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Anything new about Oblivion for the PS3
- Thread starter steinmc
- Start date
This is all very interesting theoretically, you know other than the fact that The game streams to and from the HDD on the Xbox 360 if you have one hooked up .
More importantly than anything is, Bethesda isnt going to spend the time and resources retexturing a world this large for the PS3 launch. Even if they could use a great variety of textures or super HD textures, they wont because they are porting this thing to sell copies of the game while using very little in the way of resources. Not so PS3 fans can trumpet the power of the PS3 over the 360. Why would they significantly increase their out of pocket expense in the port if they dont have to?
More importantly than anything is, Bethesda isnt going to spend the time and resources retexturing a world this large for the PS3 launch. Even if they could use a great variety of textures or super HD textures, they wont because they are porting this thing to sell copies of the game while using very little in the way of resources. Not so PS3 fans can trumpet the power of the PS3 over the 360. Why would they significantly increase their out of pocket expense in the port if they dont have to?
davepoobond
you can't put a price on sparks
Drek said:
if that were true, then it'd be 10 words, and not the game that would be unveiled in OPM or whatever
X360FanBoyLOL said:
Bethesda is definetely working on the next ES title (along with Fallout 3) and they will most likely all end up on all three platforms (X, PS3 and PC) but that is still a few years away. Oblivion will also be a PS3 title. I can't think of one reason why they wouldn't port it. I assume they'll include the post-release content from the other games, but there probably won't be much of a graphical upgrade. Porting it is a way to make more money. They aren't going to pour a ton of cash into this project.
Though, if they are far enough on Fallout 3 (which uses the same engine) they may be able to share resources. Seems unlikely, though.
steinmc said:
Maybe, but they couldn't rely on its presence, ergo they couldn't maximize the advantage of the HDD.
Modus; I'm mainly saying how guaranteed HDD presence can be used to give higher texture res, rather than saying that's how Oblivion will do it (if it will have higher texture res at all).
GhaleonEB said:
Of course the presence of a HDD doesn't guarantee the use of such a technique. But it does make it possible.
For a game like oblivion, where large swathes of land can be visible at once from a high vantage point, I think that sort of HDD streaming would be very difficult to pull off.
Vark said:
It's a primary limitation yes... but are you saying that no one has written code that exploits the faster speed of the HDD as a streaming device?
I mean... for example, without a HDD, you have to load the entire area into RAM; but with a HDD, you're able to load the textures that you predict the player will see, while streaming the rest of the level of HDD. In Oblivion, I'd imagine this would be difficult to do. But with say... an on rails shooter, it would allow the game to load larger textures into RAM (albeit less number of textures), while streaming the rest of the textures that will be coming into view off the HDD; which would be far less feasible with a optical drive.
But my other point is that texture variety can become a storage limitation. Oblivion didn't push that boundary as much as we'd thought, but doubtless other games will be designed to take advantage of the increased storage capacity afforded by BD, such as Resistance. Not to say that those games wouldn't be possible on other systems; but they probably wouldn't appear in the same form as, if they were developed for the PS3 exclusively.
To be fair, there's a good deal of repeating textures in Oblivion; the many caves look very samey, and so do the fauna. I don't think storage space was the limiting factor in the design of Oblivion, but I am saying, if you guys wanted to, you could easily push the limit of DVD7 by giving the game more unique area textures.
DCharlie
And even i am moderately surprised
wouldn't extra space lead to more variety overal rather than more textures per scene?
I mean, texture usage is RAM bound - so you still have roughly the same upper limit on textures. However, with the extra RAM you could replace reused textures with new textures... but i'd have to ask... why the hell would Bethesda care about that? Do people have photographic memories for textures?
"HOLD ON a minute ... i saw this rock texture back in Bruma!!"
DCharlie said:
Texture usage is RAM bound yes; but if you can load larger textures into the same RAM, relying on the HDD to stream the rest of the textures that you'd normally have to hold in RAM, then you'd get larger textures, for the same amount of RAM, courtesy of the HDD.
and for the second comment... maybe you wouldn't be able to tell which specific texture you saw, but you'd definetly get the sense of repitition after a few dozen hours of play.
