shams said:
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. ... 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. ... 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) ... 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. |
I understand what you're saying.
I'm a fan of the HD audio. It's no different than providing Dolby TrueHD on Blu-Ray and HD DVD movies. If they have the extra space for thsi, I'm all about it. More realistic sound = a more immersive gameplay experience.
As for lazy developers and compression, the developers of Mass Effect said that they originally thought that they would be unable to fit the game on a single disc, but with some crafty dev work, they managed to barely cram everything in. There will be games that use up more capacity than a DVD9, it is inevitable, and some of the games, that actual game engine itself will take up more than a DVD9, so it doesn't matter how much audio, w/e you try to put on another disc. The common data that would normally be replicated onto eachdisc cannot even fit on asingle DVD, and the game would simply not be able to run. According to Naughty Dog, Uncharted is oneof the first example, though of course, as yousaid, it could just be PR. Either way, there eventually will be games that ligtimitely require a BD-rom, you can't deny that. And I think some, if not many, will come out this generation.
Ultimately, more space > less space.
