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.

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.

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...

[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?

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

[RichardMarks]

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

Shocking.

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.

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?

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: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!!

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: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: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: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...

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)