Developers Talk Xbox 360

[Evil Avatar]

Gamecloud continues their coverage of the Microsoft Xbox 360 with a review (http://www.gamecloud.com/article.php?article_id=2373) of the hardware and an article (http://www.gamecloud.com/article.php?article_id=2374) asking several developers three questions about the Xbox 360 Launch.

Randy Pitchford: President-Gearbox Software

I think that we’re really going to be wishing we had a bigger storage medium soon – everything about the machine is next-generation except for the actual disc format. We’re going to need more space for what we’re doing…

[TrackZero]

I still find it surprising we can't just handle having 2 discs for the games that do require more space. It's not THAT big a deal after being 20 hours into a game to switch to a second disc. It should last out this generation.

[Captain Awesome]

While I can see his gripe. One thing I've noticed with alot of North American developers is that better content compression is almost a lost art form.

I'm hoping that next-gen also means fast to non-existant load times. Tired of games on consoles having rediculous load times.

[speeder]

Wasn't there a recent Bill Gates quote where he said he expects disc formats to die because people will be able to download content?

[Zawath]

Oh Randy Randy Randy. Your games have always been so short so I doubt that your game can fill the DVD unless you pack it with high quality voices and CGi.

[Borys]

It's not like games weren't on many discs before (Final Fantasy). A 4 DVD 360 game gives you around 28 GBs of space that is roughly the same as one Blu-Ray.

However,
you can say good-bye to open-areas, constant streaming games like GTA. Having to switch discs when going over a bridge to the second island would really shatter the atmosphere and I think it's not quite possible to do technically. Sony MUST make this one its biggest advantages. Make R* do GTA:4 impossible to port to the inferior hardware - the 360. PCs will still get it - after all you can install it on your 200 GB HD :)

Every other type of game, a game which has LEVELS (RPGs, FPSes, Racing etc.) will be virtually the same on 4 discs instead of one HD-DVD.

I'm hoping that next-gen also means fast to non-existant load times. Tired of games on consoles having rediculous load times.

Not to disappoint you but look on the internet - RR loads for 30 seconds, PGR3 features 10 seconds loading etc. Longer loading times are here to STAY because it takes more time to fill up 360's memory than it took to fill Xbox' memory.

[Zawath]

ES4: Oblivion is going to have a world much bigger than in any GTA games and still it fits just fine on one DVD.

[Borys]

ES4: Oblivion is going to have a world much bigger than in any GTA games and still it fits just fine on one DVD.

Daggerfall has a world that's bigger than Oblivion+Morrowind+All GTAs together, 10 times and it did fit on a few floppies, that's not the point.

You fail @ logic.

[Vandenh]

I am going to state again that no (PC) game at the moment fills up more than 1 DVD. And remember folks, PC games currently have higher res textures than next gen consoles will have. The only way to fill up a DVD right now is with sounds/movies.

>You fail @ logic.

Actually no Borys, his point is valid. Procedural generation of assets is probably the future, people don't have the time and the resources to fill in levels with assets, computers can do it themselves. The original Daggerfall generated most of its dungeons... and yes they all looked a bit similar, but this can be improved. Actually I am currently doing a lot of work in generated levels and the things you can do are pretty impressive. Storage space is reduced by a very big factor... games designers just will have to rethink some of their classical ways. Maybe this DVD thing will be a blessing in disguise for the 360.

[Evil Dude]

Console game installation!!! Like the current homebrew for xbox...which we can put the whole game into hdd.
Maybe xb360 dev could release game in 2 disc and such, 1 disc for installation, 1 for game.

[AlmostSente]

Lazy developers... I've seen the way many of them store stuff. Millions of files in subdirectories and uncompressed.

[ldi222]

Maybe if Pitchford spends more than 8 months on a sequal this will become a concern but for now it sounds like a baseless gripe. After the latest Sony DRM incident, I am not very eager for a blu ray enabled device either. It does make one wonder if 360 will be upgraded over its lifecycle to include a HD-DVD and larger hard drive however that doesnt seem very possible as it would fragment the userbase and essentially become a PC for the living room. oh wait...

[TKO]

Yeah, more developer whining. Couldn't see that one coming. ;) ..Maybe time for some of them to learn to do a teeny bit of compression/optomization on their stuff before they shove it out the door. I don't think 8 or 9 GB is seriously going to stifle game innovation (if such a thing should be found to still exist.) :D Hell, I rekon most of them are *glad* that here is limiter for their exploding development budgets.

