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[cvkpaladin]

Err, I don't think Square is the company you are referring to. They haven't really filled their games this gen with a whole lot of video. Usually a very limited amount.

You think so? I haven't played many of Square's games this generation, just FFX actually, so you might be right. But I thought that game had a pretty decent share of FMV scenes. I guess I was mostly commenting on Square's Final Fantasy series when I said that. A lot of what I've seen of FF12 are FMV scenes as well.

 

[Izzy]

Unreal Tournament was 6GB compressed. Next Generation games are going to be 20GB plus, and how we're going to fit them on DVD9's I don't know, they'll probably be a few of them. On the PS3, we're going to be using the majority of the space on those Blu-ray disks.

Hahaha - UT2007 for PS3 will surely fit on one BR disc. Not so sure about GOW X360, though...

 

[dark10x]

You think so? I haven't played many of Square's games this generation, just FFX actually, so you might be right. But I thought that game had a pretty decent share of FMV scenes. I guess I was mostly commenting on Square's Final Fantasy series when I said that. A lot of what I've seen of FF12 are FMV scenes as well.

FFX really didn't have that many actual videos, though.

 

[Seth C]

Hmm, I don't know...

Some of the largest games this gen have contained VERY few actual "video clips".

I mentioned Grand Theft Auto above. There really isn't much video work in those games (outside of company logos and such), but they fill up a lot of space. That's with a lot of low quality assets in play...

It's games of that type, without any solid "swap point" in the design that worry me.


Is that true?

How large do you think GTA games are, exactly?

 

[Kleegamefan]

http://www.consolegameworld.com/article.php/id/177/

Optical Drive - Xbox 2 games will be stored on dual-layer DVD-9 discs (7GB in capacity). The drive itself is said to be a 12 X speed unit.

http://next.videogame.it/forum/viewtopic.php?Topic=2056452&offset=220

In a double-layer DVD for Xbox 360, 7GB is usable by a game. The transfer rate of the DVD drive is 15MB/sec max, 10-12MB/sec average. The seek time is 115ms, switching layers takes 75ms. Loading 512MB data takes 34 seconds.

It seems like 7 of the 8.5GBs are usable for game data...why that is, I don't know..

 

[pj]

How large do you think GTA games are, exactly?

For san andreas: 3.9gb on pc, 2.3gb on xbox, 2.6 on ps2..

 

[Seth C]

3.9gb on pc, 2.3gb on xbox, 2.6 on ps2..

Which means we've got room to triple the game size and still fit on an X360 DVD.

 

[Guy LeDouche]

Which means we've got room to triple the game size and still fit on an X360 DVD.

...at standard resolution.

A jump to 720p resolution is going to be a big jump in size, not to mention everything else.

One of the very first comments R* (Houser) made regarding next-gen development is that they were looking forward to taking advantage of BR's storage size.

 

[Kleegamefan]

3.9gb on pc, 2.3gb on xbox, 2.6 on ps2..

All three GTA games are this exact size?

Bullshit....

 

[dark10x]

3.9gb on pc, 2.3gb on xbox, 2.6 on ps2..

Wha? I was under the impression that they were close to 4gb (San Andreas, at least). Dummy data perhaps?

 

[Dave Long]

Used game sales are protected under the first-sale doctrine. Mark Rein is tilting at windmills if he thinks any of the major chains will ever stop reselling used games.

Also, whether he gets a call from customer two or customer one that owns his game, they're both holding the disc in their hand at that point and have the same right to support as anyone else. If he doesn't want to provide that support, then make people register their software and give them 30-days from registration. See how much good will that gets ya.

If he really is serious about lowering prices, that's really the only way the industry can put the kibosh on used game sales. Most folks would rather pay $20 a game, but when you demand $50 (and now $60 in the next generation), then people are going to resell their games as soon as they're done with them because they simply can't afford to hold onto them if they want to play something new. They need that trade-in or resale value to fund the next purchase.

If he thought about it for a second, he'd probably realize that NEW game sales are probably HIGHER because of trade-ins. Without used games, I bet the industry wouldn't be growing like it is. Those trade-ins are funding a lot of people's habits.

Raising game prices is blowing a little harder on the house of cards that is new game sales. It's gonna all fall down if they aren't careful.

