Measuring the Xbox One Against PCs With Titanfall

An anonymous reader writes "Earlier this week, Respawn Entertainment launched Titanfall, a futuristic first-person shooter with mechs that has been held up as the poster child for the Xbox One. The Digital Foundry blog took the opportunity to compare how the game plays on the Xbox One to its performance on a well-appointed PC. Naturally, the PC version outperforms, but the compromises are bigger than you'd expect for a newly-released console. For example, it runs at an odd resolution (1408x792), the frame rate 'clearly isn't anywhere near locked' to 60fps, and there's some unavoidable screen tear. Reviews for the game are generally positive — RPS says most of the individual systems in Titanfall are fun, but the forced multiplayer interaction is offputting. Giant Bomb puts it more succinctly: 'Titanfall is a very specific game built for a specific type of person.' Side note: the game has a 48GB install footprint on PCs, owing largely to 35GB of uncompressed audio."

Comments

Glorious PC Master Race

[Anonymous Coward]

Filthy console peasants never seem to learn.

Re: Glorious PC Master Race

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not just about frame rate either. A keyboard-mouse player will always be able to defeat a joystick player easily.

Re: Glorious PC Master Race

[Paradise Pete]

A keyboard-mouse player will always be able to defeat a joystick player easily.

Not if they're both sitting on the couch.

Re: Glorious PC Master Race

[epyT-R]

Why would a keyboard player sit on a couch?

Re: Glorious PC Master Race

[jones_supa]

To make it impossible for him to play in full capacity so the joystick player gets an advantage.

Hahaa...

Re: Glorious PC Master Race

[Chris Mattern]

Why would a keyboard player sit on a couch?

Because it's comfy. A TV dinner tray makes for a good place to put the keyboard (and mouse too, if you need one).

Re: Glorious PC Master Race

[PopeRatzo]

A chair is as comfy as a sofa, unless you have a very wide butt.

Only children and people with very wide butts play games in the living room. Proper adult gamers sit at a desk.

Re: Glorious PC Master Race

[l0n3s0m3phr34k]

I've found trackballs work far better than a mouse for FPS...and less space needed too!

Re:Glorious PC Master Race

[Anonymous Coward]

This was modded "insightful"? Not funny or flamebait? Haha oh wow.

Re: Glorious PC Master Race

[Kremmy]

That's unrelated to the merits of the trackball - they're just super uncommon these days so the gaming input device makers don't bother.

Re: Glorious PC Master Race

[smash]

Because that's where his friends are, drinking beer.

Re: Glorious PC Master Race

[drinkypoo]

The speed and accuracy of a trackman wheel are phenomenal. I'm at least as good with it in FPSes etc as I am with a mouse. As a bonus, I trade lots of wrist pain for a little thumb pain, which I consider to be a win. Sadly, they are made with crap omron microswitches which will fail you and it's easy for crud to get into the scrolling wheel and clog it up.

I am a gigantic mutant with big meat hands, so finding a mouse which I like is a big challenge in any case. Perhaps this is not the solution for everyone. But the resolution of these devices is very good, and really more than suitable for gaming. Just clean the hand salsa out of the rollers periodically and you'll be all right.

Re: Glorious PC Master Race

[CronoCloud]

PC Gamer Bourgeoisie Philistine! REAL electronic gaming is done in the living room, only Dirty PC Gamer Fools play at desks. Desks are for work!

Re: Glorious PC Master Race

[CronoCloud]

Only Filthy PC Gamer Bourgeoisie think the only games that exist are first-person-shooters. But of course they are Filthy Cheap PC Gamers who buy Counter Strike a decade ago and play on de_dust over and over for 10 years and think that makes them the experts in what gaming is, or should be.

Filthy PC Gamer Philistines!

Re:Glorious PC Master Race

[Anonymous Coward]

Filthy PC Gamer Bourgeoisie can't seem to get over their elitism, focusing on the tech and stupidly obsessing over numbers, rather than the fun.

Platform competition is part of the fun you silly goose.

Re: Glorious PC Master Race

[VanGarrett]

You know, what I find funny about this, is that the only console games I ever see commercials for these days are FPS, with the occasional Third Person affair.

Re: Glorious PC Master Race

[CronoCloud]

I know! I blame the Microsoft catering to the dudebro gamer demographic with the original Xbox. And then publishers seeing that it was easier to market a shooter to dudebros than figuring out how to market other games to a more diverse market.

I think the last non-shooter commercial I saw was for Diablo 3 for the PS3! Every Xbox 360/Xbox one commercial seems to be for a shooter.

Re: Glorious PC Master Race

[Wraithlyn]

Why do you say that? I play with KB+M from my couch perfectly fine, on a PC hooked up to a projector and 5.1 sound.

Takes a USB hub on my coffee table, and one of these things on a pillow beside me for a proper (ie, elbow supporting) mouse surface.

Re: Glorious PC Master Race

[CronoCloud]

I would like to see a competitive player get a logitech marble mouse and a nostromo speedpad and see what they can get.

Ooooh yes! With the cross-pad used for movement? That would be very similar to the setup I use on the console, with games that support it. DualShock left hand: movement. Mouse: right hand. Though now you can replace the full dual shock with a Move Navigation controller (which can be used without the wand controller and camera)

Re: Glorious PC Master Race

[drsquare]

If you're moving your mouse with your wrist you're doing it wrong.

Re: Glorious PC Master Race

[ahabswhale]

This. I'm continually shocked at how few gamers understand how to tune their mouse for gaming. I get a huge kick out of people's reactions when they use my mouse at work because of the sensitivity and it freaks them out.

Re: Glorious PC Master Race

[mjwx]

A chair is as comfy as a sofa, unless you have a very wide butt.

Only children and people with very wide butts play games in the living room. Proper adult gamers sit at a desk.

Size of my arse not withstanding, it's back support that gets me. A semi-decent computer chair (~100 office chair). I recently played a few hours of Mario Kart 64 (yep, dusted of the old N64) on a couch with some friends and by the end of it, my lower back was killing me. I never get this when I spend 4 hours playing Civ IV.

Re: Glorious PC Master Race

[PopeRatzo]

I recently played a few hours of Mario Kart 64 (yep, dusted of the old N64) on a couch with some friends and by the end of it, my lower back was killing me. I never get this when I spend 4 hours playing Civ IV.

Absolutely. If you look at the posture of someone playing a console game, you will see an arched back, pressure on the lumbar, neck pulled back, often feet not flat on the floor.

As you can see from this photo of me playing WoW, PC gaming provides a much more healthy posture:

http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-xAf6...

Re: Glorious PC Master Race

[TranquilVoid]

This seems completely opposite to reality to me. The extra control and input flexibility that comes from a keyboard and mouse allows for a greater variety of games, notably MMORPGs and RTSs, which have very little presence on consoles. Consoles are mostly for FPSs and racing games.

Re: Glorious PC Master Race

[Anonymous Coward]

That is, in fact, a lie. Granted, it's at the low end of the resolution of gaming mice, but since you can move the ball more than a mouse ball without having to move your hand, you actually end up getting more precision. The sample rate and the DPI are both fine for gaming.

This shows how out of touch you are. Mice haven't used balls for years. You can buy a 2500 DPI gaming mouse for less than $20 now.

Do you know how not to be a condescending dickass? Wait, no. You don't. I must be new here. Cowards like you never know that.

Stop trying to project your bad habits on others then.

If you're not moving your arm, then you're moving your wrist. If you are moving your arm, you're moving your arm and your wrist.

If you can't move your fingers independently of your wrist then you have a physical problem. You should get that checked out.

Re: Glorious PC Master Race

[Xest]

I can't fit my dogs next to me on my chair, and I like chilling with my dogs.

Re: Glorious PC Master Race

[CronoCloud]

[quote]The extra control and input flexibility that comes from a keyboard and mouse allows for a greater variety of games, notably MMORPGs [/quote]

you know, it's very possible to make an MMORPG that doesn't need a a bajillion keys to control it. In fact, I've played such MMORPG's.

[quote]and RTSs, which have very little presence on consoles[/quote]

The first RTS was a console game, Herzog Zwei. The genre originated on consoles. While there aren't many now, quite a few got ported back in the PSone days.

Re: Glorious PC Master Race

[CronoCloud]

(...)

Game consoles predate Japanese games with angsty pokey-haired protagonists. Atari 2600? Intellivision? Colecovision? Bally Astrocade? Fairchild Channel F? Magnavox Odyssey 1 and 2?

Re: Glorious PC Master Race

[CronoCloud]

So you admit that PC games are created so well that they can be enjoyed for years and years while most console gamers await the yearly refresh of their favourite titles like the morons that they are.

Nope, what I'm saying is that PC gamers are cheap bastards who play de_dust, not because CS is a greatest game evah, but because they are cheap bastards who spent too much on hardware which makes them less willing to blow money on software. Besides, each time they play de_dust they're doing the same basic thing over and over.

while most console gamers await the yearly refresh of their favourite titles like the morons that they are.

If the yearly title has more features, and is better than the previous version, why not? I'm not talking about COD/Battlefield/Sports games...that is a relatively recent development. Sure I could have played a map in SOCOM over and over, but SOCOM II was a better game.

I mean consoles get linear FPS games like CoD,

Which has also been on PC since the beginning of the franchise, and was more popular on PC than console till relatively recently

while PCs get thinking FPS games like Deus Ex.

Oh you mean that game I played on the PS2? The one that also has mouse (and keyboard) support if you want it? What, you didn't know about the PS2 version? Filthy PC Gamers...you think you know gaming but all you know is your moms basement and de_dust or the Barrens. That is why I say that console gamers know more about PC gaming than PC Gamers do about console gaming.

Consoles get simplistic kiddie garbage RPGs like "Final Fantasy", while the PC has Ultima.

Ha! Early RPG's like Ultima were just as linear as Final Fantasy, you were expected to go through the dungeons in a particular order and often couldn't go places without doing certain quests to gain "passage" or permits or what have you.

Besides, who says console gamers didn't get to play Ultima. Several Ultima games were ported to various consoles. Even Ultima Underworld got a PSone port in Japan. But of course, living in the PC gaming ghetto, you never knew that. I know about Richard Garriot but I bet you can't name the producer for the early Final Fantasy's.

Consoles don't get strategy games, due to lack of proper controls and lack of brainpower to go behind those controls.

You remind me of Desslock, PC Gamer magazines former RPG guy, who once thought consoles didn't have any strategy games or RPG's because he didn't recognize any of the titles. Consoles have their OWN games in those genres and of course you don't know about them because you're thinking: "No Europa whatever, or Civ-foo? Consoles don't have any strategy games then." rather than actually checking to see what they do have.

due to lack of proper controls and lack of brainpower to go behind those controls.

I'm old enough to remember when the oldbie PC gamers who started on the gold box games lambasted the fratboys playing DOOM/Heretic etc as brainless casuals. There are plenty of cerebral games on consoles, but since you're in the PC Gamer Ghetto, you don't know about them.

Re:Glorious PC Master Race

[godefroi]

We need to do something about the gaming inequality. We should regulate PC gaming hardware, as it's got an unfair advantage over consoles.

Re: Glorious PC Master Race

[TaxDoktor]

After using the Logitech M570, I find I get better control and speed with my Trackball. http://www.logitech.com/en-ca/... When sitting on the couch, I can easily position the M570 trackball to allow for comfortable gaming without a movement surface. The ability to spin 180 deg with a trackball is instant, for FPS it is awesome. However it does take a bit of getting used to, but it is better in my opinion than a mouse. I also have no pain when gaming for much longer than I should admit at times, lol.

Re: Glorious PC Master Race

[X0563511]

So, because you have a disability our preferred seating arrangements are invalid?

Re: Glorious PC Master Race

[Anonymous Coward]

They still make gaming mice with balls. You have not the foggiest idea what you are even talking about.

