PGR4 limited by DVD9 size

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Soberteq

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The DVD vs Blu-Ray debate is being fired up again this morning, as PGR4 dev Bizarre Creations blames DVD size for the reason you won't see different times of day in PGR4.

Speaking on it's offical forums, a Bizarre spokesman said you won't see different times of day for the city because this involves recreating all the textures again (one for day and one for night). Whilst this wasn't a problem for our dev team, it was a problem fitting all this data on one DVD.
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http://www.computerandvideogames.com/article.php?id=169199

bad bad press for Microsoft lately :rolleyes:

Rockstar Games complaining about the lack of HD in all Xbox for development and now Bizarre complaining about squeezing data on DVD.

PS3 list of feature seem to be worth the price.
 
what the...?

recreated all the textures for Time of Day effects? we had this feature in games for a long ass time, since when did this feature massively required a dynamic change in textures?

isn't TOD just a rotating light source?
 
I guess games that are in HD needs high quality textures, which probably take up a lot of space. Didn't Rockstar Games complain that Grand Theft Auto on the xbox 360 didn't have enough space? So the extra content will have to be downloaded.
 
Cypther said:
I guess games that are in HD needs high quality textures, which probably take up a lot of space. Didn't Rockstar Games complain that Grand Theft Auto on the xbox 360 didn't have enough space?
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What they said exactly:

"On PS3 you've got a guarantee that every machine is going to have a hard-drive and, with Blu-ray, you've got plenty of storage, whereas on Xbox 360 there's no guarantee of a hard-drive and you're working with the DVD format. Does that create limitations?" To which he replied, "Yep."

He continued, "To be honest with you we haven't solved all those riddles yet." The difficulties aren't limited to working on Microsoft's box, as Houser explains that "both have enormous challenges" and that "both have their own particular pleasures and pains".
 
Cypther said:
I guess games that are in HD needs high quality textures, which probably take up a lot of space. Didn't Rockstar Games complain that Grand Theft Auto on the xbox 360 didn't have enough space? So the extra content will have to be downloaded.
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Thats not what will take up all the space, their game will dynamically change all the high def textures they are already using for TOD effects, to me it sounds like they aren't talking about TOD at all but applying an after effect to give the illusion of a better TOD (or easier?? :confused: )

very confused by this, never heard of a game needing to change textures before...
 
Psychotext said:
What they said exactly:

"On PS3 you've got a guarantee that every machine is going to have a hard-drive and, with Blu-ray, you've got plenty of storage, whereas on Xbox 360 there's no guarantee of a hard-drive and you're working with the DVD format. Does that create limitations?" To which he replied, "Yep."

He continued, "To be honest with you we haven't solved all those riddles yet." The difficulties aren't limited to working on Microsoft's box, as Houser explains that "both have enormous challenges" and that "both have their own particular pleasures and pains".
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Exactly, but 360 problem cant be sloved with exp... eventually no matter how many tricks devs pull, space is just not going to be enough
 
Brownstone said:
Exactly, but 360 problem cant be sloved with exp... eventually no matter how many tricks devs pull, space is just not going to be enough
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True, but I don't know why people are so concerned about it. If the 360 had HD-DVD we wouldn't have had all the cool games we've had so far because it would have released against the PS3 at the same time and at the same price.... and it would have been utterly demolished.

People (generally those with agendas) seem to be playing this like it means it's all over, no good games for the 360 from this point on.
 
psychoace said:
or swapping discs between online games or day or night sequences.
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yeah, i definitely didn't mean between day and night sequences, but they could put all the data for half the tracks on one dvd. All the data for the other half on a 2nd DVD. It would suck and would be an annoyance, but it's better than nothing. I think the bigger mistake here from the 360's perspective is not including an HD with all models, more so than not including a high storage optical drive. I mean, it's a 20gb laptop drive. Those should cost them ~ $20 a piece.
 
While I don't think DVD size is an issue for the xbox360, there's an easy solution. For games that requires more than 1 DVD, allow maps or other crucial data to be downloaded to the hard drive.... problem solved. Now you only have to change DVDs the first time you play or if you don't have a hard drive.
 
i agreewith the "should have had a hard drive in each unit" now for this entire gen they will have to make all games support 360s with no hard drive, i always said this was prob. looks like the tides are slowly turning with the bigger games, admittedly 90% of games this wont affect, its just when more and more aaa games start to need the extra room making the game miss out on the aaa status in some poples eyes....
 
Relying on texture swapping to make day/night cycles look good seems like a dandy way to get out of coding some very difficult dynamic lighting. You can simply keep throwing artists at textures until you have enough, but code is far more complicated (expensive and difficult to schedule, too) to both create and optimize.
 
