How many PS3 games actually use the Blu Ray storage?

[MikeB]

Cryoakira,

Nope, it's hasen't been applied for games much, because procedural requires a high level of mastering and doesn't work with many games.

Such methods have been used extensively for creating many video games (and of course demoscene productions), where this development approach makes sense. PC examples of games using such methods include even ID software's and Valve's games, Oblivion is a better known example, but high quality audio and textures usually take up the bulk of data storage needed for modern games.

For example PS3 games like Unreal Tournament 3, Resistance: Fall of Man and Ratchet and Clank: Tools of Destruction use procedural methods for example through (but not exclusively) SpeedTree middlware:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpeedTree

Why procedural methods always been used to design games?

1) (Can) Save development time.
2) (usually) Easier to create game diversity.
2) (usually) Results in filesize reductions.

"The earliest computer games were severely limited by memory constraints. This forced content like maps to be generated algorithmically on the fly: there simply wasn't enough space to store a large amount of pre-made levels and artwork. Pseudorandom number generators were often used with predefined seed values in order to create very large game worlds that appeared premade. For example, The Sentinel supposedly had 10,000 different levels stored in only 48 or 64 kilobytes. An extreme case was Elite, which was originally planned to contain a total of 248 (approximately 282 trillion) galaxies with 256 solar systems each. The publisher, however, was afraid that such a gigantic universe would cause disbelief in players, and eight of these galaxies were chosen for the final version.[1] Other notable early examples include the 1985 game Rescue on Fractalus that used fractal technology to procedurally create in real time the craggy mountains of an alien planet and River Raid, the 1982 Activision game that used a pseudorandom number sequence generated by a linear feedback shift register in order to generate a scrolling maze of obstacles."

The PS3 is a more powerful platform than the 360 for procedural synthesis as the device offers far more processing potential and of course the Blu-Ray drive additional space still offers a huge advantage as well. Procedural methods are nothing new, are widely used whenever it makes sense and the approach has its weakpoints (artist design freedom and burdening programmers more where artists have better expertise) and strongpoints.

Carmack (I often don't agree with this guy, at least with regard to assymetric multiprocessing, claims of not being able to port Doom to the Amiga while today not only Doom but also Quake runs on Amigas available back then unlike PC setups available at the that time), IMO he did hit a nail here:

"Carmack also spoke briefly of synthesis, or procedural generation of artistic aspects like textures and models. While he feels that one can certainly find interesting effects via synthesis, he feels that overall you will end up with better assets if an artist has spent time directly on them. He feels that synthesis technologies which use initial art developed by a human being have the best chance for producing workable assets. Beginning with a high resolution texture painted by a game artist, and synthesizing a non-repeating but infinitely tiling pattern from it may be the way to give a "hand-painted" look to future games, without requiring an artist touch manually adjust every square inch of the level manually."

despite all their processing power, the PS3 and X360 still have low RAM capacity, so the size of texture you can use remains low.

The amount of available memory is huge for a games console (PCs usually run bulky and resource draining Linux, MacOS or Windows based operating systems. Using streaming methods the PS3 actually has a significant memory advantage for gaming over the 360 and PCs.

Because of game budget and content production costs, games are mostly even shorter than before

How short is Oblivion? How short is Pacman? Sure creating audio-visually impressive games takes time and effort, thus resources. Games will remain the same size overall due to bigger teams and the overall very healty games industry.

The move towards the PS3 costs time and effort as there's such a huge leap in technology compared to the PS2, however like the first Jak and Daxter games the later ones were much bigger while taking roughly equally as much time to develop (re-using prior game assets), God of War 2 is bigger and more polished while taking less time to develop than God of War 1.

And finally, on average, PS3 BR load slower than X360 DVD, on multiformat games.

Like I said single layer DVDs can be read faster, but such games can easily fit on any PS3's harddrive which load much faster.