No they don't. This is just you trying to recover from looking like a clueless jackass.

Maybe on your planet, this comment makes sense. But on this planet, in order to move a mouse around and touch all its buttons, there will be wrist movement. You're confused because you don't think your wrist is moving when it is. It's not moving very much, but it is detectable by a normal person.

Nope, my wrist is completely stationary when I use my mouse. Don't tell me you're one of those people who has to make huge sweeping arcs with your arm to use a mouse. Mine never moves more than an inch in any direction. Sounds to me like you don't possess fine motor skills and/or you're a capper.

Re: Glorious PC Master Race

[l0n3s0m3phr34k]

I just picked up a Kensington Scrolling Wheel Trackball, but that Logitech looks way sweeter! Costs 2x, yet I also bet your Logitech will last at least 2x longer than mine...

Re: Glorious PC Master Race

[pslytely psycho]

Walmart (yes, I know...F***ING WALMART? ) sells the M570 for $39, and at least here in Spokane, they even stock them in the store.

Battery life is amazing...I replaced the battery at 16 months because the software said it was getting low, but before there was any noticable loss in range or performance.

And yes, it rocks.

Re: Glorious PC Master Race

[pslytely psycho]

"Nope, my wrist is completely stationary when I use my mouse."

  Bullshit. Unless your wrist is in a fucking cast and even then there will be movement.

35 GB of uncompressed audio?

[Anonymous Coward]

Will someone more aware of the rationale behind this tell me that this is not as retarded as it sounds?

Re: 35 GB of uncompressed audio?

[Anonymous Coward]

It was so that lower spec PCs can run it.

Re:35 GB of uncompressed audio?

[Shinobi]

It was claimed that uncompressing the audio would tie up an entire core. The large amount is also because they stupidly install all languages at once, even if you select a specific language at installation time.

Re:35 GB of uncompressed audio?

[Anonymous Coward]

Will someone more aware of the rationale behind this tell me that this is not as retarded as it sounds?

"Respawn Entertainment, the game's developer, claims the uncompressed audio was included for the benefit of slower PCs. "A two-core machine would dedicate a huge chunk of one core to just decompressing audio," says Richard Baker, Respawn's Lead Engineer. "We couldn't dedicate those resources to audio." The Xbox One decodes audio in hardware, so it has no such limitation."

Re: 35 GB of uncompressed audio?

[AlphaWolf_HK]

That doesn't make any sense. Why not offer an install option to decompress the audio if that is the case?

I could see them wanting lossless audio, but FLAC isn't very computationally expensive, and fuck we have so many cores these days you could just dedicate one of them to this and only this and you wouldn't lose anything. It is also quite literally impossible to improve audio quality beyond 48/16 FLAC if you have normal human ears, and it costs all of nothing to implement.

Re:35 GB of uncompressed audio?

[sven_eee]

"A two-core machine would dedicate a huge chunk of one core to just decompressing audio,"
Maybe they should use a better suited codec/compression, there are so many to choose from these days.

Re:35 GB of uncompressed audio?

[Anonymous Coward]

Will someone more aware of the rationale behind this tell me that this is not as retarded as it sounds?

"Respawn Entertainment, the game's developer, claims the uncompressed audio was included for the benefit of slower PCs. "A two-core machine would dedicate a huge chunk of one core to just decompressing audio," says Richard Baker, Respawn's Lead Engineer. "We couldn't dedicate those resources to audio." The Xbox One decodes audio in hardware, so it has no such limitation."

Good thing disk I/O doesn't take any processing power!

Re: 35 GB of uncompressed audio?

[Anonymous Coward]

The average machine DOESN'T have abundant cores to be able to sacrifice one to audio. The average home gaming machine has 2-4 cores. The game is not well optimised at this point and is extremely taxing on even good machines, why sacrifice more performance when the least stressed component (disk space) is an abundant resource even on most of the worst specced machines.

Re:35 GB of uncompressed audio?

[DrXym]

So what they claw back from the CPU overhead of decoding MP3, they lose by hogging the IO and increased memory use (and paging). Sounds a pretty weak rationalisation really. Besides, if it really were an issue for dual core machines, then they could decode and cache the audio on those machines rather than inflicting this stupid overhead on every machine.

Re:35 GB of uncompressed audio?

[Cley Faye]

It's not like some OS have difficulties dealing with large I/O operations, freezing processes in the meantime.

Re:35 GB of uncompressed audio?

[Anonymous Coward]

It is as retarded as it sounds. There is absolutely no justification for it in this is this day and age. Using look ahead decompression and caching would be a net equal, or perhaps a smidgeon higher CPU usage. It means they are in effect wasting DMA bandwidth and CPU cache by streaming uncompressed files.

I'm a DSP guy by trade, and it's one thing that's obvious - game programmers don't know how to do sound properly.

They continue to insist on driving audio by the "main" game engine thread (see Valve's games with looping audio and stutters when things get busy). Or even when they dedicate a thread, they continue to use a push model for sound - when almost all modern audio APIs have agreed that a callback based model is the "correct" way. (The notable exception being OSS which is broken for this reason).

The pro-audio guys have pretty much nailed how you do low latency high priority audio, and the game programmers continue to get it wrong.

Re:35 GB of uncompressed audio?

[Arker]

Yeah, it's as retarded as it sounds.

Official explanation is that older machines were using too much CPU decoding the audio. In this case the fix could be worse than the problem, because now you run the risk of saturating disk and memory IO. Frying pan, fire, hah.

Might have been wise to shop around for codec/decoder combinations that worked properly instead.

Re:35 GB of uncompressed audio?

[fatp]

Make it as bloated as possilbe

Re: 35 GB of uncompressed audio?

[marcello_dl]

>>(35GB of uncompressed audio)
> It was so that lower spec PCs can run it.
OMG have you thought your answer through? that would be effective only for a PC which is powerful enough to manage the graphics and engine and does not spare the cycles for audio.

Given that a 166mhz pc from twenty years ago effortlessly decoded mp3s in realtime, that in the meantime people have improved decoders, encoders, formats that audio playing is parallelizable, that uncompressed audio requires uncompressed IO, I think "aliens wanted that" is a better explanation. The best of course being that a 45gb game is less piratable than a 10gb one.

Re: 35 GB of uncompressed audio?

[JazzLad]

Spoken like a non-gamer. My space on my SSD is my bottleneck, why should I have to use a slower HDD just because MS thinks gaming rigs are slow?

Re: 35 GB of uncompressed audio?

[O('_')O_Bush]

"least stressed component (disk space) is an abundant resource even on most of the worst specced machines."

Welcome to 2010 and later, when most mid-high end gaming rigs have a large HDD for storing miscellaneous stuff, and a small SSD for the OS and game installs. Or are running off SSDs only.

48 GB is unacceptable.

Re:35 GB of uncompressed audio?

[Anonymous Coward]

And ALSA as well, and some of the Windows audio APIs.

No, ALSA is callback based and out of the various APIs I've tried is the one that gets it right (lets you choose your scheduling granularity and how you organise your DSP threads). Windows, yes, they have finally come around though with their recent APIs.

it is a myth that the "push model" cannot have low latency.

How do you know when your data will be output? What happens if something gets scheduling priority between when you try to push and the queueing into the audio ring buffer?

No, the push model is broken - as is the stupid insistence that "everything is a file" that OSS uses.

Re:35 GB of uncompressed audio?

[vipw]

That's the claim, but the probable truth is that it's intentional bloat to reduce piracy.

Re:35 GB of uncompressed audio?

[Opportunist]

Watch for the rip that replaces all the audio files with 0 byte empty sound files...

C'mon, that'd be the lamest idea in anti-piracy since always-online.

Re:35 GB of uncompressed audio?

[Opportunist]

My guess would be that they could not use the same compression codec used on XBox due to licensing issues, found that out only briefly before release date and didn't have time to redo it for the PC version and all they could get done in time was to pump the uncompressed audio files out.

Re: 35 GB of uncompressed audio?

[Narishma]

It's not Microsoft.

Re:35 GB of uncompressed audio?

[Gadget_Guy]

That's the claim, but the probable truth is that it's intentional bloat to reduce piracy.

Considering that both the pirated and legitimate versions of the game has to be downloaded, how would forcing it to be a large download prevent piracy? It would make things harder to distribute the pirated version on optical media, but who does that these days?

Re: 35 GB of uncompressed audio?

[Gadget_Guy]

Some people's gaming rigs are slow - or at least slower than yours. The alternative to requiring that you use an HDD is to increase the minimum specs so that people with slower computers are prevented from being able to play the game at all.

Why should other people have to suffer because you decided to make the trade-off between speed and disk space?

Re: 35 GB of uncompressed audio?

[obarthelemy]

Spoken like someone who thinks his situation is everyone's. I know a lot of players with very under-specced rigs. And no SSD.

Re: 35 GB of uncompressed audio?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not Microsoft you imbecile. It's developed by Respawn which an independent studio and published by EA through their partners program. They have a deal with MS to make it exclusive for exactly one title. A Titanfall 2 would most likely be on both platforms (PS4 and XB1) and would not necessarily even be published by EA.

Re: 35 GB of uncompressed audio?

[Anonymous Coward]

Not to mention it's an always online game with server authentication for which no game server is publicly available.

Re: 35 GB of uncompressed audio?

[Nemyst]

Not saying that they're absolutely right, but there are a few elements to keep in mind:
-While playing back a single FLAC (or another lossless format) isn't too expensive, games aren't music players. When you have 128 FLACs playing back at the same time, the dynamics change.
-The game's minimum spec includes dual-core CPUs. You can't dedicate an entire core to sound in that situation, yet I doubt they wanted to specifically code their engine to behave differently for dual-cores.

Now, I also heard that their sound assets were particularly inefficient (ie. repeated sounds, looping sounds being repeated multiple times in the track, etc.), so that might also account for some of the size.

Re:35 GB of uncompressed audio?

[Nemyst]

Huh? Developer: Respawn. Publisher: EA. Only thing Microsoft does is handle the servers, because EA uses Azure. But don't let that get in the way of some nice Microsoft trolling, eh?

Re:35 GB of uncompressed audio?

[Nemyst]

That's sadly a byproduct of how game engines are developed, I'm afraid. For the most part, game engines originate from graphics engine (so just graphics and then stuff tacked onto it), which means the vast majority of programmers working on the engine will be either generalist programmers or graphics programmers. In both cases, it's unlikely that they'll know how to deal with audio in any real capacity (I know I don't), so they'll use the same model that graphics uses: pushing commands.

Now, I'm sure that the larger devs have dedicated sound engineers, but I'm not sure just how much leeway they have with designing (and most likely, scrapping and completely redoing) the sound engine. It's also likely that their bosses will come from either a managerial background or a generalist programming or graphics programming background. Game development could use more specialists and needs to give them the flexibility they need.

Re:35 GB of uncompressed audio?

[fa2k]

The gains from not compressing are probably negated by the disk I/O latency caused by not being able to cache the gigabytes of audio content or the memory usage due to keeping it in RAM.

[I'm all for lossles audio, but they could at least have done FLAC and saved half the space]

Re: 35 GB of uncompressed audio?

[ultranova]

When you have 128 FLACs playing back at the same time, the dynamics change.

You can't stream 128 uncompressed audio streams from the HDD simultaneously, which means they have to be preloaded, which means you could just as well store them in compressed form on HDD and uncompress during loading.

Re:35 GB of uncompressed audio?

[ultranova]

Only thing Microsoft does is handle the servers,

And Xbox One. It wouldn't particularly surprise me if this was a backroom deal to intentionally bloat the game to make it look heavier, and by extension the XO more powerful.

Re: 35 GB of uncompressed audio?

[smash]

Because 2 TB hard drives are about 130 dollars.

Re: 35 GB of uncompressed audio?

