Resistance 2 - Nearly 50GB Big!

[MikeB]

NJ5 said:

MikeB said:

NJ5 said:
I just remembered this:

http://www.joystiq.com/2007/08/15/heavenly-sword-packed-with-10-gb-of-sound-data/

"Heavenly Sword packed with 10 GB of sound data"

Now keep in mind how short Heavenly Sword was, and you can start seeing just how much space uncompressed audio takes up.

Take into account:

"That sizable number includes approximately three and a half hours of music, sound effects and 4,500 lines of dialog. "There's an hour and a half's worth of cut scenes in eleven languages," said SCEE's Garry Taylor."

That doesn't change the fact that simply using uncompressed audio is going to take up a big portion of the space of your game.
Many games have multiple languages in one disc, if they used lossless compression or lossy compression with excellent bitrates, no one would be able to notice any difference in quality, and games would be much smaller.

However, as I said above, now that Blu-Ray is a given on the PS3, there's no reason to optimize for space if you don't need it for other game data. I'm not criticizing the developers here for using uncompressed audio, I'm just trying to give some information on the reasons for this kind of space usage.

 

Yes, lossless 7.1 quality audio eats up GBs of storage, but so does high quality graphics. I don't think audio quality is irrelevant, a large chunk of the PS3 userbase already owns 7.1 audio setups.

Some 360 games like Blue Dragon and Lost Odessey lacking lossless 7.1 audio already span many DVDs, note these games are linear, for non linear games devs are far more likely to make sacrifices (like for GTA IV) instead of spanning games onto more discs.

PS3 and 360 game data (code) is usually compressed at a 2:1 compression ratio, on the PS3 this makes abosulte sense as the Cell is able to decode compressed files faster than they can be read from disc. Some claimed Motorstorm files weren't compressed, but that's misinformation. The lenghty load times were due to the game loading each level's data in one go, the game did not support streaming except for 7.1 quality audio and of course the tracks are pretty huge with multiple routes for each track.