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.'"

Comments

Wow...25 Gigs of content!

[sgant]

Though look at it this way, 25 gigs of crap is still crap.

Re:Wow...25 Gigs of content!

[Necreia]

Okay, what's the deal with this.
1- Game developers no longer have to struggle to stuff textures / data / whatnot into small packages and use customer extractors in order to not run out of space.
2- Pre-instantiated level data (ect) can be stored in the free space, cutting down in loading speed in some commonly repeated code blocks.

That's not all, but I am EXTREMELY excited about these in particular as a developer. This gives a lot more workroom to fight less with hardware restrictions in order to make a great game... meaning they can work more on a great game!

What's with /. lately? I know that bashing Sony is the 'cool' thing to do, especially when people karma whore-- but is that really worth rejecting expansions in technology?

Don't people remember "Nobody will ever need more than 640k RAM!" -- Bill Gates 1981?

Re:Wow...25 Gigs of content!

[JohnSearle]

I'll agree with you to a certain degree... I was more defending Sony's system as a whole, and not just their increasing the storage capacity of the system. It seems to me that what Sony has done, or is doing, is increasing all of the aspects that are found in a traditional console system (aside from physical interface), whereas Nintendo has instead opted to focus on the physical interface. Both of these choices seem to me to be putting tools into the hands of the actual game makers. As others have said, the storage capacity could be used for more than just cinematics, but when you combine storage with sheer power, that seems to me to be where they are heading... towards immersion.

I'm sorry if you thought I was only talking merely about storage capacity, I was more focusing on the tactics of each company (replying to the parent thread), rather than the overall point of this whole article (storage capacity)...

- John

Interesting..

[tont0r]

It reminds of me when there is a road that is far too busy, then they spend 5+ years expanding the road, only to have it not be wide enough for the new amount of traffic.

Re:Interesting..

[jandrese]

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.

Re:Interesting..

[UbuntuDupe]

I don't know if you're calling me an "anti-suburban-sprawl type" who argues "that everybody should live in the city along the mass transit lines", but that would be an error. All I want is to be able to live in a large city, affordably, without an extremely long, stressful commute across overcrowed roads. I'm fortunate in that I found work in a smaller (though still internationally famous) city that doesn't have traffic problems, but it would be nice if I didn't have to live so far out to avoid it.

I wonder if people really consider their alternatives appropriately. For "free" roads into town, you get a long, stressful, ~2 hour/day commute. How much of your life are you missing because your commute is ~3 times longer that it has to be? Would it be that bad if tolls made it so you could take a private bus to work in 1/3 of the time (or drive alone if you could afford the tolls)? (NOTE TO PEOPLE WHO ALWAYS MISREAD MY POSTS: I'm not saying people "should" ride buses, or that they should be forced into it specifically, or that there should be some petty system of incentives to push them in that direction. I just expect that to be the emergent result of appropriate peak hour pricing.)

As for "more roads bring congestion", I don't see why it's hard to grasp. At the moment the roads are widened, the farther-out sites are more attractive: "Hey, cheaper land, farther from the rabble, same commute time." But then EVERYONE thinks this way, and the aggregate effect is that those wider roads are no longer so sparse. You can ask anyone involved in transportation engineering for 20 years, and they'll tell you the same thing.

And as for better city-living alternatives, the sprawl-hating power-trippers are part of the problem in wanting to micromanage every such development, even though developers would love to build nicer, denser, safer housing there.

No real surprise

[cjmnews]

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.

Re:No real surprise

[Ford Prefect]

It's kind of like a law, give them space, and it will be filled.

Yup. Take the original Halo for the Xbox as an example. Makes full use of the DVD storage - so much so that it almost fills a disc. Numerous gigabytes of content, with a fair amount duplicated between different maps.

