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nightsurge on 11 March 2010
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almcchesney said:
CommonMan said:
nightsurge said:
Damnyouall said:
Welcome to the wonderful world of DRM and digital distribution, where you don't own the movies and games you purchased.

On topic: No physical media needed for distribution? Good luck with those 30-50 GB downloads of future games, of which a whole bunch will fit on those enormous internal hdds.

Please check up on what I posted earlier.  Games via DD would be much smaller file sizes.  For example, a 50GB Blu Ray game on DD would probably only be about 25GB and maybe even a lot less.  So much data is duplicated on discs to ensure they load and are accessible as quickly as possible.  They could easily take a game like FF13 on 360 and release it for DD at only 8GB or so since each disc is filled with duplicated data.

The PC equivalent to an HD console game is usually 10-15GB MAX and yet it still looks better and supports higher resolutions/audio formats.  I'd be perfectly fine buying a 250gb HDD and downloading those games.  My internet could do one game ever 2 hours or faster.


Good post nightsurge! My guess is this will either/or be ignored or trashed though.

i dont think that much is lost due to multiple spots of data, sure if its contiguous its faster but the disc drive should have no problem with it the shifting of the laser takes a fraction of a second, after ripping roms (for my own personal backup) you get an idea of how much space what takes up and where,and cgi and audio takes up probably 70% of the discs anyway, givin that multiple sets of the same data are on each disc id say a  DD version of this would be like 18-21gb. and even if it could fit on 8gb dd like nightwish thinks wouldnt they only used 2 (18gb) dvd instead of 3(27gb)

Actually I guess a lot of it is also due to gaps where layer switches occur.  Duplicated data is only a big issue for multi-disc games and some blu-ray games to make up for the slower read speed.

Here is the article explaining how DD or installed to hard drive games can use less space:

http://www.xbox.com/en-US/live/engineeringblog/default.htm

"All storage media (flash, hard drives, discs, etc) have a layout that dictates where and how the files will be stored.  Optical disc drives spin the disc at a constant velocity which means that as the head reads the data from the disc and moves towards the center, the data will be read faster.  Xbox 360 game disc layouts are optimized for the reading speeds of optical discs drives and attempt to concentrate the game disc data at the fastest read locations on the disc.  This typically ends up creating gaps at the beginning, end, and in the middle of the disc layout where layer 1 transfers to layer 2.  When we first released the “Play from hard drive” feature in 2008, we did not do any detection of gaps that can exist in between game code in disc layouts.  We started our game copy at the first sector where the game started (skipping the gap at the beginning of the disc) and copied the disc until we hit the last readable sector of the disc where the game code ended (skipping the gap at the end of the disc).   During the 2008 release, we decided to not optimize out the gaps that can occur in the middle of the game code in the disc layout.

Fast forward to the 2009 release: we went back and examined how much potential space savings we could deliver to customers by removing these gaps that can occur in the middle of the game code in the disc layout.  Around the same time, we got the official green light for Xbox 360 Games on Demand project which meant customers were going to be downloading these packages, thus it was even a higher priority to squeeze the image size down as small as possible.  We did a bunch of analysis to determine the sizes of these gaps in the middle of the disc layout as well as how we could remove it during the disc image creation process.  Since everyone loves data, here is a snap shot of the data that we collected to make the decision whether the code investment to remove the gaps in the middle would pay off:

Average Space Saved (MB): 735.38
Max Space Saved (MB): 3476.37
Min Space Saved (MB): 0
Median Space Saved (MB): 453.94

 

After collecting this data we knew that this would be highly valuable since we would obtain a median savings of 453MB per game for both hard drive space and download time.  Since both “Play from hard drive” and “Xbox 360 Games on Demand” use the same underlying technology we were able to make the code change to remove these gaps for both."