Red Faction Maxes out Xbox 360 - Volition turn to Xbox 720

[shams]

megaman2 said:

Gameplayer: So you’re saying that RFG is pushing the hardware as far as it can go? Squeezing every drop of juice out of the Xbox 360?

Rick White: Yeah, we’ve got it to the point where we can’t even put an extra vehicle into a world, because it’ll blow the memory. Every little change we make we have to be hyper-critical about it because it could just bring the whole system down. We evaluate every little change in the game, and then we run our tools on it to make sure it isn’t going to break the game and then we move forward, so it really is about pushing the engine as far as we can, and pushing the hardware as far as we can, and then looking at what is the next set of hardware that’s going to come out. Where can we take it then? You know we’re already thinking about if we had XYZ X number of years from now, what would we do with our engine?

That sounds a little wanky to me, to be honest. Saying that they used 100% of the 512MB of RAM that the 360 has available is just excessive - they should cut back on some of their textures, and add extra content to the game if its important.

Unless they have balanced their textures/RAM usage to 50:50, its going to make a PS3 port much, much harder as well - as the memory is more segmented.

...

They should be using more compression (i.e. for game/mesh/sound data) if they have RAM issues - I just don't believe that everything is compressed and perfectly optimised (for RAM use) - and they have used the entire 512MB.

Or setup a local RAM texture cache, and stream textures into the cache as needed. That could save them 100MB...