And as for continually-streaming stuff like the next GTA: Well, if they really can't find a way to make it all fit on the one disc it's probably time to start utilizing that hard-drive for storage. While those with the core 360 can have the fun of loading-screens between the the two 'halves' of the city. (And remove some of those girlfriend jiggly-bit assets this time. That's gotta free up a few kb.) :p

[absolut taco]

Hopefully developers will realize that the 360's horsepower can render cutscenes on the fly so they don't fill the discs with DVD-quality cgi. Besides, the discs hold 9GB! That is an insane amount of space!

[AspectVoid]

I am going to state again that no (PC) game at the moment fills up more than 1 DVD. And remember folks, PC games currently have higher res textures than next gen consoles will have. The only way to fill up a DVD right now is with sounds/movies.


That's because PC games compress better and extract most of the information to your hard drive. It's easily possible to put a 2.5gb game on 2 CDs. You just compress the hell out of the files and then uncompress them onto the hard drive.

The problem with the XB360 is Microsoft's requirement that every game support HD. For companies that do a lot of pre-rendered movies, such as Square-Enix, that means there will have to be 2 sets of every movie in the game, one HD and one SD. If they could put SD only movies on the disks, it would save a lot of space and you really wouldn't have any problems.

[Serapth]

That's because PC games compress better and extract most of the information to your hard drive. It's easily possible to put a 2.5gb game on 2 CDs. You just compress the hell out of the files and then uncompress them onto the hard drive.

The problem with the XB360 is Microsoft's requirement that every game support HD. For companies that do a lot of pre-rendered movies, such as Square-Enix, that means there will have to be 2 sets of every movie in the game, one HD and one SD. If they could put SD only movies on the disks, it would save a lot of space and you really wouldn't have any problems.

No, I dont believe thats correct. Their would be one movie, and then it would be downsamples from HD to SD. I believe all games natively put out 720p, then get resampled to 480 ( or 1080) by the machines hardware itself. Its zero effort to the devs, other then some additional testing. The biggest hurdle would be handling 4:3 vs 16:9 as that couldnt be done automatically.

Finally, I had read somewhere that the XBox had decompression capabilities built right into the chipset. If decompression was handled in silicon and didnt hurt performance, you can fit a pretty big chunk of content onto a 9gig dvd. I dont see too many issues here.

[Vandenh]

>That's because PC games compress better and extract most of the information to your hard drive. It's easily possible to put a 2.5gb game on 2 CDs. You just compress the hell out of the files and then uncompress them onto the hard drive.

Dude.. please delete that or study a couple more years.

[Cyrano]

That's right, the developers who actually make games have no idea what they want. They have no right to wish for a hard drive in every system and a bigger storage format because 360 fanboys in an internet forum say so.

[UnderHero5]

Actually, Myst 4 on PC was 2 DVD's....
*runs*

*Walk back* but they weren't DVD9's

[Serapth]

That's right, the developers who actually make games have no idea what they want. They have no right to wish for a hard drive in every system and a bigger storage format because 360 fanboys in an internet forum say so.

No, its more like developers always ask for more then they can get by on. Always have, always will. Like, if you give a system 512 ram, your going to get developers wishing it had a gig.

[if76]

The thing about GTA is completely baseless. No matter how you slice it, the main GTA overworld is not gonna be 7gb worth of polygons and textures. If they had to put a next-gen gta on multiple discs, they could just put half the story missions on one disc and half on the other.

That said, I think this whole thing is ridiculous. Half-Life 2 has high resolution textures, high polygon counts, and tons of character animation and it fits in a snug 2.5gb on my hdisk. The only thing it doesn't have is non-interactive FMV but you don't see me complaining

[inmostlight]

No, I dont believe thats correct. Their would be one movie, and then it would be downsamples from HD to SD. I believe all games natively put out 720p, then get resampled to 480 ( or 1080) by the machines hardware itself. Its zero effort to the devs, other then some additional testing. The biggest hurdle would be handling 4:3 vs 16:9 as that couldnt be done automatically.

Or if they're very lazy and short on space, they could render it at 480p and then upsample to 720. Or optimize the compression algorithms, which is an art in and of itself.

As for the aspect ratios, couldn't they just letterbox it on 4:3 screens? Heck, they could probably use the built-in DVD decoders to handle that conversion...

And as another poster mentioned, they could also do procedural rendering instead of cutscenes. Half the time on current generation it seems like the pre-rendered cut scenes look worse than the game engine. The Splinter Cell games, for instance, will have horribly blocky renders of Sam at certain points, when it would be so much better to just display the sequence normally...