 

[Seth C]

Wha? I was under the impression that they were close to 4gb (San Andreas, at least). Dummy data perhaps?

On Xbox, GTA3 was only .9GB and Vice City is around 1.3GB. The games just are not that big.

 

[Ultra Magnanimous]

Even the Dreamcast had a proprietry format... is there an intermediary technology Microsoft could have gone with? A halfway house between DVD and HD-DVD? May have confounded the pirates if that ends up being an issue next-gen.

 

[Mrbob]

Hahaha - UT2007 for PS3 will surely fit on one BR disc. Not so sure about GOW X360, though...

It wouldn't be a problem to switch discs in Gears of War. However, UT2K7 would be a game where you don't want to swap discs.

 

[Agent Icebeezy]

Unreal Tourney 2004 file system is stupid as fuck. Put 5GB+ on your hard drive and have it basically fuck your hard drive into incompetence. I terrorized Epic's forums to the point of their mods asking me to leave. My problem was that I had an ATI card and that the game wouldn't run online over 4fps and offline I was getting 100fps.

 

[Drensch]

I gotta think that something is wrong. What do you need all of that space for? Do they even bother with compression? Do they even optimize? I'd bet that there's more than a little laziness and sloppiness.

 

[Mr Gump]

If it wasnt for the fact that developers wouldnt put their games on a nintendo system anyway, revolution would have a real problem in regards to space.

 

[pj]

All three GTA games are this exact size?

Bullshit....

oh, sorry, those sizes are for SA

 

[dark10x]

On Xbox, GTA3 was only .9GB and Vice City is around 1.3GB. The games just are not that big.

Bizarre. Where are you getting this info?

Wonder why the PC versions are so damn large and I wonder why the PS2 ISO of San Andreas is seemingly 4.19gb?

 

[teh_pwn]

Next Generation games are going to be 20GB plus, and how we're going to fit them on DVD9's I don't know, they'll probably be a few of them. On the PS3, we're going to be using the majority of the space on those Blu-ray disks.

SHOCKING.

Oh wait, that's exactly what I've been saying for the past year or so. However, some people think that there's magical compression techniques out there being developed that will compress things 6 times what they are right now and not take a hit on hardware.

 

[Musashi Wins!]

Used game sales are protected under the first-sale doctrine. Mark Rein is tilting at windmills if he thinks any of the major chains will ever stop reselling used games.

Also, whether he gets a call from customer two or customer one that owns his game, they're both holding the disc in their hand at that point and have the same right to support as anyone else. If he doesn't want to provide that support, then make people register their software and give them 30-days from registration. See how much good will that gets ya.

If he really is serious about lowering prices, that's really the only way the industry can put the kibosh on used game sales. Most folks would rather pay $20 a game, but when you demand $50 (and now $60 in the next generation), then people are going to resell their games as soon as they're done with them because they simply can't afford to hold onto them if they want to play something new. They need that trade-in or resale value to fund the next purchase.

If he thought about it for a second, he'd probably realize that NEW game sales are probably HIGHER because of trade-ins. Without used games, I bet the industry wouldn't be growing like it is. Those trade-ins are funding a lot of people's habits.

Raising game prices is blowing a little harder on the house of cards that is new game sales. It's gonna all fall down if they aren't careful.

Exactly true on all counts. And this useless line of fighting has gone with books, music, etc. etc. Better look for better forms of revenue sharing and distribution because this is a dead end. Anyone who would help try to transfer their property rights further to an item you buy in the store is a fool.

 

[pj]

Bizarre. Where are you getting this info?

Wonder why the PC versions are so damn large and I wonder why the PS2 ISO of San Andreas is seemingly 4.19gb?

I don't know about him, but I got my info from those sites. PC version is biggest because of higher res textures. Dummy data is probably a good explanation for the larger size of the ps2 iso

 

[daegan]

If you walk into EB in the US, they try and sell you a second hand version of a game before a new one. I think that's bad.

Well, tell EA to charge Johnny's Game Shop less than 43$ for a copy of Madden that they'll eventually price drop to far, far below that.

I am all for mass-market game pricing; I look forward to that day because I'm a firm believer that there's a game for everyone. It's just totally unrealistic if the pubs expect every game to break 1 million and make mad profit.