[Kremmy]

SSDs are great but if you're not using spinners for your bulk data storage you're probably starved for space and spent too much money. I pity the fool that's running off of SSDs only and trying to work with any kind of media, especially PC games.

Re: 35 GB of uncompressed audio?

[Kremmy]

Same reason you're wasting 35GB on your Operating System install.

Re: 35 GB of uncompressed audio?

[CronoCloud]

Filthy PC Gamer Bourgeosie! Instead of wasting money on an SSD, you should have got that HDD. For the large price premium you pay for SSD, I'd take disk space over speed any day of the week and twice on Sundays.

But that's Filthy PC Gamers for you, wasting money on hardware they could spend on games, and using craptastic Windows.

Re:35 GB of uncompressed audio?

[Kremmy]

push vs. callback is a false dichotomy, like object-oriented and procedural. it doesn't make a damn bit of difference what style your user facing APIs are, given the software stack they're piled on top of. You're working through so many abstraction layers to get ANYTHING done on a computer, people have forgotten that they're nowhere near close enough to the metal for your pretty-princess syntax arguments to have anything to do with the problem.

Re: 35 GB of uncompressed audio?

[khellendros1984]

There's a trade-off that you took: lower capacity and higher cost per capacity for higher speed. For under $100 (or equivalent amounts in the currency of your choice) you can add a large spinning-platter drive and have the best of both worlds.

I'm not going to argue that 32GB of uncompressed audio isn't stupid (because it really, truly is; the dev could've included a 5GB option to use compressed audio, or something). What I *will* argue is that not everyone chose the same trade-off that you did, and you've got the option to take both roads at the same time.

Re: 35 GB of uncompressed audio?

[khellendros1984]

That reminds me of the situation about 15 years ago. I had a 6.4GB drive, and Baldur's Gate had a minimum install of 300MB (with annoying swaps between the 5 CDs the game came on). The game took up about 5% of the space on my drive (similar to the situation you've described). The difference: You can get 3TB of storage for under $150 (close to 5x your current space), where paying the same amount in 1999 wouldn't cover even doubling the space I had. In short, space is cheap. Anyhow, are you using that 35GB for something more important right now?

Re: 35 GB of uncompressed audio?

[karnal]

Buy a bigger SSD. Or use a faster HDD for those "less used apps" (I know, Windows kinda sucks at this, can't dynamically move a lot of apps). My recent SSD purchase was going back and forth between a 256GB and a 480GB precisely for this reason; I had a 300gb Velociraptor that was @ around 225 before I bought.

I went with a 480GB because I decided in the end, sacrificing space and having to shuffle apps or reload windows was not an option. Once this gets close to full, I'll probably buy Crucial M500 960GB to replace it, and have the 480GB as a scratch/additional apps storage.

Don't get me wrong - I understand space costs money. Honestly - if you have a gaming rig and are buying Titanfall for whatever the price is - invest in larger fast storage as well.

Re: 35 GB of uncompressed audio?

[Nyder]

>>(35GB of uncompressed audio)
> It was so that lower spec PCs can run it.
OMG have you thought your answer through? that would be effective only for a PC which is powerful enough to manage the graphics and engine and does not spare the cycles for audio.

Given that a 166mhz pc from twenty years ago effortlessly decoded mp3s in realtime, that in the meantime people have improved decoders, encoders, formats that audio playing is parallelizable, that uncompressed audio requires uncompressed IO, I think "aliens wanted that" is a better explanation. The best of course being that a 45gb game is less piratable than a 10gb one.

Except the pirates will compress the audio for quicker downloads.

Re:35 GB of uncompressed audio?

[jtownatpunk.net]

That's just fucking stupid. That guy's a "lead engineer"?

Re: 35 GB of uncompressed audio?

[AmiMoJo]

It's probably a latency issue. If you have a lot of audio to mix adding in a decompression stage to multiple streams adds noticeable delay. The usual way of getting around this is to store sounds that need low latency uncompressed and stuff like background music or radio comms that can tolerate delay compressed.

My guess would be that they wanted to simplify the audio subsystem and didn't care about the user's hard drive space, do just went with decompressing everything.

Re:35 GB of uncompressed audio?

[AmiMoJo]

Most pirate games come with compressed audio that decompresses during installation. This isn't going to stop anything. In fact it makes the pirate version more attractive - smaller download and probably smaller install as they will have fixed the need to install every language during the cracking stage.

Re:35 GB of uncompressed audio?

[AmiMoJo]

Not much. Disk I/O is mostly DMA, never touching or loading the CPU down. There is a bit of memory bandwidth lost.

Re:35 GB of uncompressed audio?

[SuricouRaven]

I've seen a few theories:
- Intentional anti-piracy bloat. Make the game so huge it isn't practical to download.
- Internal politics and policy ruled out all possible codecs. Titanfall was developed under contract from Microsoft, they probably had a 'no open source' clause.
- Rushed development leaving no time to test how audio codecs would interact with everything else on a highly-loaded system.
- Plain lazy incompetence.

Re:35 GB of uncompressed audio?

[rsilvergun]

Decompressing the audio on the fly hit the frame rate too hard. This is probably because the XBoxOne and many PCs don't have hardware accelerated sound. I run off my mobo's sound, for example. Yeah, I could do better, but I'd rather take that $100 bucks for a decent sound card and step up to the next graphics card, and I think a lot of people do....

Re:35 GB of uncompressed audio?

[Dutch Gun]

It is as retarded as it sounds. There is absolutely no justification for it in this is this day and age. Using look ahead decompression and caching would be a net equal, or perhaps a smidgeon higher CPU usage. It means they are in effect wasting DMA bandwidth and CPU cache by streaming uncompressed files.

I'm a DSP guy by trade, and it's one thing that's obvious - game programmers don't know how to do sound properly.

They continue to insist on driving audio by the "main" game engine thread (see Valve's games with looping audio and stutters when things get busy). Or even when they dedicate a thread, they continue to use a push model for sound - when almost all modern audio APIs have agreed that a callback based model is the "correct" way. (The notable exception being OSS which is broken for this reason).

The pro-audio guys have pretty much nailed how you do low latency high priority audio, and the game programmers continue to get it wrong.

As a professional game audio programmer, let me say that you're painting with a pretty large brush when you say that "game programmers don't know how to do sound." No offense intended, but you really shouldn't try to sound like an expert on game audio about unless you've worked on a AAA game engine. There are demands that games place on hardware systems that you really wouldn't understand. It's not like a DAW system where you can devote nearly 100% of the system resources to processing the audio. Yes, of course there are similarities, but the constraints and requirements are very different.

First of all, unless they're absolutely retarded, no audio programmer would push any sort of audio processing on the main thread. Sorry, but it just wouldn't, and isn't, happening. I don't even have to look at the source code to know that, because I know these guys aren't utter morons or incompetents.

Secondly, if you're a DSP guy, you're largely working at a level that game audio programmers do NOT typically work at - that is, the DSP and mixing level. Most game engines use professional third-party mixing/decoding engines with excellent, highly tuned code developed by specialists over many years of work, and are every bit as optimized as pro audio engines. Having used FMOD in our own game, I know it can decode and mix real-time compressed data in dozens of streams simultaneously, applying lowpass, highpass, reverb, echo, etc to them, and still only take up a small percentage of a single core. I believe Valve licenses the Miles Sound System, but I don't know for certain that this is the engine used in question.

That being said, I agree that leaving audio uncompressed seems unnecessary, at least for technical reasons. Having said that, I don't like to question the programmers judgment because I'm not there working on the project, and don't have all the fact. I have some recent experience with this, having recently shipped a game with a new, custom game engine I wrote that sits on top of the low-level FMOD mixing engine. We decided to keep all our samples compressed in memory, and were pretty impressed with the overall performance.

MP3 was used for most samples, as it has the most efficient decoder, and Vorbis was used when required for either seamless looping or multichannel audio. Additionally, each voice also had lowpass and highpass filtering performed on it. Dynamically calculated reverb settings and a custom echo filter I wrote was applied to the mix as well, plus the overhead of basic mixing operations, of which I used the highest quality 5-point spline-based mixing variation. We found that, on average, audio processing tended to take between 10 and 40 percent of a single core on a typical mid-grade PC (of about two years ago), depending on the level of activity going on at the time, with the vast majority of the CPU time used for audio decoding. Overall, it was pretty impressive to see all that being done in real-time without substantially impacting the rest of the game.

The real constraint in o

Re:35 GB of uncompressed audio?

[Billly Gates]

... or having to use a sllooow mechanical drive instead of a fast SSD because of the bloated space requirements. I own 2 238gb SSD's and this is game sadly is going on neither. I need to put VM's on them for VMWare and they up over 100 gbs before I even load a game on them.

I hope the market is not going this route for piracy or laziness reasons.

Re:35 GB of uncompressed audio?

[TwoBit]

FYI: EA strongly suggested that Respawn compress their audio, and offered the engineering to do it, but Respawn said no.

Re:35 GB of uncompressed audio?

[Dutch Gun]

That's sadly a byproduct of how game engines are developed, I'm afraid. For the most part, game engines originate from graphics engine (so just graphics and then stuff tacked onto it), which means the vast majority of programmers working on the engine will be either generalist programmers or graphics programmers. In both cases, it's unlikely that they'll know how to deal with audio in any real capacity (I know I don't), so they'll use the same model that graphics uses: pushing commands.

Now, I'm sure that the larger devs have dedicated sound engineers, but I'm not sure just how much leeway they have with designing (and most likely, scrapping and completely redoing) the sound engine. It's also likely that their bosses will come from either a managerial background or a generalist programming or graphics programming background. Game development could use more specialists and needs to give them the flexibility they need.

Audio programming specialists like me are rare, but not unheard of. For most games, though, using a commercially available 3rd party engine is not only sufficient but probably preferred. So, the "audio programming" one is likely to do is mostly a case of resource management and integration with game development tools. It's the same reasoning as to how most games don't really require a custom-built game engine anymore - it's probably best left to the most specialized of games.

In my case, I was able to build a custom audio engine from scratch (yes, throwing away our old one) on top of the low-level audio API FMOD provides, but I think that's probably fairly rare nowadays, and for fairly good reasons. Our game was massive in scope, and had some pretty specific audio requirements and constraints, so it made sense to do this. I'd be pretty surprised if Titanfall had the sort of extreme requirements that we had, though, so they could probably get away with doing this. The fact that they could even fit all the uncompressed audio in a reasonable space demonstrates that there actually wasn't a lot of audio to begin with, at least not compared to the monster I was working on.

BTW, pushing commands works just fine for audio engines. In fact, it's the only sane way to do things at the high-level API, because that lets you efficiently and safely queue commands across a thread boundary. You're probably talking about push-vs-pull model audio processing, which is a complete non-issue, because game programmers almost never get down to that level of detail in the audio code. That's entirely handled by the low-level audio engine.

Re: 35 GB of uncompressed audio?

[Billly Gates]

You know many of us have this little thing called a budget. The landlord, student loans, bank, exwife, kids, food, gas all take higher precedence. I bought my second 238 gb Samsung PRo and I am already having buyers guilt as I am looking at bills due.

I have VM's for work on these drivers that are hundreds of gigs. A 50 gig game is frankly unacceptable nor is loading audio tracks and maps on the backup mechanical driver. Star wars the old republic had a level )corella) that takes 4 minutes to load on the mechanical drive and the fact some VMs had to be moved to the mechanical is why I bought the second drive.

I also still have a 2010 era phenom II x6 (at least 6 cores) and only a modest upgrade to an ATI 7850. This was all due to financial constraints which I feel I overspent heavily for this as it is :-(

I am not alone as 40% of all new jobs created are at Walmart, McDonalds, dollar stores, etc according to statistics. I am thankful I make more than $10/hr as these poor saps but they are all competing with me for jobs as they get A+ got to night schools for certs etc.

