Rockband on the Wii

[Sqrl]

rocketpig said:

Entroper said:

Sqrl said:

I've said this before but I'll say it again for good measure:

The sizes of those downloads is completely unnecessary. The avgerage single song should easily be able to fit under 10 MB including the information about what notes need to be played when etc... I have a feeling they are doing things the hard way and separating each instrument into its own file and mixing it back together at playback.

Whatever the reasons they did it for its not going to change now.

Honestly, the way the game works, they do need to have separate tracks and mix them during the game. When you mess up, your specific instrument track doesn't play, but the rest of the tracks continue. It has an effect in multiplayer, too. Even with separate tracks, though, they could definitely consume less space than 30-60 MB per song.

@DMeisterJ: Stop trying to impose your own artificial limitations on the Wii. Again, Smash Bros. appears to have its own download interface that is separate from the Wii Shop Channel, and there is absolutely no reason that Rock Band could not do the same. Why do you make this stuff up? Why do you even care, would a fully functional Wii version of Rock Band be some kind of a threat to you?

Both of you are also forgetting the crowd vocals specific for each song, the various video setups (each song has its own "video", if you will), and a few other things.

There's a lot more going on in Rock Band than you initially realize. Trust me, I've played the damned game enough to notice (logged well over 50 hours on the game already, probably more like 100).

 I was actually accounting for the video aspect also.  Unless they are bringing in entirely new sets and stages for you to play on we are talking about maybe a few KB worth of data to tell the actors where and how to move, a good lipsyncing  engine would only need the lyrics in a text format to sync that also.  A very small amount of the 30MB is anything but song tracks.

Also, I kinda figured that the game stopped playing only the portion being messed up when someone made a mistake. But you can still get around that with only a single recording..but I totally admit its a lot more complicated that way...thats why I said it wasn't going to happen =P

Basically they made it for the 360 and PS3 where the space issue didn't matter and they did it the easier way...its not a bad method its just using more space than is absolutely required.  In short they did it the smart way for those consoles because there was no reason for them to spend time or effort shrinking the format when it wasn't an issue for them.  It makes things interesting for a Wii port but that wasn't on their plate at the time and by the time it was in the cards they weren't going to go back and fix something that worked already.