Now compare with the PC version of Halo. Comes on a single CD - and contains more content too. Much less than a gigabyte, thanks to heavy compression, reuse of textures, sounds and models between maps, etc. Much more efficiently laid out, but requires a decent amount of processing grunt to decompress to a computer's hard disk. This could have been done with the Xbox version, but there simply wasn't the need. There was space available on the DVD, and there wasn't so much content to justify more aggressive compression...

It'll be more interesting to see how a blockbuster PS3 title of, say, 2010 might fill that 25 or 50 gigabytes of space. Assuming, of course, that Sony hasn't collapsed into bankruptcy and the ColecoVision 3000 isn't ruling the roost with its authentic rat-neuron-powered parasympathetic whatsit-matic gameplay.

Re:No real surprise

[Ford Prefect]

Which I wonder why, when the Library level itself could have been reduced to no more than maybe 8K. 7K for the basic layout, and 1K for all the locations of all the repeated places that first 7K goes to.

I think you're being a bit generous there. The Library could have been reduced to just four bytes - 0x53, 0x48, 0x49 and 0x54...

You know...

[Kirin Fenrir]

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.

Re:You know...

[MeanderingMind]

There's a reason people piss and moan, and it isn't because Blu-Ray sucks. Blu-Ray isn't bad, but that doesn't make it desirable. DVDs have only very recently become truly ubiquitous, and many people have just finished assembling DVD collections. The idea of buying all of that again without any immediate benefit save "Someday when I get an HDTV this will benefit me" isn't very compelling. Even less so because of HD-DVD and Blu-Ray confusion.

I have an HDTV, and I'm sticking with regular DVDs until there's a clear winner for the next format and maybe even afterwards. The look great, maybe not fantastic, but good enough that rebuying my movie collection isn't appealing.

There isn't any irony in saying we don't need a new technology when we don't.

Re:You know...

[Ash-Fox]

People piss and moan about Blu-Ray, "You don't need it!"

Why do I need DRM?

When you're posting your Sony flames, just think of the irony in Slashdot posters arguing that we don't need a new technology.

I bought a Mini-disc player from Sony, the format and devices flopped in the end.
I bought a (what was considered at the time) next-generation MP3 player from Sony that couldn't play MP3s -- Flopped too in the end.

Give me reason to trust any more Sony technologies?

Re:You know...

[MBCook]

That's a tangent to the conversation. Blu-ray may end up flopping for movies (I doubt it, but it may).

We are talking about a GAME CONSOLE FORMAT. Your comments don't make much sense in that context. What you are saying is basically...

I bought a Dreamcast from Sega but the GD-ROM format flopped and no movies were released for it.

What does it matter if they are releasing things on Blu-ray, DVD, Hard Drive, HD-DVD, or punch cards? The point of the article is that next-gen games are already taking up 25 gigs so Sony's move to not use DVDs (like MS did) seems like it was a very smart one (on that issue, price could be argued otherwise).

In other words...just like every other generation?

[RichardMarks]

New generation of console hardware arrives with more storage. Developers use the space.

Shocking.

cutscenes

[name*censored*]

I don't see why they don't just downgrade the cutscene quality; barely anyone watches the cutscenes more than once anyway. I can't imagine sitting there thinking "WOW LQQK AT THE 1080i CUTSCENE!!!! WHAT QUALITY!!!!!!". I CAN, however, imagine sitting there thinking "come on, come on, get back to the game already!"

Re:cutscenes

[El_Muerte_TDS]

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.

Re:cutscenes

[crswanny]

This is why I hate EA games. The inability to skip through the opening EA Logo splash screen, or when playing through a game numerous times and having to watch the same cutscenes over and over is such a pain in the butt. Sure, some I may want to watch additional times but for the love of everything holy, when I die on a level and need to attempt it again, don't make me watch the same opening video every f'ing time!