Not everyone makes $60,000 a year and is single and has their student loans paid off. If you are this congrats. But you are in a bubble and saying purchase more is ignorant of what resources other people have.

XP is still popular as many who have 10 year old computers are the ones who work at Walmart, barely make it each month, or live off social security retirement.

Re: 35 GB of uncompressed audio?

[Billly Gates]

They are amazing if you have levels that used to take 3 minutes or more to load.

I admit I bought some for games but I have real work VM's for vmware workstation as well. There is no way I could go back to learning exchange where I need to setup a domain server, an exchange cas, exchange owa, exchange mailbox, and 2 clients with another vm running server 2003 acting as a router to another subnet etc.

Starting each one up on a mechanical driver takes about 10 minutes before they are even ready. Want to call it the night. Wait many times longer for each one to shutdown. Wooa if you shutdown more than 2 at a time as the disk spins freaking mad and then takes 5x as long when you just need to go to bed.

Re:35 GB of uncompressed audio?

[Dutch Gun]

I take it you've never looked into what a DAW has to do? You know, the ones where there is realtime feedback of spectral envelopes, realtime compressor displays etc.

They have the same basic premise as games (low latency process input, compute output, display output with synchronised audio). I'll grant that games place a heavier burden on GPU resources and non-realtime threads as compared to low latency audio. However, I won't agree they are fundamentally different regimes.

I never said they were fundamentally different - as you indicate, there are many similarities. In fact, game audio programming has been moving closer and closer to what DAWs are doing. I was trying to emphasize the main difference was in extreme resource constraints, and for game programmers, it tends to color everything they do. You were scoffing at the idea that they couldn't afford to take up a core for decompression, and I just don't think you understand the significance of that, when DAWs can very well assume they'll most likely be running on a high-end workstation, and can assume they own nearly 100% of the computer resources for processing audio. It's not unreasonable to assume that, for all practical purposes, game audio is about a decade behind what DAWs can do, since that's about the equivalent amount of processing power they're allocated. We have to make a lot of tradeoffs to keep the game running at a reasonably fast, glitch-free frame rate.

The audio part of the game industry rotates around the rotting corpses of push model APIs that should have died years ago. Stop propping them up!

I mean, you think FMOD provides a _low level API_ and that you were lucky to create something on top of that. Like you said, no offense eh!

I'm curious, to which APIs are you referring exactly? Most of the modern audio engine APIs I've looked at recently use pull models to retrieve data. Or are you talking about system level mixer APIs?

Oh, and no, I don't take offense when people say they know better than the professionals who have spent their entire lives making games. It sort of comes with the territory, for whatever reason. ;-)

Re:35 GB of uncompressed audio?

[viperidaenz]

Except in reality it makes the XO pale in comparison to a PC.

Re:35 GB of uncompressed audio?

[viperidaenz]

Maybe that's the plan, make piracy more attractive so more people do it. That gives the lobbyists more lobbying power.

Add to it the offputting multiplayer so you don't need online access to enjoy it (good bye DRM) and the poor performance on the console to make the PC version more attractive.

Re:35 GB of uncompressed audio?

[Anubis IV]

Someone should hurry and tell them that they built their massively successful and hugely moneymaking product "wrong".

(sarcasm aside, I agree with you and what you're saying, though it's hard to argue that they should care about getting it right when it's clear that, on the whole, it doesn't matter to their custoemrs)

Re:35 GB of uncompressed audio?

[viperidaenz]

Maybe they needed to support lots of audio channels, like 128 of them. How does your computer handle decoding and mixing 128 MP3's at the same time?

Re: 35 GB of uncompressed audio?

[viperidaenz]

1% CPU, multiplied by 128 channels = 128% CPU usage.

Re: 35 GB of uncompressed audio?

[gmueckl]

40GB is going to be the start of the future. With every new generation of consoles so far the size of the game data increases *a lot* because the new generation of console hardware is capable of handling that and competition with other game titles required that the hardware gets pushed to the limit. Get used to it!

Re: 35 GB of uncompressed audio?

[JazzLad]

I have a HDD too, my point was it is slower loading off the HDD than the SSD & it isn't big because it is super-awesome, it is big because they wanted to market a new game to older systems but didn't want to take the absolutely trivial steps to have uncompressed as an option for decent spec'd rigs (or even have you only download/install the languages you want) rather than make everyone dedicate an obscene amount of space to one game. It's just sloppy.

Re: 35 GB of uncompressed audio?

[JazzLad]

That's a fair statement, I did over-state my point - most gamers (not people that casually play some games on a computer they happen to own, but people that built a box specifically for gaming - my rig is nothing to brag about at 3.5 years old, but it does have a decent video card & modest SSD) I know do not have abundant space *for games* as they are loading their OS & games off SSD while using the HDD for media. At 48GB, it is 3 times the size of my next largest game and the reason isn't because it is better, it is because they didn't compress their audio.

Anyway, your point was perfectly valid and I should have chosen my words better :)

Re: 35 GB of uncompressed audio?

[JazzLad]

Karnal's point about if I can afford a dedicated rig + buy AAA titles when they come out, I can afford a bigger SSD is completely valid - the key there was if. I do have a(n older) dedicated rig, but I don't buy games until they hit a Steam sale for the very reasons (most of them, I am still married) you mentioned above. I was not weighing in an opinion because I am annoyed about how I'm going to install the game today, but if I ever do nab it on a sale (I think it's Origin only, so I likely will never play this particular title), it will be a PITA. My complaint was only about the short-sightedness of the developer delivering an inferior (quantifiably) product to pander lo low-end machines when they could have easily offered an option, or just had the user download the language(s) they wanted to use. As is, I replied in a rush and several people (rightfully) called me out on my incomplete thought :)

Re:35 GB of uncompressed audio?

[spire3661]

Its so the game can run on machines like my nephew's Celeron 1610 with ATI 7750 (GDDR5). I built it as an experiment in low power gaming last year. He says the game runs GREAT. The devs said that if they used compressed audio, dual core machines would churn an entire core on decoding the audio.

Re: 35 GB of uncompressed audio?

[spire3661]

240 GB Crucial M500 SSD is $119 on amazon right now. $.50/GB for future tech storage. Stop complaining or use HDDs.

Re: 35 GB of uncompressed audio?

[Redmancometh]

Just saying I have a lot of trouble not filling in fecal puns for every serious/constructive comment you put on the site.

Re: 35 GB of uncompressed audio?

[mjwx]

That doesn't make any sense. Why not offer an install option to decompress the audio if that is the case?

I could see them wanting lossless audio, but FLAC isn't very computationally expensive, and fuck we have so many cores these days you could just dedicate one of them to this and only this and you wouldn't lose anything. It is also quite literally impossible to improve audio quality beyond 48/16 FLAC if you have normal human ears, and it costs all of nothing to implement.

Yes, but you're asking audiophiles to make sense.

It's like leaving Lindsey Lohan a line of coke and asking her not to snort it.

Re: 35 GB of uncompressed audio?

[gmhowell]

Spoken like someone who thinks his situation is everyone's.

I think it's called 'Slashdot Disease'. The symptoms are particular apparent whenever the topic of tablet computers comes up.

Re: 35 GB of uncompressed audio?

[mjwx]

>>(35GB of uncompressed audio)
> It was so that lower spec PCs can run it.
OMG have you thought your answer through? that would be effective only for a PC which is powerful enough to manage the graphics and engine and does not spare the cycles for audio.

Given that a 166mhz pc from twenty years ago effortlessly decoded mp3s in realtime, that in the meantime people have improved decoders, encoders, formats that audio playing is parallelizable, that uncompressed audio requires uncompressed IO, I think "aliens wanted that" is a better explanation. The best of course being that a 45gb game is less piratable than a 10gb one.

Except the pirates will compress the audio for quicker downloads.

And that it's pretty much an excursively multiplayer game, making piracy largely irrelevant.

Re: 35 GB of uncompressed audio?

[O('_')O_Bush]

That is probably so, but Titanfall isn't a game of the future. It is a neat game with a neat concept, but dated technology behind it. Especially so if it has 35 GB of uncompressed audio (meaning the rest of the game fits within 13 GB).

Re: 35 GB of uncompressed audio?

[karnal]

Oh, believe me - I always thought "Man, if I make (x) amount of money, I'll be SET" - but everyone's finances are their own. Back when I would spend money as quick as it would come in, I would have one of the better upper class rigs of my gaming group. Now? Core2Quad with a GTX280. Why? I have other priorities as well; paying off all of my debt is becoming a BIG priority even though I'm years away from retirement.

My point should have been more to - if you are into gaming and can afford to shell out the bucks for the big name games, then you probably have some income that you can save or just outright spend on a larger drive, spinny or SSD. Hence, buy a bigger SSD or HD. Simple solution. If not, then don't buy a game that has such large requirements and save up until you can.

Besides - even if you don't buy a larger drive, well... then offload some games? There's solutions; potentially sub-optimal for what you want to do. At this point it isn't like the creator/publisher is going to go back and re-do all of the sound files, right?

Re: 35 GB of uncompressed audio?

[karnal]

Definitely understood; I know money's always tight. Wasn't necessarily trying to come across overbearing, but if you know the requirements going into it - then it's a choice, even if the devs bloat the game in ways we may not like.

Re: 35 GB of uncompressed audio?

[AlphaWolf_HK]

No that guy is still around, and still posts that stuff. I'm really not sure what his deal is, or why he targeted me in particular.

Re: 35 GB of uncompressed audio?

[AlphaWolf_HK]

Which is fine and all, until you consider that most games only use one or two cores anyways (typically just heavy use on one core with very little use on a second one.) If you have a quad core machine, two of those cores are going to be mostly idle unless something else is running in the background.

Re: 35 GB of uncompressed audio?

[khellendros1984]

Just make a symlink/junction and run it off a RAM drive. You can just dedicate half your 128GB memory to it and have still have 14GB or so free. Yeah, you have to wait half a minute to stream it from your NAS to the ramdrive, big whoop. If you don't have enough ram or a fast enough hard drive, drop down to a dual or triple SLI setup instead, n00b. :D

If you're going to do all that, you're better off causing an inverse feedback loop in the chroniton resonator coils and reversing the polarity of the tachyon emitters; otherwise you'll overload the power junctions and cause a data cascade failure in the isolinear relays, and you certainly don't want that.

Re: 35 GB of uncompressed audio?

[Redmancometh]

Oh I just realized his Alpha has an i instead of an l. My bad.

Re: 35 GB of uncompressed audio?

[adiposity]

Don't worry, the pirated version will have this option.

Re:35 GB of uncompressed audio?

[GuB-42]

Probably laziness.
I think the idea is that decoding audio takes maybe like 2% of one core, which isn't much. However, if you have 50 samples playing at the same time, you get to 100%. There are plenty of ways to deal with this problem, like using caches, compressing long samples (BGM, voice acting, ...) and leaving stuff like gunshots and footsteps uncompressed. But doing this would require extra work, possibly including re-validation, new licenses, etc...
So their solution was probably to simply replace the XBox compressed files with their uncompressed equivalents and call it a day.

I don't believe in the anti-piracy theory. Crackers will compress the audio in their release, as they have done for decades. In fact, putting large games into small packages is something they are really good at.
If you want a conspiracy theory, you can say that they were paid by HDD/SSD manufacturers. This is nuts but it certainly makes more sense.

Re: 35 GB of uncompressed audio?

[triffid_98]

Sadly, the reason more people don't go (or have problems with) SSD has nothing to do with SSDs themselves, it has to do with Microsoft's crappy software.

When you have an OS that can consume 30+GB all by itself and then create suites of applications that can only be installed on the boot (C) drive, the idea of having a small SSD + a large spinny disk completely falls apart.

I could make the same argument regarding 4K displays. Nothing wrong with the technology itself, but now try using a small screen 4K display (ex: laptop) under any flavor of Windows. Are you enjoying your 2 point system font?

