How much do you reckon Sony paid for MGS4 exclusivity?

[Andir]

starcraft said:

Andir said:

 

What you believe and what is true are two different things. Use your noggin for a second here. Data is stored on the discs as binary data. There is no "special packet" involved here as you claim. You are going to get the same transfer speed at the same point in a disc. On DVD that speed gets faster as you move along the surface. BD ROM acts more like a hard disk where the disc spins at a constant velocity and the drive doesn't have to wait for spin-up/spin-down as you would with regular DVD, thus decreasing the seek times since the head only has to move to the appropriate spot and start reading. It's basic physics here. DVDs have to wait for the disc to reach an appropriate speed. If you have a game that fills all 9G of a DVD, your seeks times are going to go all to hell if you can't duplicate some of that info. You'd have the laser all over that disk reading in uniform textures, level data, and whatever from all parts of the disc. This is why they duplicate textures in each level and keep these within the same area on a disc. Sure, you could probably squeeze MGS onto a DVD9, but your load times would suffer, your disc would constantly be spinning up and down to load the data all over the disc and you'd hate every minute of the loading. But let me tell you, those first few levels that they crammed on the outter track with the commonly used textures and models would be pretty fast... but as you progress through the game, your load times would go in the crapper.

Thats the key point for me there.  Your assuming a 9gb game to get your average.  At most a game has a few GB of textures, and the games engine is already streamed to the processors. 

You put your finger on it in this post though.  MGS4 could probably be squeezed onto a single disk with crappy load times.  All I've argued in the entire thread is that the game could be put on TWO disks without any major performance lost other than 5.1 audio.  Do you agree with that?  Because if you do, our argument is resolved? 

 

 No, you and I could not decide that unless you have access to the MGS disc right now and can determine how many duplicated models and textures exist and how large the high quality sound files are.  And, no.  You can't compare it to other games.  If you wanted to do that, I'd show you Vanguard where the models alone are 15+ GB while the textures are roughly 10GB.  It would really depend on how much variety is in the game.  Sure you could make a terribly mundane game with few textures and repetitive dungeons (*cough* Oblivion *cough*) that looks simply "OK" after you start seeing the same models and textures re-used a million times, but again... neither of us really know what's on that disc.  You are just guessing.