W000t

[xtracto]

W00t for the 3122131 maps of 8000x6000 sqr ft Doom 6!!! I for one cant wait to shoot-shoot-jump-shoot-jump-shoot-run-strafe-shoot -crouch-shoot-shoot-shoot-jump-shoot-jump-shoot-ru n-strafe-shoot-crouch-shoot-shoot-shoot-jump-shoot -jump-shoot-run-strafe-shoot-crouch-shoot-
shoot-shoot-jump-shoot-jump-shoot-run-strafe-shoot -crouch-shoot-shoot-shoot-jump-shoot-jump-shoot-ru n-strafe-shoot-crouch-shoot-
at 1620x1280 !!

Seriously, is anyone still turned on by this??

(sorry this is a not-so-old-man rant).

I am waiting for my humble Wii =o)

My dissapointment

[Taulin]

The one thing I was dissapointed with at the TGS was that the next gen titles still used old techniques. 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. Even worse, proper physics are still not used in games like Virtua Fighter 5 and you still get a foot through the stomach. I would expect them to use some of that extra power to calculate and fix some of these artifacts of the elder systems. If not from these first gen titles, then from the next batch at least.

Re:My dissapointment

[Ford Prefect]

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...

Cut Scenes

[BenjyD]

it's about having up to 1080p movies built into the game;

I was hoping that the power of the next-gen consoles would mean developers finally stop using cut-scene movies and do everything in the game engine. Why waste disk space on movie files when doing it with the game engine is smaller and better for immersion?

Re:Cut Scenes

[j00r0m4nc3r]

Why waste disk space on movie files when doing it with the game engine is smaller and better for immersion?

Companies do this because it's easier/cheaper to farm out cutscenes to an animation studio than to program a good scripting system and pay people to program in the cutscenes.

Re:Cut Scenes

[WilliamSChips]

I wish more games would do things the way the old Command and Conquer games(up to RA2) did things--with real actors. Tiberian Sun even had James Earl Jones.

Alternate Explanation

[mikeisme77]

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.

typical

[gEvil (beta)]

That seems like a typical response from Sony these days. When asked whether they're simply going to use the space for high-def cutscenes, they respond with, "No, we're going to synergistically leverage the high capacity and bandwidth of the new BluRay media format to deliver super high-resolution full motion video and multichannel surround audio."

Duplication... Seek Times

[adam31]

One key piece here is the duplication of game data. See, while the disc capacity and the amount of RAM to be filled have increased 15x, the disc bandwidth and seek times have improved only ~2x. So there is this huge bottleneck getting data into the game.

Now, you commonly have models that reference the same textures or normal maps, and these models might be very far away from each other in the game world. You could seek around scooping up all the shared resources, but that would be really slow and loading times would be attrocious. What you really want to do is load up a giant chunk of data pre-packaged, and the only way to do that is to duplicate the shared resource. With giant disc capacity, there really is no downside except that some data gets squished further toward the "slow-read" inner ring.

Higher capacity helps gameplay by improving load times, allowing denser data to be loaded and flushed more frequently, and making the game world richer. As far as 25 gigs of pre-rendered movies goes, I don't think you'll see that. It's just not cost effective. Those cinematics cost an ass-full of money, and maybe a few games will go nuts with it. But it certainly won't be the state of the industry in 2 years or anything.

Re:Duplication... Seek Times

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

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 :P

Re:Gameplay

[SpeedyDX]

Nice job on the bias/assumption. I, and a ton of people I know, play the game SOLELY for the cutscenes, storyline, voiceovers, etc. The gameplay is more of a bonus for us. It all comes down to preference. I play through FF games just to experience the story. We play games as a form of interactive movie, if you will. And if this will enhance our experience, good! Just because new technology doesn't enhance YOUR experience, it doesn't mean it doesn't enhance ANYONE'S experience.

Re:Something's law

[Bastian]

Is there a name yet for "The enjoyability of the game is inversely proportional to its graphic design and art budget"?