Re: 35 GB of uncompressed audio?

[Kremmy]

16GB is pretty reasonable (though it kinda hurts to say that). My workstations usually run a mix of Windows 7 and Ubuntu, but I started in the days when you could bring up the full Mac OS GUI from a floppy disk so it's all pain to see how far and wide things have bloated out.

Re: 35 GB of uncompressed audio?

[Frobnicator]

I'm not going to argue that 32GB of uncompressed audio isn't stupid (because it really, truly is; the dev could've included a 5GB option to use compressed audio, or something). What I *will* argue is that not everyone chose the same trade-off that you did, and you've got the option to take both roads at the same time.

Yet another who failed to RTFA.

The article describes how they found some bugs on low-end systems very late in the development process. Late enough that trying to fix the audio system would have pushed the release date back by weeks or months.

Rather than push the date back, they decided to ship decompressed audio as a workaround to the decompressor bug. Give it a few months and they will likely have a patch that addresses the issue and removes the uncompressed audio. These days 32GB is not much of a difference on a hard drive and anyone who actually want to play it if they don't have that much space available should easily be able to free it up.

Re: 35 GB of uncompressed audio?

[khellendros1984]

There were *4* "TFAs". I read two of them (although 50% is, of course, still a failing grade). You seem to have missed the core of my post, which was that a larger download and install isn't as big of a problem as other posters have been making it out as. Also, as you (and apparently the article) pointed out, it's likely to be a temporary issue.

I stand by my opinion that the developer took the worst possible route; I'm not a fan of forcing release of an inferior product due to an arbitrarily-specified release date. If you really want to point out how wrong someone is, pick someone further up the thread with their doom and gloom about how terrible the developer is for not taking their tiny SSD drives into account.

Re:35 GB of uncompressed audio?

[nhat11]

If I had points Gadget_Guy. +1

Re: 35 GB of uncompressed audio?

[Kremmy]

Somehow I think the problem may be on your end, bro.

Re: 35 GB of uncompressed audio?

[Kremmy]

Yeah, and even if it's 15GB, that leaves a vanishingly small amount of space on the hypothetical tablet. It's simply absurd that this is being presented as anything other than something to point and laugh at.

Re: 35 GB of uncompressed audio?

[TangoMargarine]

You have 128GB of RAM?!?

Re: 35 GB of uncompressed audio?

[TangoMargarine]

So you aren't running a modern OS like Windows 8? A fresh install is currently under 20GB,

Heh. I can do a fresh install of a full desktop distro of Linux in like 6 gigs or less. And that includes an office suite. What is your Windows box up to with that?

Re: 35 GB of uncompressed audio?

[TangoMargarine]

One problem with the Slashdot demographics is that apparently 90% of our commenters edit uncompressed 1080p video while playing Crysis 3 on the other monitor. Because I'm curious what other possible use you could have for more than 8-16GB of RAM...although apparently "having to" run 6 10GB VMs at the same time--at home?!--is becoming popular.

And a 50" monitor?! Do you sit 10 ten feet away from your screen?

It's like 12 XVGA monitors with no bezels

That right there is damnably First World Problems.

Re: 35 GB of uncompressed audio?

[smash]

Correct. I'm in Australia. It's standard.

Re: 35 GB of uncompressed audio?

[Bing Tsher E]

Which suites of applications from Microsoft can only be installed on the boot (C) drive?

I was wondering about that...

[John Pfeiffer]

Whatever the rationale for the uncompressed audio, I've got a 3.20GHz hexacore, and it has trouble sometimes. A couple rounds I've had the audio completely cock up from what I can only describe as it trying to play too many sounds at once...then just playing broken bits...then completely breaking down, requiring me to tough it out until the audio is reinitialized with the start of the next round.

I'd also like to note that it took me about 45 minutes to download the whole game, and a whole hour and a half for the installation...most of which was spent extracting the audio.

That said, the game is abso-fucking-lutely amazing and I love it. I need to fix the cooler on my other 6870 so I can put it back in, SLI the suckers, and turn the graphics up to 11. :D

Re:I was wondering about that...

[thegarbz]

Why do you need hardware acceleration for something that is so computationally insignificant?

Re:I was wondering about that...

[thegarbz]

I wonder how much your audio problems are the result of having to load the audio files and juggle them around in RAM? Where's it get the samples from? I hope not load them on the fly, and at the same time I hope not pre-load them.

There are many cases where compression can actually speed up things as reading and writing huge data is more expensive than doing a bit of maths on the much smaller result.

Re:I was wondering about that...

[danknight48]

A couple rounds I've had the audio completely cock up from what I can only describe as it trying to play too many sounds at once...then just playing broken bits...then completely breaking down, requiring me to tough it out until the audio is reinitialized with the start of the next round.

Sounds like the audio is running on a separate thread.
Most likely, the main audio parts are loaded at launch. The thread will then destroy and load current audio while the game is running, basically hot swapping.
The reason for the corruption is probably due to failed create/destroy requests, and didnt complete in the required time for the thread.
Either that, or they haven't made it truly thread safe. Could even be a simple case of the audio play request has been made and completed before the audio was destroyed and loaded into memory, hence, casing the corruption in audio playback.

Re:I was wondering about that...

[Mashiki]

So, using onboard sound or a PCIe/PCI soundcard? If it's the first case, it'll most likely be a driver issue. And since most onboard solutions are realtek, you get what you pay for. Complete shit. If it's the latter, you can probably narrow it down to one of three things: Something wrong with the engine/driver. Incorrect PCI/e latency, an extra "feature" of the driver like various DSP modes causing an issue.

Re:I was wondering about that...

[dbIII]

That's a software issue. The last time I had trouble getting enough processing power to decode mp3 files it was because I was using a 586 - I was too much of a cheapskate to get an Intel Pentium 60 to do that task. Even then it was fine in mono.

Re:I was wondering about that...

[Thanosius]

Impressive. It would take me just under 24 hours of constant, full-speed downloading before I'd manage to get 35GB.

Fuck you and your post internet connections! I say this in the nicest way possible of course, but it surprises me how much people under-appreciate what they have in terms of bandwidth.

Re:I was wondering about that...

[Shinobi]

Decompression is, in general terms, computationally insignificant. However, the hardware acceleration support in DX was not for decompression, it was for 3D spatialization and effects. And those are NOT computationally insignificant for interactive scenes, especially not when you have a significant number of audio sources.

Re:I was wondering about that...

[mikael]

It's not simply slurping up a sound file and sending it to the sound card. Audio is post-processed in the same way that textures and graphics are. Effects such as echo (reflection shaders), reverberation, radio communication. There was a previous discussion related to the need for games to need to use segments with both data and execution permission.

Re:I was wondering about that...

[Narishma]

The Xbox One doesn't use the GPU for audio, it has a dedicated DSP for it in the SoC.

Re:I was wondering about that...

[Imrik]

And yet none of those problems are fixed by using uncompressed audio.

Re:I was wondering about that...

[Imrik]

The download was probably quite a bit smaller as the audio was compressed for download, it then had to be uncompressed for the installation.

Re:I was wondering about that...

[noh8rz10]

So, using onboard sound or a PCIe/PCI soundcard?

sound card? 1995 paged you - they want their sound blaster back.

Re:I was wondering about that...

[DocHoncho]

He's right, you can still get sound cards, though given the prevalence of the aforementioned embedded Realtek audio (that is, shit) its uncommon to use them. I'm not really sure what the exact use case for them is, since windows threw the hardware acellerated audio baby out with the Vista bathwater, the hardware is just a shitty DAC, a puny amp and some 3.5mm jacks. The rest is at the mercy of whatever crap drivers the vendor bothers to release.

Killing hardware accelerated audio was just fucking stupid. Sure, my fancy quad core can process that audio signal. But why the hell should it? As if there aren't other things it could be doing besides being a glorified DSP. It can process all those vertices too, but you don't hear anyone rushing off to kill hardware accelerated graphics for ... reasons.

Re:I was wondering about that...

[jones_supa]

And since most onboard solutions are realtek, you get what you pay for. Complete shit.

Complete shit?! May you elaborate? Realtek produces quite damn advanced stuff.

Re:I was wondering about that...

[Kremmy]

These APU kits are all about the reunification of the processing chipsets. It's very similar to 'using the GPU for audio'.

Re:I was wondering about that...

[Kremmy]

Still running a few SoundBlaster Live! cards in various machines, including one in my main for use with a MIDI keyboard that plugs directly into the gameport. It does 5.1 and has a sweet DSP on it, I'll be running these things until they all burn out.

Re:I was wondering about that...

[Narishma]

It's not similar at all. It has dedicated silicon for audio processing that consists of several different processors and is completely separate from the GPU part.
You can learn more about it here: http://www.vgleaks.com/durango...

Re:I was wondering about that...

[CronoCloud]

There is this thing called HDMI audio, let the video card handle it.

Re:I was wondering about that...

[Kremmy]

I'm actually quite surprised to see that it's such a significant chunk of silicon, and can see how that would cause issues on the PC side as I know too many gamers who make due with 'good enough' onboard.

Re:I was wondering about that...

[jones_supa]

What is the problem?

Re:I was wondering about that...

[CronoCloud]

There is this thing called HDMI audio, use it, love it.

Re:I was wondering about that...

[John Pfeiffer]

Yeah, nice try. But I was in the beta too, and the only things this game has in common with CoD is the developer, and that it's an FPS.

And the game was never 32 players. It would have been unplayable. The reason it's 6v6 plus bots-- and really, this is the genius of it --is that they wanted players, the Titan Pilots, to feel special in-universe (By having them surrounded by 'ordinary' infantry) and make them feel completely badass (By making the infantry easy to mow down a squad at a time.) without making actual players take on these other roles.

The other aspect the bots represent is making it so players of any skill level can contribute; you don't have to be able to take out other pilots, you can go around and take out dozens of AI troops instead. It's not as efficient, but it still earns points and XP, and all the weapons have Grunt/Spectre killing challenges.

If there were more than 12 players, Titan combat would be a complete clusterfuck, or they'd have to limit access to the Titans. And who the hell would want to play if they don't get a 6-meter-tall walking death machine?

Again, this goes back to making the players feel special in-universe; They are Titan Pilots. They are Elite Badass Motherfuckers. The AI infantry can be heard saying stuff like "Hey, it's a pilot! About time!" or "Did you see that! That pilot jumped right on the back of that Titan!"

There's more nuance in the Titan cockpit entry sequence than there is in the entirety of any Call of Duty game, so why don't you just stick to telling kids on Xbox Live about how you fucked their mom, you ignorant fuckwit.

Re:I was wondering about that...

[gmueckl]

As far as I can tell the problems aren't the Realtek chips themselves, but some half-assed mainboard integration. The snd-hda-intel driver is full of workarounds for wrongly connected chips. Plus, nobody cares for the quality of the analog audio signal which is generated and amplified on the board. The result is fucking terrible. I can listen to my programs working when I connect my headphones to the onboard audio. At times I was able to tell which stage of the algorithm the GPU was computing from the noise.

Re:I was wondering about that...

[thegarbz]

But none of that changes as a result of compression. What I was saying was computationally insignificant was the decompression of audio samples. Post processing needs to happen one way or the other.

Re:I was wondering about that...

[thegarbz]

Yes but storing uncompressed wave files does not get you away from having to post process.

Piracy prevention?

[thegarbz]

The cynic in me wonders if the retarded idea of using uncompressed audio and not giving you the option to install just a subset such as the language of interest is some way of attempting to prevent piracy.

Maybe someone had the bright idea that people wouldn't bother trying to pirate that much data.

Maybe I'm just jaded.

Re:Piracy prevention?

[Threni]

People will either pirate it as-is, or just compress the audio; another case of making it more desirable than the original version (you won't need 48gigs and it'll sound exactly the same)

Re:Piracy prevention?