Rash said:
i agreewith the "should have had a hard drive in each unit" now for this entire gen they will have to make all games support 360s with no hard drive, i always said this was prob. looks like the tides are slowly turning with the bigger games, admittedly 90% of games this wont affect, its just when more and more aaa games start to need the extra room making the game miss out on the aaa status in some poples eyes....
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Yeah, the HDD-less system was a total mistake on MS's part. How ironic and humorous that Sony learned the lesson Xbox 1 taught last gen, and Microsoft *forgot* it.
 
Doward said:
What ever happened to compression?
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Well, let's see. The graphic accelerator and CPU are tied up with physics calculations and rendering and such, so there's probably not going to be overhead available for on-the-fly decompression. There's not enough memory to cache all of these decompressed textures, and there's no hard drive to store the decompressed textures. So how does compression help anything?
 
Doward said:
What ever happened to compression?
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They are compressed. If you think they are rocking with 20mb .bmp files you are sorely misinformed. More than likely they are using some form of DXTC

Parja said:
Well, let's see. The graphic accelerator and CPU are tied up with physics calculations and rendering and such, so there's probably not going to be overhead available for on-the-fly decompression. There's not enough memory to cache all of these decompressed textures, and there's no hard drive to store the decompressed textures. So how does compression help anything?
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Talking out of your ass.

jaegertech said:
Relying on texture swapping to make day/night cycles look good seems like a dandy way to get out of coding some very difficult dynamic lighting. You can simply keep throwing artists at textures until you have enough, but code is far more complicated (expensive and difficult to schedule, too) to both create and optimize.
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Agreed. Using different textures for day/night is just a cheap way to fake the effect. The whole thing could be done with pixel shaders if they wanted to, let alone the normal approach of dynamic lighting.
 
Parja said:
Well, let's see. The graphic accelerator and CPU are tied up with physics calculations and rendering and such, so there's probably not going to be overhead available for on-the-fly decompression. There's not enough memory to cache all of these decompressed textures, and there's no hard drive to store the decompressed textures. So how does compression help anything?
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The textures will be compressed anyway, as they are on the PS3 because of how long it takes to get data off the optical media.

You don't need a hard-drive to deal with that.
 
Psychotext said:
True, but I don't know why people are so concerned about it. If the 360 had HD-DVD we wouldn't have had all the cool games we've had so far because it would have released against the PS3 at the same time and at the same price.... and it would have been utterly demolished.

People (generally those with agendas) seem to be playing this like it means it's all over, no good games for the 360 from this point on.
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That's how I see it also. If they were "smart" enough to release with a HD-DVD drive instead of a DVD drive it would have been released a year later with a higher price. It could not have competed against the PS3 and would have lost on name alone.
 
Molasses said:
That's how I see it also. If they were "smart" enough to release with a HD-DVD drive instead of a DVD drive it would have been released a year later with a higher price. It could not have competed against the PS3 and would have lost on name alone.
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Not to mention it would be too big a risk to include HD-DVD when the format war is long from gone. PS3 having BD is understandable since Sony is the one pimping it in the first place. But it's not like MS owns HD-DVD, so if HD-DVD loses the 360 would have an obsolete feature that may or may not discourage potential buyers (in the mentality of a consumer, if there is an obsolete feature, even if you don't need/care for it, it lowers the overall value of the product).
 
swapping discs is so 20th century.

whoever argued in the past that double layered dvd was enough for this gen... well, there's your fact.
 
Perhaps they should license Allegorithmic's ProFX, and use procedural textures.
 
http://www.bizarrecreations.com/article.php?article_id=5257

"As I'm sure you've seen, some of the comments made on our forum have been blown out of all proportion. This has been reported on certain web sites. It seems that a number of fan boys have jumped on the topic... sigh. So it's time we cleared this one up...

When we started designing PGR4 our primary goals were to create a great and unique experience over and above PGR3, to push the hardware as far as we could, and obviously to ensure that we give great value for money. DVD size is absolutely not a factor that we consider when designing our games[... and PGR4 is no exception. DVD9 gives us more than we need to create a fabulous experience for you guys."

Well, I guess that clears it up.
 
Well I get to say I told you so to all the posters that shit on me 2 years ago when I said DVD9 wasn't going to be enough. (had a different account back then)

But can someone correct me if I'm wrong; didn't Gran Turismo on the original playstation have something like 3-4 disks.

To be honest its not a huge problem because you can have multidvd games, its just annoying to have to swap the disk. Hopefully some developers will allow you to install some of the content on the hard drive if you have one. I think COD4 has an option to install stuff to the hard drive.
 