There are plenty of small record labels that are very healthy. I'd like to see their business practices spread to the games channel.

 

[Ruzbeh]

How much space on Rev DVDs?

Probably around the same as Xbox 360 discs, ~7GB.

 

[cvkpaladin]

FFX really didn't have that many actual videos, though.

Eh, okay... I thought it did. Point still stands though, FMV encoded at 1920x1080 will take up a decent amount of space I would think and will look great in the process.

 

[Vennt]

I don't know about him, but I got my info from those sites. PC version is biggest because of higher res textures. Dummy data is probably a good explanation for the larger size of the ps2 iso

What do you mean by those sites, are these the pirates rip sizes or the actual shipping ISO size?

I ask because you quote a smaller PS2 GTA:SA iso size to dark10x. (2.6Gb vs. 4.19Gb)

Which is correct?

 

[Raistlin]

... the 360 version might be cut back a bit, not because of hardware limitations, but due to lack of storage space.

Technically speaking, the storage space is a hardware limitation.

 

[pj]

Eh, okay... I thought it did. Point still stands though, FMV encoded at 1920x1080 will take up a decent amount of space I would think and will look great in the process.

There won't be videos that res on xbox 360. The max it supports is 720p (which draws more pixels per frame than 1080i). I think ms has wmv9 hd videos on their site somewhere, and I think I remember them being about 100mb/minute. But I could be totally wrong on that

 

[pj]

What do you mean by those sites, are these the pirates rip sizes or the actual shipping ISO size?

I ask because you quote a smaller PS2 GTA:SA iso size to dark10x. (2.6Gb vs. 4.19Gb)

Which is correct?

pirate

But I don't think the pirate rip is missing anything other than the possible dummy data. 1.6gb would be a lot of compressing/cutting of assets..

 

[Vennt]

pirate

But I don't think the pirate rip is missing anything other than the possible dummy data. 1.6gb would be a lot of compressing/cutting of assets..

The problem is "I don't think" doesn't cut it, you cannot compare a rip to an iso, there is more than just dummy data to it as there is also duplicate/redundant data for the purposes of loadtime optimization.

And they do call them a "rip" for a reason, the trimming may be minimal, or it might be more, or worse it may be played around with altogether, therefore your data is suspect.

The most you can say is that pirates managed one way or another to reduce the iso by X. That is *not* the same as saying GTA is such-and-such size.

 

[kaching]

Used game sales are protected under the first-sale doctrine. Mark Rein is tilting at windmills if he thinks any of the major chains will ever stop reselling used games.

But he didn't say that - he pointed out that some retailers are selling secondhand copies of games ahead of new copies. I don't think he's looking for a halt to used game sales, he just seems to be looking for a more equitable deal related to the potential profits made off secondhand sales for a product his company created.

Also, whether he gets a call from customer two or customer one that owns his game, they're both holding the disc in their hand at that point and have the same right to support as anyone else. If he doesn't want to provide that support, then make people register their software and give them 30-days from registration. See how much good will that gets ya.

Here too, he wasn't saying anything about not providing support, but simply pointing out a reason why devs/pubs might deserve a cut of retailers' secondhand sales.

 

[Companion Cube]

We're showing off some new stuff at the Tokyo Game Show to help Microsoft in the Japanese market. It's the kind of game that could really appeal to the Japanese, so we'll have a little stop gap demo, we'll have a massive show at X05. That's what we're really aiming for.

So what game(s) did Epic have for the Japanese market at TGS?

 

[Kleegamefan]

Probably around the same as Xbox 360 discs, ~7GB.

Probably more like 8.5 GBs, like a PS2 and Xbox.....

 

[Kleegamefan]

Hmmmm...it seems X360 DVDs are 3.5GB per layer:

 

[Cuth]

For san andreas: 3.9gb on pc, 2.3gb on xbox, 2.6 on ps2..

GTA: SA (PC version) takes about 4.7 GB on my HD.