[jones_supa]

Pirate groups are known to sometimes work around these issues. In this case they might rip away everything but English and tweak the game to still work. Then they might ship the audio compressed (MP3, for example) and a tool which does the conversion back to RIFF Wave (or whatever the game company is using). During the uncompression, that tool displays some pixel art animation and plays chiptune music, of course. ;)

Re:Piracy prevention?

[thegarbz]

Fiber is becoming the standard,

If you call select fortunate areas in select fortunate cities a standard then by all means. I know people who would breach their monthly download limit just getting this game.

Your type of connection is far from the "standard".

Re:Piracy prevention?

[Anonymous Coward]

Pirate groups are known to sometimes work around these issues. In this case they might rip away everything but English and tweak the game to still work.

If Pirate groups are having to do this kind of cleanup, then they should perhaps look for a job with the manufacturer. Clearly they are in need.

Re:Piracy prevention?

[Anonymous Coward]

ah, but perhaps he is not living in the US, so his statement about fiber becoming standard is actually true.

Re:Piracy prevention?

[Opportunist]

I don't know a lot about content copying, but have compression tools gone out of fashion while I was not looking? I'd guess that even if the game itself was uncompressed, crackers would deliver it RAR'ed.

Re:Piracy prevention?

[Opportunist]

Pirate groups do a lot of necessary cleanup already. For example, they made it possible to play the latest Sim City at release day, something that was not possible when you bought the game instead of copying it.

Re:Piracy prevention?

[__aaqvdr516]

Using 100% of my current daily limit, it would take me 16 days to download this game. Taking into account what my wife and kids use on average daily, it would take over 30 days. I have to bring my PC to a co-workers house to download stuff after a Steam sale is done.

Re:Piracy prevention?

[Kojiro Ganryu Sasaki]

GP is wrong. Even in, say, Sweden, fiber isn't close to be standard. ADSL pretty much IS standard, though.

Re:Piracy prevention?

[Shinobi]

That's not to say that it's rare either. Fibre accounts for roughly a third of all subscriptions for wired internet access here in Sweden. xDSL is a bit over 40%, and cable taking up the slack.

Re:Piracy prevention?

[noh8rz10]

If I want to download using my phone cellular and not incur data charges it would take nine months, also it would preclude any other data use. Frowning face!

Re:Piracy prevention?

[Nyder]

Pirate groups do a lot of necessary cleanup already. For example, they made it possible to play the latest Sim City at release day, something that was not possible when you bought the game instead of copying it.

No piracy made the latest Sim City game playable at launch. Sad part is at least 4 idiots modded you up on false info.

Sim City was pirated a bit after launch, first I think by someone who figured out you didn't need to be connected to play, but still had no way to locally save files.

Not sure where it is at now, don't care really, but it was NOT pirated the day it was lauched, in fact, very few games are pirated the day they are launch, usually takes a few days.

Re:Piracy prevention?

[RivenAleem]

Except the legitimate users have to download all that data. It's quite possible that a good pirate will compress the audio and add in the installer, as other posters have pointed out, thus, again, providing people who pirate the game a better experience than those who buy it.

Re:Piracy prevention?

[TangoMargarine]

This is Slashdot. Standard means in the U.S. Slashdot is a U.S. site run by a U.S. company, with servers presumably located in the U.S., aimed at a U.S. audience.

1408x792

[jones_supa]

Why the odd 1408x792 resolution?

Re:1408x792

[Chris Mattern]

Why the odd 1408x792 resolution?

Presumably that's as far as they could dial it up without having the Xbone choke.

Re:1408x792

[glasshole]

I'd guess they tried many combinations and it gave the best perceived quality vs avg frame rate. Odd decision none the less.

Re:1408x792

[thegarbz]

Per the article the Xbone is already choking and they are critical of the fact that they have the odd resolution with no real visible benefit while the game is unable to sustain 60fps.

The video is full of image tearing and stuttering.

Re:1408x792

[Opportunist]

Hmm... doing a factorization, you get 1408 = 2^7*11, 792 = 2^3*3^2*11

GCD would even be 2^3*11, i.e. 88. (resulting in 1408 / 88 = 16 and 792 / 88 = 9, i.e. 16:9).

Doesn't look that odd to me anymore, to be honest.

Re:1408x792

[jones_supa]

What does "GCD" mean?

Re:1408x792

[Antique Geekmeister]

Oh, my. No, I'm afraid it's "greatest common denominator". it's the standard mathematical "term of art" for the largest number that can that two, or more, numbers can be divided by, with no remainder. "Greatest common factor" may be more clear to you, but failure to use the correct label should be a troubling sign with anyone you expect to do mathematical work.

Re:1408x792

[CronoCloud]

Besides, do you think Sony will ever allow PC/PS4 gamers to play together?

It's a developer decision, not SCEfoo's. It has been done in the past and present:

FFXI on the PS2 had cross-platform play PC, PS2 and later the Xbox.

PS3 Dust514 players can communicate with Eve Online players.

http://www.eveonline.com/retri...

PS3 Portal 2 players can also play with PC players.

Final Fantasy XIV players play cross platform across ALL platforms, PS3, PS4, and PC.

Re:1408x792

[Chris Mattern]

Besides, do you think Sony will ever allow PC/PS4 gamers to play together?

Yes, absolutely. Because having that happen has already been committed to. PC and PS3 players play together in Final Fantasy XIV (just like PC and PS2 (and XBox 360) players play together in Final Fantasy XI). When the PS4 edition of Final Fantasy XIV comes out (it's already in beta), they will play together with the PC and PS3 players.

Re:1408x792

[spire3661]

MS and Respawn are hand-tuning the game to get it to 'first-party' level optimization. That was probably the absolute best they could get out of it.

SSD

[Daniel Hoffmann]

Man a game like titanfall is for the hardcore gamer, a hardcore gamer worth its salt has a SSD these days. Asking for 35GB of SSD space just for audio is ridiculous.

Re:SSD

[Anonymous Coward]

A hardcore gamer worth his salt has a SSD for the OS and Aps...and a large internal platter drive for such things as music, movies...and games.

Re:SSD

[Opportunist]

Erh... I have my SSD exactly FOR games. Why? Because contemporary games don't hold more than their bare minimum in ram, the rest (especially graphics, i.e. textures, map and model meshes, etc) is loaded when needed.

And yes, that stutters on a normal HD.

Re:SSD

[quintesse]

Ehm, no, I want the next map to load as fast as possible so the others won't start the next round without me, I *definitely* use my SSD for my games.
Also: gameS, if all of them start asking almost 50GB even my 500GB HDD will quickly fill up

Re:SSD

[CronoCloud]

I want the next map to load as fast as possible so the others won't start the next round without me

If your multiplayer compatriots are that impatient that they can't wait a few seconds at most, perhaps you should find new ones.

But that's Filthy PC Gamer Philistines for you.

Re:SSD

[Anonymous Coward]

maybe that hardcore gamer should have just the ssd as a cache drive for his games, then after a couple loads of his favorite maps, audio, games, whatever its just as fast as an ssd but with all the space of an hdd

Re:SSD

[Billly Gates]

Shoot!

I have an SSD for games ... errr work :-)

I need bloated VM's for work and training with VMWare Workstation. Running 7 VM's for a homemade domain with exchange servers and clients with a startup can take freaking 10 minutes on a mechanical drive! Shutting down is painful too.

A SSD is alife saver, but I do not want to wait 4 minutes for levels to load in SWTOR (corellia) orTitanfall :-(

I just blew more money (close to $500 since last summer) on another SSD to make room for Windows, games, and lots of VM's. A 50 gig game is frankly unacceptable. I wonder if I am being pennywise pound foolish with my investment so far :-(

If this is where the market is going we are screwed. 1 tb ssd's will not get below the $250 for a least 2 years and the OS and 1-2 games plus some apps as it is today can fill a 238gb ssd easily. Even ancient World of warcraft is over 25 gigs!

Re:SSD

[flibbajobber]

A hardcore gamer worth his salt has a SSD for the OS and Aps...and a large internal platter drive for such things as music, movies...and games.

So move the audio files onto the HDD, and use NTFS symlinks on the SSD to point to them (or volume mount point, if a whole folder can be moved).

Re:SSD

[Opportunist]

Depends entirely on the games you play. In the average FPS you're right. In pretty much any other multiplayer game, being the first to load can be a decisive advantage.

Re:SSD

[Bing Tsher E]

Everyone's hardware is slightly (or greatly) different with PC Gamers. It's not like Consoles, where everybody has the same standard proletarian hardware.

sad resolution

[sixsixtysix]

While I wasn't expecting 4k levels of resolution, that these new consoles aren't even pure 1080p/60 is pretty fucking pathetic.

Re:sad resolution

[rochrist]

The PS4 is,

Re:sad resolution

[AmiMoJo]

The PS4 usually manages 1080p/60. It's the XBone that is seemingly lacking.

Re:sad resolution

[Anubis IV]

CoD: Ghosts has attracted some notice for running natively at 1080p on PS4 but only 720p on the Xbox. Not sure if there are other cases of such behavior or if that's in any way common, I'll admit.

Re:sad resolution

[sixsixtysix]

yeah, i should've said "this new console", but hearing that even some ps4 games are nerfed down is pretty lame.

Re:sad resolution

[Xest]

Battlefield as well, but similarly some of the PS4s flagship games (Infamous) have had issues reaching 1080p @ 60fps so it's really not an XBox One only issue contrary to the claim above - that's really just popular myth spread by fanboys and peddled by the unaware. I suspect above all else it's simply because both consoles are new hardware.

The real test will be what's going on in a year or two, if there is still disparity then then there is a problem. Judging current titles is difficult because the hardware was still changing when all current titles were in development so current games were all developed against a moving target and that's bound to cause issues by the time release is reached. This is especially the case with the XBox One where Microsoft completely and utterly changed the DRM system and so forth last minute which will have required effort by devs - effort that could've meant time that would otherwise have gone towards better optimisation.

Microsoft recently lowered the requirements on reserved CPU for Kinect, so I imagine that had some relevance too - they were perhaps just asking developers to put more aside than was necessary because they weren't sure themselves what they could get away with. Both companies are still refining their systems, but too a lesser degree. But again, it's only Christmas next year (Christmas 2015) that we'll begin to see games developed purely on the now static hardware definitions and many not even until Christmas 2016 as a 3 year dev cycle for an AAA title is fairly typical.

If last generation is anything to go by though I suspect in a year or twos time it just wont matter anyway - games will almost entirely be getting ported to both systems, exclusives will be rare, and it'll only really come down to whose controllers and interface you like best at the end of the day.

Nice but pointless for me

[nehumanuscrede]

I have a strong gaming rig and I won't bother with Titanfall for one simple fact: The PC version requires Origin to play it.

I tried it with Battlefield the last Battlefield game and it was such a trainwreck I uninstalled it and tossed the game in the trash before ever getting to play it. It went something like this:

Buy the physical media ( dvd ) install game. Try to play, find out you have to install Origin, cuss, install Origin, register and do all the BS required. Try to play, find out there is a multi GB PATCH to install before I can play, cuss some more, start download ( which takes HOURS coming from their servers ) finally get it all downloaded, try to play, discover my browser opens up instead of the game, Origin now wants to install some plugin to the damn browser. At which point I gave up from sheer anger and uninstalled the entire thing, Origin and all.

I put the Battlefield disc in the microwave then ran it through the shredder resolving to never again touch any game that had an Origin requirement.

So, Titanfall may be the most amazing game ever made but due to the Origin requirement, it is a game I will never play.

Re:Nice but pointless for me

[Anonymous Coward]

Please next time return the disk as it didn't work without requiring to download and install other things that didn't come on the disk. Probably no where on the box did it say you'd have to download more patches before the game would work. If the store doesn't take software returns, do a charge back on your credit card claiming the produce was defective (didn't contain everything needed to run) or didn't work as advertised.