Northbridge said:
Well I get to say I told you so to all the posters that shit on me 2 years ago when I said DVD9 wasn't going to be enough. (had a different account back then)

But can someone correct me if I'm wrong; didn't Gran Turismo on the original playstation have something like 3-4 disks.

To be honest its not a huge problem because you can have multidvd games, its just annoying to have to swap the disk. Hopefully some developers will allow you to install some of the content on the hard drive if you have one. I think COD4 has an option to install stuff to the hard drive.
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So what about those with the Core system, what are they to do?

bazylik said:
swapping discs is so 20th century.
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I couldn't agree with you more. Man what is worse than getting comfortable playing a game and getting a message saying "Please insert Disc2". It was annoying when watching LotR's, its annoying period.
 
I doesnt clear anything up. They come up with a statement yesterday and say the opposite today.

Sound like Microsoft told them to retract their statement to keep the bad press from spreading.
 
Baker said:
So what about those with the Core system, what are they to do?
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They have to suffer through swapping disks unlike everyone else with a hard drive.

Thats the price you pay for what I would argue is a gimped system. The core system should never have hit retailers. And in all honesty would Microsoft have lost that many sales by not having it anyways? How many core to premiums are in peoples living rooms? It appears to me the extra $100 for the premium wasn't that big of a deal for most people buying a 360.
 
Btw... game is clearly suffering from lack of space on the drive:

1163_0001.jpg
 
Soberteq said:
Sound like Microsoft told them to retract their statement to keep the bad press from spreading.
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I think it was more that they were worried they made it sound like the game had to be gimped. That's not the way to promote your own stuff.
 
bazylik said:
swapping discs is so 20th century.

whoever argued in the past that double layered dvd was enough for this gen... well, there's your fact.
Click to expand...

Dual Layer DVD is *plenty* for this generation in the vast majority of cases. In a few we'll have multi-disk games, so what? i suppose you'll argue next that CD's weren't adequate for the Playstation/Sega Saturn generation either?
 
I don't think this is a huge issue with the DVD and all.

I think MS fucked up by not including a HDD in all models, thats for sure. Whats worse is it costs a fuckin arm and a leg to get an HDD if you don't already have one. I am still jaw dropped at how much they charge for their add-on hard drives. It really blows me away. The core system to begin with is a ripoff.

But, what can ya do. You have millions maybe without Hard Drives in their systems. There is no way that you can make a game that requires something that your lowest model can not deliver....just can't do it.
 
CopyCat said:
I don't think this is a huge issue with the DVD and all.
But, what can ya do. You have millions maybe without Hard Drives in their systems. There is no way that you can make a game that requires something that your lowest model can not deliver....just can't do it.
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I can't agree with this. I think it's honestly stupid to have to cater to the lowest common denominator of people who have a core system without a hard drive. Sure, you might limit your audience, but they can always upgrade.

When you state that you have to assume that people won't have hard drives, in a similar way, you'd have to assume people with PS3's won't have hard drives. Why? Because maybe their 20 GB is full of previous games, and they won't have the 3 GB of hard drive space you need for cache.

PS3's get around this by giving the option of installing, while assuming the person won't have a hard drive (or at least very minimal space). The 360 could get around this by giving the option of playing PGR4 without a hard drive, and also giving an option of installing the game to give an enhanced experience.
 
aznpxdd said:
http://www.bizarrecreations.com/article.php?article_id=5257

"As I'm sure you've seen, some of the comments made on our forum have been blown out of all proportion. This has been reported on certain web sites. It seems that a number of fan boys have jumped on the topic... sigh. So it's time we cleared this one up...

When we started designing PGR4 our primary goals were to create a great and unique experience over and above PGR3, to push the hardware as far as we could, and obviously to ensure that we give great value for money. DVD size is absolutely not a factor that we consider when designing our games[... and PGR4 is no exception. DVD9 gives us more than we need to create a fabulous experience for you guys."

Well, I guess that clears it up.
Click to expand...

Right on. I can't wait for this game. I loved PGR3. I still play it to this day, and the graphics are almost still better than Forza (to me), if not very close. Then again, I guess you can say it's a trade off because it's not as deep as Forza 2. Wasn't PGR3 a launch game? I remember it was one of the first games I bought after Condemned and Perfect Dark. I loved the sense of speed in PGR3, but with the graphics updates to 4, and with more cars in the new one, it's going to make it even better. And I love the fact they're adding weather effects into the mix. I can't wait to see what it'll be like driving in rain.
 
This is all reminding me of the N64 days when you had to buy that expansion pack in order to play perfect dark campaign. Normal people don't like spending extra on an item that you are required for in order to play a game. We buy consoles so we dont have to upgrade, but when you start requiring extra mandatory peripherals in order to play future games, then its just like buying a gimped PC.
 
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