Is Blu-Ray Really Necessary For Gaming?

[MikeB]

@ NJ5

You don't really understand what "optimizing for space" means, do you?

Of course I do, realtime rendered cutscenes should take less space than pre-rendered cutscene videos. Compression is one option and improves loading times on the PS3 as the Cell is so powerful it can decompress data faster than the drive can load the additional data. Compression possibilities are also limited though as in the end it's all just 1s and 0s and you cannot reduce this further without losing data (reduced texture or video quality for example is possible, so you can reduce this furher than executeable code).

You have to understand I come from an Amiga background, devs had to deal with 880 KB diskettes, this was the platform's most evident and profound limitation with regard to creating games. Devs had to pull every trick they could find to reduce the amount of data on disc, such as re-using graphics and sound from previous levels, using memory efficient mod music, procedural teniques to create more diversity or by mirrorring graphics and using different color schemes, etc.

The demoscene also is really big on the Amiga with for example the devs behind Max Payne / FutureMark creating space and memory restricted technical demonstrations for fun. They had to use a varierty of techniques to impress while limiting themselves to for example on 40K-64K max for intros or one disc for the bigger demos.

Example Amiga 500 demo example (880 KB disc) (DivX capture)
http://omr.planet-d.net/amidemos/sota.zip

Amiga 4000 demo
http://youtube.com/watch?v=2aoIsWxGWHQ