DCharlie
And even i am moderately surprised
um... why? larger texture files eat up more RAM - you still need the textures in RAM to display and then you are still have the limit - i don't see how you can have the same RAM yet magically the HDD provides the ability for Higher rez textures per scene unless my understanding of this is totally AOT (which it might be)
me personally, i put 80+ hours into Oblivion and it never hit me. It just strikes me as a lot of effort for very little gain - infact, until someone can explain exactly how a HDD cache of Textures would allow higher res texturing and less repetition in a scene, then i don't even see how it's possible - so an argument about effort might be moot! i just see the ability of expanded storage (HDD or BR) as allowing more variety of texture DATA to be available - you still have to put it into the same amount of memory.
GhaleonEB said:
I'm not saying it's unforgiveable (at all), I'm just suggesting that the issue of unique content could be improved (in games of this nature) at some point in the future. I don't think we'll be stuck with an Oblivion-level of unique content forever (or for too long, even)..it's not a knock to the game as such, just a comment on the improvement one can hopefully expect going forward.
DCharlie said:
Because not all the textures in RAM are been displayed at once on screen, efficient streaming means that a larger portion of the textures in RAM would be allowed to be shown on screen at once.
the HDD simply allows for more efficient streaming than optical media. Indeed, the linear data rate and the predictive lookup, as well greater data redundancy allows the BD to stream more efficiently than the X360 drive, although HDD would still be best.
more texture variety would come courtesy of greater storage (BD), while higher res textures may be enabled in some games by way of HDD.
For most games, textures will be on par on both platforms, especially multiplatform games; because developers won't be as prepared to take complete advantage of the PS3's strengths over the X360.
But for games that have time disparity between releases such as FN3 and Oblivion, there's a chance for developers to not only develop more content, but to better exploit the PS3 architecture/strengths.
Of course, they're not required to do so, so there's no guarantees there.
Warm Machine
Member
It doesn't matter what the disc size or HDD size is, what matters in a streaming game is how much on board memory you have to put textures into. Lets just say that the 360 has 256 megs of textures on board at any given time. It doesn't matter if there is room on the disc for more or bigger ones because they wouldn't load into that 256 meg of currently loaded textures ANYWAY! The larger the textures you have the less of them you have to fill the available memory dedicated to video.
There is a reason the 360 dvd was not filled. Oblivions textures, assets etc had to be compressed and you cannot compare the PC packets to the 360. Totally different setup. The 360 is locked at 7.5gigs and with compression.. resources are well not that great.Nerevar said:
Blu Ray for Oblivion does not mean it will use 50 gigs but as you can see from PS3 games lately textures, sound etc are being put to good use. Bethseda will pass the 4.5gig mark on PS3 because they can.
Well if it is coming though
Warm Machine
Member
Zaptruder said:
This is a myth. What the player can see or encounter at any moment is carefully balanced. You are essentially saying that when one enemy or asset goes off screen you can drop his maps and another can come on screen through efficiencies...what you fail to get is that when the player turns to see them both there still needs to be space to accomodate both of them. The maps have have to go somewhere.
As a dev myself I know intimately the process of texture budgeting and asset management. Normally streaming accomodates the newest stuff first and only purges the older stuff when it needs the space for more new assets. This still needs balanceing otherwise you will see texture and vram corruption cropping up here and there. It is a performance hit to try to look through all the textures loaded and individually figure out which ones go and which ones stay on a per frame basis so to alleviate this things are organized in groups of memory.
The devs of Oblivion could probably tell you exactly what they expect loaded at any given moment of their game even accounting for some randomness and there is no chance of anything coming in that tips them over the edge.
If they do do a PS3 port of Oblivion don't expect the textures to change.
X360FanBoyLOL
Banned
I'm drowning in all this....this....liquid I don't know what it is!!
