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Forums - Gaming Discussion - L.A. Noire - Not so exclusive? PS3/PC? Too big for DVD9?

iclim4 said:

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Mono audio? even ps1 titles had stereo sound. i would hate it if they went mono, i dont really care about 7.1 or 5.1 though, but i think mono is way to low a quality for sound.

also, correct me if im wrong, but doesnt compression make your processor work extra hard and if you compress it enough, it would take a really long time for a processor to uncompress the data which would actually add more load times, frame rate drops and other issues.

 

@Mono audio:

It really depends on the sound. If you think about it, most "in-game" sounds are all point sounds - generated from a single point in 3D. The CPU is then used to dynamically work out the stereo, panning, etc (more complex for 7.1, etc) - based on either the camera position, or the position of the player. But the original sound data itself is all mono. I was doing this back on the PS1 - its not a very hard thing to do.

The exception I guess is for things like FMV cutscenes. 

So its not about more space at all - its about better code to generate dynamic sound.

 

@Compression:

Yes - you do work your CPU harder. But in most cases, CPU is *almost* idle when loading. Its pointless to have your IO at 100% utilisation and CPU at 5%. Not smart.

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Even when streaming - the biggest factors are average seek time, and data read rates. The better the read rates, the less time it takes to load something - meaning less popup, and the faster you can "navigate" through a city that uses streaming (directly affects the top speed you can drive at for example).

Compression can effectively increase your read rate by a factor of 3..10x (depending what you are streaming).

And whereas code can be optimised (including decompression algorithms - rewritten in assembler, etc) - drive read rate is basically fixed. Its not something you can tweak.

(seek times can be tweaked, by reorganising the location that certain data blocks reside on the disc itself - but thats a different issue). 

There are other issues as well - including drive noise, drive wear (the more you read, the more you wear the drive out), etc. 

Another more technical issue is this: depending on exactly how the loading occurs, it will require CPU usage anyway (i.e. it could use DMA access, syncronised reading from the bus, coping blocks from a drive memory buffer, etc..).

So its sort of odd - but in some cases its possible that reading/decompressing data can actually take less CPU. This has actually been the case in some of my projects in the past. And as CPU cycles are much faster than IO cycles - you can cut down on loading times by 80%-90% in some cases.

(hope that helps... :>)

 

 



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makingmusic476 said:
@shams: It's not the size that's keeping the game from going to the 360. It's the fact that it's not going to the 360 that let's them increase the size, utilizing the extra space.

That's the one problem with arguments for/against the use of Blu-Ray in gaming. People often say that Blu-Ray is useless, because the 360 has far better games using DVDs than the ps3 has using BD-roms. But the question that is never asked, and can never be answered, is would those games have been better if the developers had Blu-Ray to work with? And if so, how much better? It can't be answered, and we can't use multiplats for answers, as developers design them to be equal on both platforms, taking into account the DVD of the 360.

People say that games like Gears weren't hurt because of the limitations of DVD9, but we can't actually say that. The developers designed it with DVD9 in mind, so of course it was going to work just fine with the format. Same goes for games like Uncharted and Blu-Ray. Uncharted apparently streams everything - sound files, textures, EVERYTHING, from the Blu-Ray disc, which is why there are no load times whatsoever throughout the game. Streaming data off the disc requires the data to take up more space on the disc (less compression) than it would normally, and as such even the demo from e3 could not fit on a single DVD9. Could this be done on the 360? Something similar, yes, but not this specific game, because of the way it is designed. Even a multi-disc solution just wouldn't work.

The only way anybody can definitively prove that Blu-Ray is better or, dare I say it, "needed" for gaming would be if a developer developed a game entirely around the 360, and then recreated the game entirely around the ps3, starting the engine from scratch, taking into account the added storage space of Blu-Ray and whatever advantages it may provide, and carrying over only the plot and artwork from the 360 version. They would even expand the concepts of the game, taking into account whatever possibilities Blu-Ray opens up for them. It would essentially be a brand new game, that just happens to look like the other version. Then we could truly see what effect Blu-Ray has on the game. This will never happen, however, as it would be far to costly for a development studio.

