Multiple DVD Xbox360 Games already!

[Mr Bean]

Linky

We’d figured as early as February that Microsoft would forgo placing a next-gen optical drive in the Xbox 360 for a myriad of acceptable reasons, but we couldn’t help but keep the nagging issue of disc space from lingering in the back of our minds. From the high-res textures fit for an HDTV to the higher polygon counts befitting a next-gen console, the space available on standard DVDs is suddenly in increasingly short supply. So far we’ve yet to see an Xbox 360 game take up more than a single disc, but if the most recent issue of Game Informer is any indication, Microsoft may soon be sweating their decision to pass up on a next-gen storage format.

Further on it mentions that a certian game(Likley ES:Oblivion) is already looking at packing in FOUR DVD's worth of crap due to texture and speech lines.

Anyone remeber the 13!! DVD's that EQ II came on?

[Dooey Jo]

Yes, they have the RAM and processing power to display in HD format but lack the ROM space for larger games of that resolution. A very strange decision...

Anyone remeber the 13!! DVD's that EQ II came on?

That's more than 60 GB! If they install that much I'd need a dedicated harddrive to play it

[Ace Pace]

He means CDs I'm nearly certain, 5 DVDs was the number If I remember the PC gamer review correctly.

[Mr Bean]

Woops yes, my bad, 13 CD's not DVD's. Of which there were three with the DVD version.

[Praxis]

That's just ridiculous. A first-gen title taking four disks...

Imagine two years from now!

[Spanky The Dolphin]

That's just ridiculous. A first-gen title taking four disks...

Imagine two years from now!

I assume you mean a launch title, since First Generation games were about thirty years ago.

[Admiral Valdemar]

I thought Xbox 360 was going to just use the HDD or have the option of coming with HD-DVD in the future anyway. Oh well, sucks to be someone who hates games being on multiple discs.

[SirNitram]

Microsoft backed off on that, Vald.

Then the fanboys here declared we'd never need multiple DVD's. I simply stood by my claim that programmers and designers will always fill more space.

And amazingly, they did it. Dammit, I had my bets on two years from now for this.

[Praxis]

That's just ridiculous. A first-gen title taking four disks...

Imagine two years from now!

I assume you mean a launch title, since First Generation games were about thirty years ago.

It's not launch, but its in the first waves of games after launch.

[Praxis]

Yes, they have the RAM and processing power to display in HD format but lack the ROM space for larger games of that resolution. A very strange decision...

Anyone remeber the 13!! DVD's that EQ II came on?

That's more than 60 GB! If they install that much I'd need a dedicated harddrive to play it

And ironically, a single tri-layer Blu-ray disk can fit all that.

Sony might have something going here. Sell the PS3 at a massive loss, but make money back on both the video game industry and the movie industry.

If Blu-ray fails, they'll wish they stuck with DVD like Microsoft.

[DPDarkPrimus]

Four DVDs to hold Oblivion?

Everyone, stand back- I'm having an erection.

[Netko]

While I wouldn't say it is impossible I seriusly doubt it, especialy since I've yet to hear of a PC game that didn't come on CDs (as much as I find that retarded) and I doubt Oblivion is going to be the first (no chatter about it on the forums and by now there would be) or come on 20ish CDs (that would be rather absurd). And there is no way that the PC version would have worse media then the xbox.

I'd say that it will come on 2 DVDs tops...

EDIT: That is not to say that there will not be an expansion of discspace requirements and that not giving the xbox360 something better then DVD wasn't shortsighted, especialy considering it's expected lifetime.

[Spyder]

Are you trying to say that games won't stop using CDs on the PC? Oh
5.25 floppy disk, has it been that long that no one remembers you?

[Admiral Valdemar]

Who remembers the last few Monkey Island games on the Amiga where you had 17 floppies?

[Arthur_Tuxedo]

I'm still skeptical about multi-disc games becoming the norm. PC games have been running at HD resolutions for years now, and most still ship on CD, with few games exceeding 3 CDs (about 1/4 the storage capacity of a DVD-9). I'll eat my words if this 4-disc game isn't some freak occurance or the result of poor compression, but for now I still stand by what I've said earlier.

Besides, multi-disc games are not a viable solution for storing textures and other gameplay elements, anyway, unless it's a game that never has to load that texture again once the disc is swapped. Usually, you'd end up with multiple discs with 8 out of 9 GB of identical information on each one. That's why the only multi-disc games on past consoles featured heavy FMV or pre-rendered backgrounds, and PC games on multiple discs always installed to the hard drive.

[DesertFly]

There's something, it's coming to me now....

Oh yes, what about procedural textures?

These can be very small indeed, and only require processing power to realize fantastic results. Witness kkreiger.

[Uraniun235]

Further on it mentions that a certian game(Likley ES:Oblivion) is already looking at packing in FOUR DVD's worth of crap due to texture and speech lines.

If these are dual-layer DVDs, that's up to 32GB of data, and that seems damn fishy considering I'm not seeing any 32GB games out for PC. If they're not dual-layer, I have to question why they're not going with dual-layer, but even then that's 16GB. Even fucking Unreal Tournament doesn't take up that much!

[LordShaithis]

If this were 15 years ago, Microsoft would be Sega and Sony would be Nintendo. Way to rush to market, MS. Next you'll see them advertising "blast processing" for the 360.

[Admiral Valdemar]

Their gamble is that they gain enough of a market lead, or simply a bigger piece of the pie anyway, to give the other two parties a run for their money. The premise could be a tortoise and hare race, since while being able to get next-gen games now is fun, people will look at the innovation in the PS3 and Revolution and think stuff it, and go with the pricier, but better kit. We'll see how it fares, but 4 DVDs does sound bizarre.