Warm Machine said:
Is that true for all games? how about for say... racing games, where there's a much more obvious directional flow? A faster streaming device would be able to shorten the range of the none visible textures required in memory, or indeed allow the game to off load a decent portion of the track that wouldn't be coming into view for a while yet.
I did say I wouldn't expect oblivion to feature higher res textures; that such streaming would be difficult (maybe not impossible) to achieve, given the nature of the game.
RavenFox said:There is a reason the 360 dvd was not filled. Oblivions textures, assets etc had to be compressed and you cannot compare the PC packets to the 360. Totally different setup. The 360 is locked at 7.5gigs and with compression.. resources are well not that great.
Blu Ray for Oblivion does not mean it will use 50 gigs but as you can see from PS3 games lately textures, sound etc are being put to good use. Bethseda will pass the 4.5gig mark on PS3 because they can.
Well if it is coming though
do you understand anything of what you said?
DCharlie
And even i am moderately surprised
can someone explain to me why the texture RESOLUTION is coming into this? i'm a bit confused here - and i keep seeing it come up over and over again.
:/
is it just my mainframe minded brain?!
or are the PS3 guys viewing it like this? (focusing solely on environment)
X360
Memory : 512 MB
Lets say from your point (A) you need to have every texture you can see from your point to the horizon in memory. So your 512 MB has to handle everything. 512MB / 10 view ports. (just bear with me hear - i know this is all bullshit, i'm just trying to make it easier)
PS3
Memory : 512 MB
From point A, because of the fast caching to ram from HDD (i'm not sure BR is fast enough?) , you can increase texture resolution because when you swing your head around to view elsewhere you can just stream in the data. The rest of the textures are all sitting on HDD to be pulled in (is this fast enough for _real time_ caching?!)
Say you have the main viewport, plus left/right view port - therefore 512MB / 3 of texture ram active.
???
Obviously, it's not as simple as that , but... you know... sounds like a lot of work, a lot of reworking of assets, and -potentially- something that might not be technically that easy to get to work well.
Are the gains going to be that significant that it justifies the reworking of what , IMO, is a good looking game as it is?
i'm just not seeing it - but i might just be missing something.
:/
is it just my mainframe minded brain?!
or are the PS3 guys viewing it like this? (focusing solely on environment)
X360
Memory : 512 MB
Lets say from your point (A) you need to have every texture you can see from your point to the horizon in memory. So your 512 MB has to handle everything. 512MB / 10 view ports. (just bear with me hear - i know this is all bullshit, i'm just trying to make it easier)
PS3
Memory : 512 MB
From point A, because of the fast caching to ram from HDD (i'm not sure BR is fast enough?) , you can increase texture resolution because when you swing your head around to view elsewhere you can just stream in the data. The rest of the textures are all sitting on HDD to be pulled in (is this fast enough for _real time_ caching?!)
Say you have the main viewport, plus left/right view port - therefore 512MB / 3 of texture ram active.
???
Obviously, it's not as simple as that , but... you know... sounds like a lot of work, a lot of reworking of assets, and -potentially- something that might not be technically that easy to get to work well.
Are the gains going to be that significant that it justifies the reworking of what , IMO, is a good looking game as it is?
i'm just not seeing it - but i might just be missing something.
DCharlie said:
You need to keep more than just what's in your viewport on either system. You can't stream data off a hard drive quickly enough to accomodate a completely different view, which may be required in a split second. A certain amount of the area around a player needs to be in RAM, at least.
I'm not sure if texture resolution per se enters into the equation at all. Maybe if on one system loading of data was so slow that you had to keep more data from the surrounding area in RAM at one time, and on another you could afford to keep less (and thus have a higher quality/resolution of that lesser amount of data). But I really don't know if having a standard HDD or whatever suddenly puts you in the situation.
(Better) streaming can help in other ways, but I don't know about texture resolution.
The one way more storage capacity could help with textures (as opposed to texture resolution) is the seperate issue mentioned earlier, of unique data, and diversity of data across the game. The quality of data in a given load may not diverge greatly, but in a given area more unique data for that area could be pulled off the disc versus pulling in the same old assets used in a million other places. But that's not really relevant for a port of Oblivion.