Destroying the disk can be fun, but it doesn't send a message.

Re:Nice but pointless for me

[ildon]

For starters, you already did the work of installing Origin and setting up an account. So even if you deleted Origin, you still already have an account so that work is a sunk cost. Second of all, you would have had to install that multi-gigabyte patch regardless of if Origin existed or not because you wouldn't have been able to connect to the game servers and play without it, so that has nothing to do with Origin. Third, the browser plugin is specific the the Battlefield Battle log feature. The game was designed to use a web browser as its server browser. It's something specific to BF and you would have had to do that to play it regardless of if Origin existed or not, and it's not a feature of Titanfall so you wouldn't have had to do that again to play Titanfall.

So right now, if you wanted to play Titanfall, your steps would be:
1. Install Origin.
2. Install Titanfall.
3. Log into Origin.
4. Possibly download a Titanfall patch (I don't know if there's a patch because I didn't buy it because I'm not a fan of CoD style shooters), which you would have had to do regardless of Origin's existence or non-existence.
5. Play.

That's it.

Seriously, 90% of your problems with "Origin" were problems with Battlefield.

Re: Nice but pointless for me

[nehumanuscrede]

Chuckle. Anyone who has been playing PC games ( and console games for that matter ) knows that within a month of launch, you can expect one or more patches to fix the product they rushed out the door to meet some deadline. Guaranteed.

I'm pretty much done with jumping through all the hoops for this. If you want to make it a pain in the ass just to play it, then I just won't play it. Pretty simple really.

Not that they care as they have legions of folks who are willing to put up with the BS to play at any cost, but in time they too will become jaded with the system and become ex-gamers as well.

Steam seems to have finally got it right in my opinion. I have zero issues with that platform now and the majority of my games come from there.

Re:Nice but pointless for me

[Chryana]

I agree with most of what you said. With that said, I am really sick and tired of having to create an account on some service I don't care or need every time I buy a game. I already paid good money for the stupid game, but the greed of game distributors is endless. They probably milk the personal data they ask for for everything it's worth, and then they want to nickel and dime their customers to get every little trivial addition to the game, such as new players skins and weapons. Honestly, if buying a movie DVD was as complicated as installing a triple-A game, the movie business wouldn't be a tenth of the size of what it is right now. It's gotten to the point I have to write down a long list of made-up personal details, such as my birth date and address, and to create a disposable email address with every new login that I store in my password database. There is a need that the laws be changed to put a stop to the personal data collection which is being performed by all the big actors in the game industry.

Re:Nice but pointless for me

[AdamHaun]

I have a strong gaming rig and I won't bother with Titanfall for one simple fact: The PC version requires Origin to play it.

I've been going back and forth on this. I keep hearing it's really good, but I hate having to reinstall Origin for one game. I wish EA would stop holding their games hostage. But wishing for EA to be less greedy is pretty hopeless.

Re: Nice but pointless for me

[Nyder]

Chuckle. Anyone who has been playing PC games ( and console games for that matter ) knows that within a month of launch, you can expect one or more patches to fix the product they rushed out the door to meet some deadline. Guaranteed.

I'm pretty much done with jumping through all the hoops for this. If you want to make it a pain in the ass just to play it, then I just won't play it. Pretty simple really.

Not that they care as they have legions of folks who are willing to put up with the BS to play at any cost, but in time they too will become jaded with the system and become ex-gamers as well.

Steam seems to have finally got it right in my opinion. I have zero issues with that platform now and the majority of my games come from there.

Then download the crack for it and don't use Origin. I never use Origin on any games that require it, because there is always a crack that will fix that.

Re:Nice but pointless for me

[AmiMoJo]

Or just refuse to accept the EULA and return it on those grounds. I'm pretty sure they didn't print a copy of that on the outside of the box so there is no way you could have known about it before making a purchase.

Re:Nice but pointless for me

[Sibko]

I tried it with Battlefield the last Battlefield game and it was such a trainwreck I uninstalled it and tossed the game in the trash before ever getting to play it. It went something like this:

Buy the physical media ( dvd ) install game. Try to play, find out you have to install Steam, cuss, install Steam, register and do all the BS required. Try to play, find out there is a multi GB PATCH to install before I can play, cuss some more, start download ( which takes HOURS coming from their servers ) finally get it all downloaded, try to play, discover my browser opens up instead of the game...

About the only thing Steam doesn't require here, is a plugin for your browser.
Sorry, I just feel like pointing out the slag that other distribution systems seem to get when Steam does the exact same thing, or is worse. It reminds me of the kind of love Apple used to and still does get.

Re:Nice but pointless for me

[lexman098]

That's not really a problem with Origin.

Re: Nice but pointless for me

[nehumanuscrede]

Grant you that. Up unil recently, Steam was a trainwreck too. It's finally to the point where it's actually pretty nice to use now and offline mode finally works the way it should have from the beginning. See a game you want ? Buy it, download and play. Done.

Though I still wait for them to have a sale for any games I want to play. Done paying $60 a pop for what will basically be Beta II. By the time I pick it up, it's ~$20 and fully patched and tested by millions of others.

Re:Nice but pointless for me

[mjwx]

For starters, you already did the work of installing Origin and setting up an account. So even if you deleted Origin, you still already have an account so that work is a sunk cost. Second of all, you would have had to install that multi-gigabyte patch regardless of if Origin existed or not because you wouldn't have been able to connect to the game servers and play without it, so that has nothing to do with Origin. Third, the browser plugin is specific the the Battlefield Battle log feature. The game was designed to use a web browser as its server browser. It's something specific to BF and you would have had to do that to play it regardless of if Origin existed or not, and it's not a feature of Titanfall so you wouldn't have had to do that again to play Titanfall.

So right now, if you wanted to play Titanfall, your steps would be:
1. Install Origin.
2. Install Titanfall.
3. Log into Origin.
4. Possibly download a Titanfall patch (I don't know if there's a patch because I didn't buy it because I'm not a fan of CoD style shooters), which you would have had to do regardless of Origin's existence or non-existence.
5. Play.

That's it.

Seriously, 90% of your problems with "Origin" were problems with Battlefield.

Erm no.

I gave up on Battlefield after BF3 not just because the game was so crap, but origin was also just as crap. In fact the clincher was when I went back to play it a month later and Origin decided I needed to download the entire game again. Not just a patch, the entire fucking game. Steam has never forced me to do that, even when a game is highly corrupted it only downloads what it needs to and I've had game installs so corrupted that 60% of the files needed to be re-downloaded on Steam.

After Origin not even giving me the choice and automatically deciding to start the download, I stopped it and uninstalled both Origin and Battlefield 3. 100% of my problems were with both, but ultimately Origin proved to such a pain that keeping it wasn't worth the games it had on it.

Origin isn't the only reason I wont be buying Titanfall, but it may as well be.

Re:Nice but pointless for me

[Anonymous Coward]

I bought the game on Xbox One, as did my roomate, and it's equally pointless for us: joining together in a party means we're stuck with the endless "Connecting..." thing, and have to quit the game to break out of that loop. It's extra annoying, because it works fine if we play simultaneously while not in a party.

From what I can tell, Xbox one only uses teredo tunnels for Xbox live networking, through it uses standard IPv4 to download content from akamai at least. We've got "native-ish" IPv6 connectivity through Charter's 6rd tunnel, and while the Xboxes do seem to pick up SLAAC IPv6 addresses from the router advertisements, they don't seem to do much (if any) network communication through the native IPv6 connectivity. Instead, it seems to be all teredo. I don't even have any idea if that has anything to do with it, but it sucks.

Anyway, I've not gotten too far with debugging this, a bit of wireshark snooping to see if I can find anything interesting, but nada. Which makes the game rather unfun, as half the point of these sorts of games is to play with friends. Well, we can't do that. I don't think I've ever been so annoyed to not have a root-access shell terminal on my console before. I don't see how there's anything on our end that could be the cause (*everything* else works fine), but cannot help but imagine there's a work-around that could be applied. Or some data that could be passed to MS or Charter...

*sigh*

Re:Nice but pointless for me

[guises]

Steam was worse when it was launched. I don't know if you remember, but Hlaf-Life 2 was unplayable back then. Not that I'm defending Origin either, I just hate Steam too.

Re:Nice but pointless for me

[PatientZero]

You're not missing out. After being intrigued by the trailer showing the solo campaign and the pretty cool gameplay and graphics, I bought it Saturday and let it download overnight. Installed it this morning and started it up, but the tutorial crashed. Restarted it (remap the keys again because it didn't save them) and launched the campaign mode . . . which is online and multiplayer only. WTF?

Apparently, "campaign mode" now means "goal-oriented multiplayer modes with no story" like conquest while "classic mode" means "standard multiplayer games with no story" such as team deathmatch or capture-the-flag.

Twenty-four hour return policy activated, and good riddance. You'd think with all the cash EA has they could produce an online store half as good as Steam (much as that raises ire for some people), but alas that is not the case.

BTW, that browser extension was the server browser. I have no idea what it bought them to write a bunch of C code in a browser extension rather than packaging it up into a regular executable, but the major downside is that every time you join a server the entire engine has to be loaded and initialized. If these were the good ol' days of 2 second startup times it would be no problem. I gave up on BF4 pretty quick as it got so tiresome waiting for the game to reload every time you switched servers.

Re:Nice but pointless for me

[sadboyzz]

About the only thing Steam doesn't require here, is a plugin for your browser.

Steam also doesn't require an "install", the game is playable after the download, unlike origin.

Re: Nice but pointless for me

[L4t3r4lu5]

Plenty of games come with Origin, GfWL etc requirements. I'd be much more happy if Valve refused to sell games through Steam which required 3rd party DRM. I'd be doubly happy, now they have the lions share of online games distribution, that they boot off all of those titles. Battlefield is dead, CoD is boring, and they're raking it in with indie title distribution anyway.

Re: Nice but pointless for me

[nehumanuscrede]

Sorry you had to endure that, I'm not sure what EA is thinking these days but it sounds like they can't dig the hole they're in fast enough.

  Short sighted/term thinking maybe. They don't realize that a few bad experiences leads to less folks willing to play their product at all. There will always be those who don't know any better and must have it at any cost but there exists no better teacher than experience and in this day and age, word travels very quickly indeed.

Burn your bridges to those who finance your business and the outcome becomes obvious.

Re:Nice but pointless for me

[ildon]

That's nice, but you weren't the person I was replying to.

Re: Nice but pointless for me

[Samizdata]

And, it is especially wonderful when you get ripped off by the manufacturer and Steam because the DLC you purchased from GfWL is no longer available as GfWL no longer exists, and the developer tells you "Hey, you need to buy that again, should you ever need to reinstall." and Steam tells you "Oh, yeah, new buyers get all that DLC for free. You, that have had the game for years, not so much."

Re:Nice but pointless for me

[phorm]

Steam also lets me play more than just EA Games, and manages them much nicer than Origin.
EA Games used to work on Steam, before they decided to do their own crap.
Steam adds features like the overlay etc. Even managing buddies on Origin is a huge PITA.
And the browser plugin... WTF do they have a game binary and management system for if they also need a fricking web plugin.

Re:Nice but pointless for me

[TangoMargarine]

Twenty-four hour return policy activated, and good riddance

Well there's their mistake right there. It should have taken longer than 24 hours to install :)

It's not the hardware

[Tony Isaac]

If you've ever written software that is ported to multiple platforms, you know that the performance of the ported version can only match the original, if serious performance tuning is done. Performance of ported software is not a measure of the hardware, but of the effort put into making it work better.

Re:It's not the hardware

[Kremmy]

You're wrong to begin with, but you're completely off the wall in this case because we're not really talking about different platforms, we're talking about the Xbox One and Windows. The Xbox One is an AMD APU PC, what kind of platform differences are you on about? the Xbox One is running a distribution of Windows. This is the point where any additional effort required means they did it wrong.

