2 cents. Not that anyone will read this because i'm posting as an AC