DCharlie said:
Kinda... but not quite; like Warm Machine said; you can't just throw things not in immediate view out of memory (the looking left/right example).
A better example is the one I gave; If the entire level had to be in ram; i.e. the streaming device was too slow for anything else, then you'd have a good portion of the stuff in ram non visible.
With a faster streaming device, you could off load a portion of the level that wouldn't be coming up for a minute or two (or even ten-20 seconds).
The faster the streaming device, the less latency you'd require between loading textures into memory and the textures becoming visible on screen. The less latency required, the more texture memory can be devoted to what's actually visible (or predictably visible).
There are limitations of course; even if you had a fast enough streaming device, there is the cost of figuring out what needs to be on screen (or whatever it is that warm machine said), overcomes the benefit of streaming. It also works best when what's coming in and out of visibility is very predictable (so something like a racer, or an on rails shooter).
plagiarize
Banned
unless the maximum texture resolution is limited by the size of the disc, then yeah, PS3 owners shouldn't be expecting blu ray to help with texture resolution. i believe that happened on some gamecube games vs ps2 games.
but on PC, with every maching having a hard drive, you can't put a bigger hard drive in to get higher res textures. only more memory on your graphics card will do that, and given that essentially we're talking about two systems with the same memory... i don't see that happening.
potentially better texture filtering... more texture variety and less texture reuse (which is i think the case in Resistance) is what we're going to see down the line potentially.
still, i stand by the thought that disc size isn't an issue *yet* given that PC games still fit on one DVD, and there you install the game so if a game like oblivion NEEDED to come on multiple DVDs there'd be no real reason for it not too, beyond disc cost.
of course, i doubt that it's going to stay that way as traditionally it never has. games get progressively bigger over a generation and that's a given. it's just a matter of time. sony are hoping it'll be quick, ms are hoping it won't be.
but on PC, with every maching having a hard drive, you can't put a bigger hard drive in to get higher res textures. only more memory on your graphics card will do that, and given that essentially we're talking about two systems with the same memory... i don't see that happening.
potentially better texture filtering... more texture variety and less texture reuse (which is i think the case in Resistance) is what we're going to see down the line potentially.
still, i stand by the thought that disc size isn't an issue *yet* given that PC games still fit on one DVD, and there you install the game so if a game like oblivion NEEDED to come on multiple DVDs there'd be no real reason for it not too, beyond disc cost.
of course, i doubt that it's going to stay that way as traditionally it never has. games get progressively bigger over a generation and that's a given. it's just a matter of time. sony are hoping it'll be quick, ms are hoping it won't be.
It hasn't been confirmed as OPM's big story has it?davepoobond said:
Expecting more than 1080p and a "GOTY Ed." type repackaging with a lot of the DL'able content is wishful thinking. Oblivion is a very well made game that doesn't need graphical upgrades to still be a premier RPG on any system. I'd rather Bethesda focus their efforts on new Oblivion content and (most importantly) Fallout 3 living up to the HIGH bar the franchise has set previously.
gofreak said:
Yep. What comes into consideration then is the usual development contraints. Time and money.
Just because you have the space to store 2x as many textures, doesn't mean you have the development time or budget to make 2x as many textures.
Contrary to popular opinion developers like leaving the office once in a while
Vark said:Yep. What comes into consideration then is the usual development contraints. Time and money.
Just because you have the space to store 2x as many textures, doesn't mean you have the development time or budget to make 2x as many textures.
Contrary to popular opinion developers like leaving the office once in a while
Of course, but I imagine production scale and scope will progress. It would be horrible to think we've already hit the peak of what is possible to put into a game, no?
In the short term there are some interesting tools some people are working on to support unique asset creation on a large scale, without breaking the bank, but besides that, game budgets will keep increasing, and production ambition will keep going up. At least it should (and I say that as a gamer who wants to see more and more ambitious games, not necessarily as the accountant in the background figuring out the economics
).