[Xon]

Further on it mentions that a certian game(Likley ES:Oblivion) is already looking at packing in FOUR DVD's worth of crap due to texture and speech lines.

They have edited the article to say "perhaps not" and then link somewere else.

I'm going to wait and see. We sure as hell havent seen any PC games (which have had HD quality textures for years) taking up 36gb of disk space. Hell 2 DVDs is about the max for any PC game I've seen, and the 2nd DVD generally has crap all on it.

We'll see how it fares, but 4 DVDs does sound bizarre.

36gb is over 42 hours of video at DVD quaility(using mpeg4 type encoding), still over 24 hours at HD quality.

Given procedural textures & model gemoetry are apparently all the rage for the Xbox360, which dramtically drops the storage requirements, that sounds like one fucking huge game.

[Netko]

Are you trying to say that games won't stop using CDs on the PC? Oh
5.25 floppy disk, has it been that long that no one remembers you?

Of course not (I was there when floppys were all the rage btw :p) - I will be the first to cheer when they finaly all ship on DVDs and the CD is rightfully relegated to history (heck, I'm still pissed that non-collectors edition WoW came on 4 CDs and no single DVD option for the same price). In fact, from all I've read as far as everything else except America is concerned the switch could happen now and there wouldnt be much hurt however quite a lot of systems in the US are/have been sold with only cd drives and it is still common that people buy the DVD version and find it doesnt work - the diffrence is because in the US DVDs took off as a video medium with standalone players first, while elsewhere (especialy Europe) dvd drives were faster adopted then standalone players.

So while I expect that the change to DVD only will happen in a year or two I don't expect it yet and I especialy don't see a game currently in final phases of development to ship on 4 DVDs when 1 to 2 is the max currently (also, remember that there was actualy a contraction of the number of CDs a game shipped on at one point, I still have Wing commander 4 which came on 6 CDs and there were a number of games released in that period which were released on a similar number of discs which is something you rarely see today and especialy didn't see in the 2000 till last year period - procedural textures seem to have the potential to decrease disc space like the transition from FMV to 3d graphics and better compression did in the past).

[Dooey Jo]

You know, if they're really going to use procedural textures to a significant extent, I bet loading times of levels, especially big ones with lots of textures, are going to be absolutely awful. Now, apparently both Xbox360 and PS3 have dedicated hardware for prodecural algorithms, but how fast is it really going to be? Say you have a level with 100 MB worth of textures (it's not impossible), and half of that is procedural. That's 50 MB that the system not only has to load, but actually create through not-so-simple fractal and noise algorithms. Does anyone know how fast they will be able to do it?

Multiple discs don't bug me nearly as much as loading times...


Also, the main "purpose" of procedural textures and procedural processes in general is not to decrease space (it was at first, though, when it was used for game-generated levels in early games which did not have enough ROM for stored levels and stuff), but to be able to create a large amount of variation in textures and geometry without having an enormous staff of artists...

[Xon]

You know, if they're really going to use procedural textures to a significant extent, I bet loading times of levels, especially big ones with lots of textures, are going to be absolutely awful. Now, apparently both Xbox360 and PS3 have dedicated hardware for prodecural algorithms, but how fast is it really going to be? Say you have a level with 100 MB worth of textures (it's not impossible), and half of that is procedural. That's 50 MB that the system not only has to load, but actually create through not-so-simple fractal and noise algorithms. Does anyone know how fast they will be able to do it?

Procedural textures reduce the amount of data loaded from disk and main memory. The importance of that can not be understated.

Also there is a reason the Xbox360 has 6 hardware threads and 3 CPU cores. It is vastly easier to add lots of hardware threads than to make a single hardware thread go really fast now days. Procedural textures allow multipule units to generate textures and geometry at the same time. More units that are working on procedural textures the more textures generated at the same time.

[Dooey Jo]

Procedural textures reduce the amount of data loaded from disk and main memory. The importance of that can not be understated.

Yes, but it doesn't reduce the amount of memory the textures use once they're inside the RAM (unless it generates every texture every time it's going to render it, but that would be way too slow. However, you can create interesting effects that way if you slightly change it each time), which was what my "100 MB" was referring to...

Also there is a reason the Xbox360 has 6 hardware threads and 3 CPU cores. It is vastly easier to add lots of hardware threads than to make a single hardware thread go really fast now days. Procedural textures allow multipule units to generate textures and geometry at the same time. More units that are working on procedural textures the more textures generated at the same time.

Of course, but how many 256x256 textures of reasonable quality (no bullshit textures, like simple gradients or cloud noises or something) can it create every second? That's what I want to know.

[Xon]

Yes, but it doesn't reduce the amount of memory the textures use once they're inside the RAM (unless it generates every texture every time it's going to render it, but that would be way too slow. However, you can create interesting effects that way if you slightly change it each time), which was what my "100 MB" was referring to...

From what I understand it has limited caching of procedurally generated textures before they are sent to the GPU. The GPU itself has a direct link to the main memory, and the CPU actually needs to go via the GPU to get/send stuff to main memory. Letting the GPU cache as it requires is better.

Of course, but how many 256x256 textures of reasonable quality (no bullshit textures, like simple gradients or cloud noises or something) can it create every second? That's what I want to know.

Who knows, but the Oblivion trailers have a fully procedurally generated forest covering about 8km^2 which is vastly more densely packed with stuff than any game before.