Relevant directories:

- "audio": 3.2 GB. I've read Rockstar used the OGG format for audio
- "models": 1.1 GB. Surely models + texture data. Since WinRAR can compress it to 40% of its size, I suppose texture are not DXTC or JPEG compressed
- "anim": 270 MB. Animations/cutscenes data? WinRAR reduced this one to half its size


Conclusion: the bad news is that most of the GTA: SA data is related to audio, and it already uses MP3-like compression, so it's impossibile to reduce the data size without losing quality. The good news is that there is no big need to increase the audio quality in next-gen games, since the audio it's already at 44 or 48 KHz. The data that will increase more in size is of course related to texture and 3d models, and GTA: SA doesn't use very much of that.


Anyway, GTA textures are crap, 7 GB is not much and I suppose this will be a problem for some games.

 

[Seth C]

Bizarre. Where are you getting this info?

Wonder why the PC versions are so damn large and I wonder why the PS2 ISO of San Andreas is seemingly 4.19gb?

I put the discs in my modded Xbox and loaded up the PxLoader. That's all the space they require to be installed to the Xbox. No clue why they're so large on the PC.

Let me be clear that these are NOT pirate rips. I am inserting the actual retail discs in to the drive, and the size of the games on the discs show as about .9GB for GTA3 and 1.26GB for Vice City. I don't have San Andreas here to check.

 

[Pimpwerx]

17MBps? Damn, that's a fucking slow HDD. Must be like 4500rpms or something. Anyway, the swapping probably won't be a big issue. I'd wait to see if any launch games come on multiple discs first before getting worried. PEACE.

 

[Queeg]

pirate

But I don't think the pirate rip is missing anything other than the possible dummy data. 1.6gb would be a lot of compressing/cutting of assets..

The figure that you quoted for the PS2 version was rar'ed, the real size on disc would be a fair bit larger as decompressing that while the game was running wouldn't be possiable without huge hiccups.

 

[Azure Dream]

If it wasnt for the fact that developers wouldnt put their games on a nintendo system anyway, revolution would have a real problem in regards to space.

Oh, I see, even though we know nothing about the CPU or graphics card, we're already still assuming that third parties will ditch Nintendo again.

Not to mention that nothing has yet been announced about disc medium for the Revolution, except that it will not only accept GCN GODs, but it will also take a standard CD/DVD sized disc of unknown capacity. (Most likely something propriety, but nothing's been said yet.)

Microsoft might be well and truly screwed if BOTH Nintendo and Sony opt for a high-end medium. But HD-DVD's the only one I could see Nintendo getting cheap enough to work for the Revolution, and that's having a lot of problems right now. (Not to mention Panasonic would want to back Blu-Ray, which is supposedly going to cost Sony something like $100 per PS3 alone.)

 

[Andrew2]

Anybody that thinks disk space won't an issue should start rethinking their stand.

Champions of Norrath alone took up every byte of the PS2's dual-layered Dvd's. In fact, Snowblind had to cut alot of content from the original game simpily because they was running out of space. What interesting, the game didn't even use any CG cutscenes and managed to take up the entire 8.5 GB disk.

Also if can mange to rip the Champions of Norrath disk, you'll be suprised at the file sizes(CoN files are stored in a .LMP format) . Not only that, theres 2 unused character models stored on the disk; both which had to be cut from the final release.

 

[Ryudo]

I am sure space will be a massive concern mid cycle for the 360. Everything is pointing towards the 360 being a total failure.

 

[Yusaku]

If you walk into EB in the US, they try and sell you a second hand version of a game before a new one. I think that's bad. It would be fine if they share that revenue with us. They can also be marketing partners with us as well. We can have an official refurbished games policy. That's the problem. Those resold games use server resources, tech support. The majority of guys calling up saying "I don't have my serial number", I'm sure a lot of those are resold. It costs us money. Those customers think they paid for it, and they're entitled to support. The reality is, we didn't get paid. They didn't pay us.

I have a HUGE beef with this. Yes, you got paid $50 from the guy that originally bought it. The idea that publishers should get a cut of used sales is asinine. Used sales doesn't cost them any more in support because there's still only one owner per copy. If a game is sold 50 times on the used market they're not suddenly supporting 50 people for a single copy, because only one person can use the copy at a time.

If they want to reduce second hand sales they need to reduce the price of games, and he at least understands that.

 

[ninge]

a lot of people here are missing the point that the thing that takes up the most space this gen (outside of video) is music - and thats simply not going to see any jump in data size for the next generation. thats a huge win for storage space in a game like GTA. The vast majority of its data is tied up in the soundtrack.

