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

[iclim4]

shams said:

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.

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Sure, I understand what you are saying.

I just don't really agree.

Sony are pushing developers to make bigger games. Ones that take more space. Its one of the advantages of the PS3 hardware, and they want to use it for media/publicity reasons.

There is no evidence that the game would be significantly different on either a single DVD (9Gig), or multiple discs.

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For instance - take sound. Instead of using compressed sound, they might be using uncompressed, 32-bit, stereo, 44Khz (or higher) samples.

Its one of the biggest space wasters in games. A game I worked on had 500MB of sound - and it was compressed, mono, etc.

We *could* have made it much larger if we had the space - it could have gone from 500MB to 8Gig quite easily.

Apart from being a pain-in-the-butt to process (larger files, longer build process, longer disc burns, more server space taken, more source repos space taken, etc..) would it have made any real difference to the game?

No - not really. 

On some machines (this was for a PC/XBOX/PS2 title), it might have improved the audio experience. But we would have been better off putting the extra development time into improving the use of the audio within the game. Instead of making a 5% difference to the quality of the audio, it could have made a real difference - 5% to the quality of the game.

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Clever programming allows huge environments and experiences to be generated from small data sets. Its been happening from the very start of programming - there are some really amazing demo-scene applications, and the machines those demos were designed on were much less than 1% as powerful as a PS3/360.

It may be a personal preference (development) thing - and there may be a real reason why huge data sets are required for some games.

But - if the developers for those games are not using compression to the maximum, and using every trick in the book to reduce data sets to a minimum - they are kidding themselves.

It would simply mean that the extra space has not been legitimately used at all - and is purely an excuse for lazying programming, and ammunition for a PR department looking for material.

(note that compression *also* reduces load times - and more so in next-gen consoles than last-gen - so there is no excuse to not use it)

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We have all seen LAIR & Heavenly Sword. Two games that define Sony's desire and use for BluRay. Neither have proven that BluRay is useful for games.

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.