Drive usage the same on Xbox?

[codepigeon]

Does the Xbox install use the same amount of space? Considering you have a fixed 500GB and games have to be installed to the drive, I would be slightly upset that one game takes up that much space.

I couldn't imagine trying to do the digital only thing they were trying to push last year. That's so much data being downloaded at once you would probably get flagged as an evil file-sharer by your ISP.

Re:Drive usage the same on Xbox?

[codepigeon]

I can't edit, so I will reply to myself. It looks like the Xbox install is 'only' 17GB.

Re:Drive usage the same on Xbox?

[spire3661]

NO because the Xbox has a dedicated audio DSP and 8 cores.

Re:Drive usage the same on Xbox?

[gl4ss]

..your answer makes no sense at all.

or it makes as much sense as for them to include unpacked audio in the game. the overhead to unpack vorbis or mp3 is pretty much nothing and ends up with less disk access...

Re:mod 5down

[DocHoncho]

Seems legit, must be actual game footage!

Re:Audio is amazing

[DocHoncho]

It would be just as stunning with lossless compression like FLAC too. In fact, without trying to start an audiophile flamewar, a sufficiently high bitrate MP3 would be stunning too. Either way the audio would take up drastically less space.

Re:No...

[rochrist]

Low price point? The Xbone?

PC Master Race

[slashmydots]

Ooh surprise result...just kidding. But they did sort of bury the lead. It's a first person shooter game. Let me put it this way. If I'm steering a car in a game, I'd rather have a 16-level variable sensitivity joystick instead of a single state key on a keyboard. It's just more accurate and better. If I'm shooting a gun, pseudo-absolute positioning from a mouse beats the crap out of relative positioning from a joystick. Aiming a gun with a joystick is like driving a car with your ass instead of your hands. Yeah, you can sort of get it done and pretend you're good at it but if you were doing it the correct way, you'd do better.

So resolution, screen tearing, FPS, prettiness, all that is great and everyone knew PCs were faster but the game really crashes and burns when you consider the thumbsticks you're forced to use. That just simply is not how you control a gun.

My own view of Titanfall

[Kimomaru]

On Titanfall's release day, I posted a user review on Metacritic giving the game a zero, saying that I got a refund on Origin (they have a return policy for games, lucky me) and that I felt that the game was basically a super-modded Call of Duty - a sentiment that has been echoed even by more traditional gaming outlets. I also mentioned that when it comes to liking or disliking TItanfall, there are two types of players, 1) players who still enjoy Call of Duty and 2) players who don't. If you still enjoy the old CoD gaming formulas, give this game a try, otherwise pass on it. After a couple of days, the review was taken down, presumably because it was considered trolling? Not sure. I couldn't have been more honest.

Titanfall is not a great game, but opinion aside - some odd facts. Has anyone noticed that the textures on the PC version almost seem excessively low res? I find this particularly baffling. The other thing that troubles me is that Vincent Zampella aparently tweeted on October 29th that he wasn't aware that Titanfall was going to be an Xbox One exclusive until just then (http://www.gameranx.com/updates/id/18380/article/titanfall-perpetually-a-microsoft-exclusive-respawn-unaware-ea-made-a-deal/). So, the only way he could have been unaware is that they were already working on a PS4 version and that the exclusivity deal announced in October quashed it. It just feels like a couple of these points kind of add up that Microsoft needed to make sure that it was exclusive and that the PC version wouldn't outshine the Xbox One version in the inevitable side-by-side comparisons. And, for its part, I must confess that I'm hard pressed to find much difference inthe Xbone-to-PC side-by-side videos.

In the end, I think the effort was wasted. There weren't many players broadcasting Titanfall on Twitch last night. And, as an avid gamer, it just feels like a lot of jockeying when versions of already-finished games are stopped with exclusivity contracts. I just can't get behind the Xbox One platform at all.

Re:My own view of Titanfall

[phorm]

Go play some Hawken. You'll probably have more fun, and your wallet will thank you :-)

MATHS

[Anonymous Coward]

The answer is "sample theory". Anti-aliasing on a modern computer game is frequently achieved with a variety of methods. Pre-filtering in the textures. Algorithms in the shader code. Use of hardware MSAA sampling. Temporal techniques. Post processing of scene 'edges'.

the '792' is going to be scaled up (sampled) to '1080'. The mathematical relationship between 792 and 1080 is clearly designed to give some 'free' anti-aliasing 'improvement' from the up-scaling, when combined with the other anti-aliasing methods in play.

I thought Titanfall was...

[issicus]

I thought Titanfall was another battlefield DLC , except it costs three times as much.

Your own children

[tepples]

Only children and people with very wide butts play games in the living room. Proper adult gamers sit at a desk.

So where do proper adult gamers sit when they spend quality time playing a game with their own children or with the children they're babysitting?

Re:Your own children

[PopeRatzo]

So where do proper adult gamers sit when they spend quality time playing a game with their own children or with the children they're babysitting?

Playing on a console with a child who is your own or entrusted to your care is borderline child abuse.

My daughter preferred singing songs, hearing me read a book or playing one of the many musical instruments in the house. Or, as she got older, playing with her microscope set or walking through the woods or older still, practicing martial arts and riding her skateboard.

At some point, she liked games, but preferred playing on her PC to consoles, because consoles are for nincompoops. She is now working on a PhD in Mathematics and can kick your ass. At Battlefield 4 or a with a 2-meter staff. Or the puzzle of your choice.

I don't like using the term, "master race", and I don't like to say that it was the choice of PC over consoles that made her grow so straight and true, but the result speaks for itself.

Re:Your own children

[Xest]

"but the result speaks for itself."

No it doesn't.

As the father of a mathematics PhD one would think you'd be well aware of the point that correlation does not equal causation. It sounds like she got where she did in spite of you, not because of you.

Graphics My @$$

[tepples]

As if there aren't other things it could be doing besides being a glorified DSP.

What percent of one of the cores of your quad core does the DSP take?

It can process all those vertices too, but you don't hear anyone rushing off to kill hardware accelerated graphics for ... reasons.

Unless you're Intel. Its GMA integrated graphics processors (nicknamed "Graphics My Ass") offloaded vertex transformation to the CPU. Only during the Bridge era did Intel graphics catch up with the PS3.

How many simultaneous MP3 files?

[tepples]

How many MP3 files were you trying to decode at once? Decoding music is one thing, and even a Nintendo DS can do that. Decoding 50 layers of environmental noises and sound effects is something else entirely.

Re:why not just 720p

[Jeremy Erwin]

There's a incredible amount of hype attached to "1080p", or "Full 1080" or whatever to the point that most TVs sold today seem to be either "crap", 1080p, or 4k, with 3d thrown in there along with "Smartness". Besides, most of those 720p sets are actually 768p, a quasi standard supported by almost no output device.

For a XBox One game not to support the "standard" 1080p resolution suggests early obsolescence is on the horizon.

Bad example plus silly model

[dbIII]

Actually a DS is much more powerful than my example, and has dedicated sound hardware as well. If implemented well and it's not doing anything else those "50 things" may well be within it's reach. There's an emulator of a real multitrack synth that runs on the DS which has got to be more complex than native decoding and playing a few tracks. "50 things"? Let's get to that.
I think that this stuff must be modelled very badly in the first place if your "50 things" are happening and implemented very badly if close to cutting edge hardware can't do however many things the real task, and not imaginary "50 things" task, involves.

These things do not model walking through an orchestra pit in exacting detail.

Re:Bad example plus silly model

[tepples]

Actually a DS is much more powerful than my example, and has dedicated sound hardware as well.

The original DS's CPU is a 67 MHz ARM, which doesn't even have a floating-point unit, unlike your Pentium. And the only "dedicated sound hardware" in a DS is a 16-channel mixer and ADPCM decoder, not an MPEG audio decoder.

There's an emulator of a real multitrack synth that runs on the DS

Which synth? Different synth algorithms have different computational complexities.

Re:Bad example plus silly model

[dbIII]

mpg123 had an integer mode back in the original pentium day as do some other decoders. Consider some of the really cheap hardware based decoders as well.

Which synth

Korg DS-10 apparently. Either way it's multiple tracks, drums etc - and remember the PCs of the era I mentioned didn't have mpeg hardware either.

Re:Bad example plus silly model

[dbIII]

Either way we're getting off track. It's not the year 2000 so the overhead of a bit of audio compression and mixing should not tax the system (vastly more powerful than what I mentioned above) while an enormous download is a bit of a kick in the teeth to the non-trivial number of customers that have to pay a lot for traffic. It looks sloppy to me. There's got to be a hell of a lot of data in that huge chunk with zero information.
Context: I don't work with audio but I work with seismic data - which is effectively digitally sampled audio with a few million tracks per survey.

Re:Bad example plus silly model

[dbIII]

I'm certain that 586 (remember the quote is "The last time I had trouble getting enough processing power to decode mp3 files it was because I was using a 586"), I think from Cyrix, didn't have a floating point unit either because I used the integer option in mpg123.

What happened to consoles?

[doccus]

OK , I'm not a diehard gamer at all , in fact it starts and ends at pinball.. so perhaps it's not surprising I missed a recent development over that last decade.. Buit "Naturally, the PC version outperforms"?. Last that I paid any attention, it was "naturally" a dedicated unit like a console would outperform a PC. So what happened? Did PCs really get that much better, and I somehow am missing it, even though I still am paying attention to that side of things, or do consoles suddenly suck, from, I would assume, no development? Which is it? Have I somehow not noticed PC hardware getting *that* much better, right under my nose?

Re:What happened to consoles?

[Nizumzen]

PCs generally have better graphics cards and CPUs due to the fact that they are not as restricted when it comes to keeping them cool. Try putting an Intel i7-4930K into a console and see how quickly the whole thing lasts before it crashes due to overheating. There is a reason that the PS4 and the Xbox One use a 1.8Ghz CPU which is essentially equivalent to a laptop CPU. Plus with gaming PCs (such as mine) you can have multiple graphics cards making them even more powerful. Oh and higher resolutions for PC gaming as well (1440p for instance is becoming the norm). Take my PC with an i7 3930k running at 4.4Ghz, 16GB RAM, 2x AMD 7950 graphics cards and a Samsung 840 Pro SSD and compare it to the PS4 or the Xbox One and it should be obvious that the PC will wipe the floor with any of them.

Low end of system requirements

[tepples]

the overhead of a bit of audio compression and mixing should not tax the system (vastly more powerful than what I mentioned above)

But is it enough more powerful to guarantee running several dozen full-blown decompressors at once, plus game and rendering logic, even on an older dual-core? Making a PC game is like making a console game that can scale up and down between Xbox 360 and Xbox One CPU specs.

Re:Low end of system requirements

[dbIII]

I'd say so since doing it once is utterly trivial on modern hardware and ten times almost ignorable - and if it's more than a couple of dozen without being a simulation of walking through an orchestra pit designed for highly trained musicians then I'd say the modelling is poorly done causing a waste of resources .

Re:Low end of system requirements

[dbIII]

Also I suspect the I/O time of obtaining these large files may be approaching or exceeding the fairly trivial cpu time (or in this case GPU even though it's audio) of decompressing them.
The entire process doesn't sound like big deal - obtain sound, decode it, amplitude according to the vector to where each speaker output is mapped, mix, output. If the sound file can't fit in memory I think it would be a much slower process than decompressing one that can.
Eventually you are going to hit too many sources and receivers to do it in real time (which is the sort of stuff I'm involved with), but I strongly doubt decompressing the signals is going to be the bottleneck.

Missed a bit

[dbIII]

Also I suspect the I/O time of obtaining these large files may be approaching or exceeding the fairly trivial cpu time (or in this case GPU even though it's audio) of decompressing smaller files containing the same data.

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