Re:HD on PC

[KillerBob]

Games on the PC has had "HD" content for years. I remember playing Quake 2 at 1025*768! And we had 5.1 sound for some time too (my first true 5.1 game was Doom 3 in 2004). How come they could fit the game on a batch of CD then?

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.

.kkrieger, anyone?

[Stormwatch]

Check it here. A fully modern-looking first person shooter, in 96kB. Procedural synthesis for teh win!

Next-gen FPS's

[rlp]

Yes, your character may be moving through a dimly lit room where you can't see anything. But, your character is moving through a dimly lit room where you can't see anything at 1080p!!

overall experience

[the dark hero]

You can say all you want about a lack of compelling content, but saying no one cares about 7.1 sound and 1080i cutscenes is a bit ironic because no one cares about your bitch rants.

The truth is, sound does enhance the overall experience as well as the visuals. Voice overs (if done well) can add dimension to characters. Yea sure, none of that really stands out if the game is crap, but that's not the point. I'm not such a technphile, but one reason i play games is for the immersion or the escapism. If added capacity on a disc will enhance my gaming experience, then i welcome the change.

Re:Something's law

[MindStalker]

That depends upon if nudity is involved in this budget..
Oh gameplay enjoyment... that kind of enjoyment.. I get you..

How fast is it gonna read those movies...

[aapold]

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.

Quality not quantity..

[mattpointblank]

Half-Life 2, surely a game most /.ers can agree was (one of?) the best in recent years, takes up only a few gigabytes on disk. Its graphics still look better than anything I've seen a console render, and its gameplay is a thousand times better than most games that rely on flashy FMV sequences to tell the story. What developers should be focusing on is not how many flashy videos that are not interactive they can cram onto a disc, but how good a game they can create with these wider limitations. If I wanted to see high-quality computer generated movies I'd watch Star Wars.

Re:Remember

[Maxwell]

Ah... Remember back in the day when games didn't worry about having THE flashiest graphics, but rather focused on being, oh i don't know, good games? I mean how much of that 25 gig do you think is actually playable content? How much of that game is actually good stuff?

Back in the day, games were ALWAYS worried about the flashiest graphics. Always. Every game had screen shots on the back of the box, usually picked from the best of many supported platforms, and bragged about their great graphics. I remember what a 'waste' VGA was and what an outcry there was about VGA games 'ruining the game with fancy graphics'. Who needs 256 colors! it's about the gameplay, and 16color EGA games are just more fun!! Besides a 386 with a VGA card was outrageously expensive.

Don't even get me started on CD ROM based games - what an outrage, 800MB of PURE UTTER CRAP how could they possibly need all that space? it must be junk!

etc, etc.

10 years from now, when BlueRay2 is out we will here the same old complaints...1Terabyte? why? oh why? I had tons of fun playing 4.3G DVD's..developers are just greedy and lazy.

Duh.

Duh.

JON

Re:Something's law

[ozbon]

Isn't that known as "the Daikatana effect"?

Re:Jumping and ducking i n video games(was Re:W000

[ichigo 2.0]

You obviously haven't [verb]ed many [objective]s from the '80s. An [adjective] portion of them were just [verb]ing to get to [subjects] and avoid various objects. Take a look at the original [substantive]. Wikipedia article -- Relevance percentage: 0%

You fail.

Re:What does the size matter if it isn't fun?

[DrEldarion]

hmmm, kinda like that whole "its not the size, its how you use it" sexual innuendo line.

Sorry, but what the girls never told you is that they want both the size AND have it be well-used.

Some game companies will waste the space, but it's best to have it there for the ones who will use it to completely blow you away.

Re:Something's law

[WilliamSChips]

I had an order of magnitude more fun with Half-Life 2 than Half-Life 1. Guess which one had a bigger graphics budget. Sure, HL2 would still be fun even if it didn't have the awesome graphics(gravity guns for the win) but your statement rings of argumentatum ad foeditatem.(argument towards ugliness)