Seeing as we can't prove whether Blu-Ray is really useful this generation, we can only go by the words of the developers, and most are rather welcoming of the new format, many stating that their games could not be done with out it. With Lost Oddyssey on 4 discs, Blue Dragon on 3, and Rage on 2, it seems like it would've been at least somewhat beneficial for MS to go with HD DVD for this generation, if for no other reason than to avoid multi-disc situations such as the aforementioned games. And then there are cases like Uncharted where even the main engine of the game can't fit on a single disc, let alone things like audio, story, and new areas. How many 360 games could have been improved with this? Mass Effect, no loading whatsoever? Who knows. How many game elements were nixed entirely because of the limitations of DVD9?

 Blu ray is more expensive for developers than DVD9, therefore it is impossible to say that multiplatform games wouldn't have been better on PS3 if they weren't limited by the large distribution (and therefore smaller development) budget of the PS3. Thank you for playing, money pwns space.



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Hmmz, it rather seems like just another flame thread.
People said that the XBox couldn't do the lighning effects etc. Well the PS3 and the XBox have almost the same graphics card, thats why all games look alike.

As for the multidisk problem, if a dvd would be too small the game would end up on maybe 2 disks. With games lasting like 20hours, you would have to change the disk every 10 hours.
Yet if you want to release the game on a blue-ray disk you'll end up releasing it with a one year delay, for less people.

And as stated above, compression makes your system faster. Yet one could argue that compression is already being implemented on games that just fit on one disk.

And on the other hand: Lair did had 2GB maps. (don't ask anyone how it fitted in the 512MB total memory, but hey, it did had 2GB maps)
I hope the game is more fun then those 'multiple disks' discussions, after all how many rf engineers are there in here?



sieanr said:
iclim4 said:
makingmusic476 said:
iclim4 said:
makingmusic476 said:
Lost tears of Kain said:
No i never stated that, put some missions on 1 disc and some on the other.

Seriously people, if ps1 could do it, im sure 360 can do it.

What sandbox games for ps1 had multiple discs? Oh wait...


Wouldnt the older GTA's for ps1 be considered sandbox games?

the closest sandbox game i played on the ps1 was courier crisis. damn that was fun, you can flip cops off and they would chase you just like in GTA except... your riding a bike. plus you can also punch people and they would fight you back. i remember a guy hitting me then running away, then.. a bus ran over him ^^ good times... good times...


I thought the older GTAs had multiple cities per game. You beat a few missions in one city, then move onto to the next. I haven't played GT2 in a good 8 years, though, so I could be mistaken. Either way, none of them took up multiple discs. :P

oh, yeah..... good point..

 

GTA3 was the first sandbox GTA, the earlier games were a lot different in gameplay.

Ultraslick said: Yeah , thats it lets just ruin the game for no good reason. The game is larger because it (most likely) will have advanced lighting and graphics and uncompressed audio, all of which the 360 cant handle.

But designing it for a weaker system and porting it is a good idea.

I think they would rather have a quality product.

Yeah, advanced lighting takes up soo much space....


If you wanted to pull this sort of game off on 2 DVDs, you could have all the world data on both discs - then split the data for the specific missions, ie characters, audio, cutscenes, onto seperate discs. That way you have the first half of the missions on one disc and the second half on the other, but both discs have all the level daa as well as anything else that is share. Its basically like multidisc RPGs, but kinda in reverse; Those titles have all the character data, items, common sounds and ojects, ect on all the disc, but the specific levels and related items on the different discs.

My point in all of this is what heppens when the world data ends up taking up more than 8.5 GB? Then the game could not work no matter how many DVDs you throw at the game.