Any game that relies on video is gonna be fuxxored tho - HiDef video is gonna eat DVD9 for breakfast.

Texture space will be the other thing that is gonna be a big problem going forward - texture resolution will at least double if not quadruple and that means 4x or 16x as much space for textures. In some cases it might even be 16x to 64x as much space required as a whole lot of games still use 8bit or even 4bit textures this generation..

 

[Cuth]

GTA: SA (PC version) takes about 4.7 GB on my HD.

Relevant directories:

- "audio": 3.2 GB. I've read Rockstar used the OGG format for audio

Since 3.2 GB of heavily compressed audio data seemed too much even for a game like San Andreas, I've searched other info...

The radio songs, speech and some other things uses the MP3-like compression (1.1 GB), while 2/3 of the audio data is in raw format (no compression).

So I'm pretty sure it's possible to reduce the whole GTA: SA to around 2 GB without a significant loss in quality. Obviously it's not the biggest game around.

 

[Mihail]

I have a HUGE beef with this. Yes, you got paid $50 from the guy that originally bought it. The idea that publishers should get a cut of used sales is asinine. Used sales doesn't cost them any more in support because there's still only one owner per copy. If a game is sold 50 times on the used market they're not suddenly supporting 50 people for a single copy, because only one person can use the copy at a time.

If they want to reduce second hand sales they need to reduce the price of games, and he at least understands that.

Maybe I'm being too idealistic, but I hate this "business" solution. The real solution should come from a game design point of view. A lot of games today are simply just too forgettable. They don't give the player any incentive to keep it. I don't like the buying and selling of used games (just as a personal preference, not as a policy) but as long as there is a flood of crappy to mediocre titles out there, I fully support gamers' rights to take advantage of them. Why pay the full price to buy a game that you won't look at once you beat it when you can get some of your money back or buy it at a discounted rate?

But the collective mind of the industry is in overdrive right now, trying to ride the wave of hype and pop/fashion as high as possible. Unless this changes, and devs/publishers realize they have to make games that people want to keep, there will always be a problem.

And it's a pretty big problem -- the kind that makes a market fragile.

 

[Ruzbeh]

Probably more like 8.5 GBs, like a PS2 and Xbox.....

X360 has less space than the Xbox? :lol Ok.

I think developers will just have to invest more in compression or something. Seriously. It's as if developers don't want to do any effort in trying to make the game smaller.

 

[Cuth]

Texture space will be the other thing that is gonna be a big problem going forward - texture resolution will at least double if not quadruple and that means 4x or 16x as much space for textures.

I agree on this...

In some cases it might even be 16x to 64x as much space required as a whole lot of games still use 8bit or even 4bit textures this generation..

... but I'm not sure about this. I suppose that, if needed, most textures will use DXTC or 3Dc compression, with smaller size than the equivalent 8 bit textures.

 

[dark10x]

I agree on this...

... but I'm not sure about this. I suppose that, if needed, most textures will use DXTC or 3Dc compression, with smaller size than the equivalent 8 bit textures.

I'll be curious to see how much that helps...

Obviously, this next-generation is going to focus on many different texture layers in order to achieve a variety of results.

I'm not sure how accurate this would be, but let's take a look at Doom 3. D3 used three different layers per surface (diffuse, specular, normal). The textures required quite a bit of disk space for storage and also used a ton of video memory. If you were to compress all three layers, the end result was a rather muddy looking texture. Just compressing the specular and diffuse layers gives you much better results, but still requires a at least 256mb of video ram.

Thing is, these textures do not appear particularly sharp or high-res when playing. They certainly aren't blurry, but they lack the razor sharp appearance of less complex surfaces in many other PC games. If textures this gen use a similar technique, but with higher resolution base assets, the storage space and ram requirements seem as if they will jump up.

It seems that UE3 uses a similar method for texturing. If Epic can cram it onto one DVD9, I think that might be a good sign for other X360 games. I'll be curious to see just how all of the textures end up looking when I'm playing it on an actual 360.

 

[Deleted member 284]

Probably around the same as Xbox 360 discs, ~7GB.

12 GB on their "disc" format actually

 

[sonycowboy]

12 GB on their "disc" format actually

Are you saying the Rev will have a 12GB format or what? More info please.