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[TLZ]

And Epic ported Gears of War 3 to PS3, none of these games are impossible to put on other systems.

The issue is the number of discs.

 

[PaintTinJr]

Probably devs could've fit the game in 4 discs, which isn't something unheard of for a 360 game. Hardly an "impossible port" when we've seen things like Resident Evil 2 running on N64 (two 700 MB-discs squeezed into a single 64 MB-cartridge).

And I'm sure it would've run beautifully on 360 indeed. Back then games often performed better on 360, or had better IQ, or even both

Too bad it looks like MGS IV will be stuck on PS3 forever.

Beautifully, but without the active Octo Camo looking that way is almost a certainty IMO because that graphical feature was accelerated on SPUs IIRC, and the 360 just didn't have the extra compute for such things and the Xenos was already 500M quads/s less than than the RSX with optimised mesh geometry - which we know Kojima would have been exploiting.

MGS4 is effectively a first party game by use of the hardware, and we never saw any of Microsoft's first party games reach the same visual fidelity of games and features, and resolution and without screen tearing as PlayStation 3 first party games.

 

[Thirty7ven]

Between you and me? Doesn’t this sound a bit bullshit?

So they got it running on 360 beautiful but they can’t make a port for any other platform? To this day?

Word?

 

[RaduN]

Between you and me? Doesn’t this sound a bit bullshit?

So they got it running on 360 beautiful but they can’t make a port for any other platform? To this day?

Word?

Yeah, my thoughts exactly...

Is there an actual reliable source for this other than that Payton hack?

 

[Thaedolus]

Between you and me? Doesn’t this sound a bit bullshit?

So they got it running on 360 beautiful but they can’t make a port for any other platform? To this day?

Word?

Well if a) they don’t have access to that beta 360 code and b) don’t have access to the source code, porting could be a real pain in the ass. Not impossible, but some bean counters probably aren’t convinced the ROI is worth it

 

[KOMANI]

This was from last year and it said the same thing.

Metal Gear Solid 4 could've come to Xbox 360, but it was too complicated

The Xbox 360's DVD-based disc drive just didn't cut it

www.gamesradar.com

Which was pulled from this book,

The Ultimate History of Video Games, Volume 2: Nintendo, Sony, Microsoft, and the Billion-Dollar Battle to Shape Modern Gaming: Kent, Steven L.: 9781984825438: Amazon.com: Books

The Ultimate History of Video Games, Volume 2: Nintendo, Sony, Microsoft, and the Billion-Dollar Battle to Shape Modern Gaming [Kent, Steven L.] on Amazon.com. *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers. The Ultimate History of Video Games, Volume 2: Nintendo, Sony, Microsoft, and the Billion-Dollar...

www.amazon.com

I love people stealing the photo from my tweet for clout.

 

[TGO]

If it needed all those installs.. it wasn't running good on PS3.

If the data could be streamed you wouldn't need to install it in the first place.
The whole game would have just streamed via 1 disc with loading screens.
You're working off the assumption the 360 would just be streaming.
Each area needed to be installed on the PS3 so it's safe to assume one area would require more then 1 disc on 360.
You can already picture what it would have been like to play it on 360.

 

[adamsapple]

Beautifully, but without the active Octo Camo looking that way is almost a certainty IMO because that graphical feature was accelerated on SPUs IIRC, and the 360 just didn't have the extra compute for such things and the Xenos was already 500M quads/s less than than the RSX with optimised mesh geometry - which we know Kojima would have been exploiting.

MGS4 is effectively a first party game by use of the hardware, and we never saw any of Microsoft's first party games reach the same visual fidelity of games and features, and resolution and without screen tearing as PlayStation 3 first party games.

MGS4 was sub HD and had pretty bad performance. I don't know what you're smoking but I would like to partake.

that link literally says the PS3 version looks better though

also cursed because they allude to ff13 which was not a very good port on 360.

In practice they look virtually identical, and there's no macroblocking artifacts that you see in 99% of 360 games which use Bink video

 

[adamsapple]

Between you and me? Doesn’t this sound a bit bullshit?

So they got it running on 360 beautiful but they can’t make a port for any other platform? To this day?

Word?

Bullshit in the sense that there's absolutely no reason why it couldn't be technically possible, but most likely because Konami doesn't want to invest in re-licensing as they don't see enough ROI on the project.

If the data could be streamed you wouldn't need to install it in the first place.
The whole game would have just streamed via 1 disc with loading screens.
You're working off the assumption the 360 would just be streaming.
Each area needed to be installed on the PS3 so it's safe to assume one area would require more then 1 disc on 360.
You can already picture what it would have been like to play it on 360.

I don't think anyone would have had an issue with the game being multi-disc on the 360. There were 3 disc games on the 360 less than one year after the console launched. There were also multiple 4 disc games on the system as well. Worse comes to worse, they could have split acts among different discs like how PS3 had separate installs per-act.

 

[Kataploom]

What!?

The game is so big because of pre-rendered cutscenes occupying all that space, they could just make those cutscenes in-engine and save all that space but "Kojima didn't want to compromise his creative vision" by running the wrong career. Therefore, they skipped Xbox 360.

 

[Thirty7ven]

Bullshit in the sense that there's absolutely no reason why it couldn't be technically possible, but most likely because Konami doesn't want to invest in re-licensing as they don't see enough ROI on the project.

Bullshit in the sense that this guy is making it sound like it was easy enough, which runs counter to the idea that it would be expensive to port it. Sorry, but it smells like bs.

 

[adamsapple]

Bullshit in the sense that this guy is making it sound like it was easy enough, which runs counter to the idea that it would be expensive to port it. Sorry, but it smells like bs.

I don't know why a producer on the game would need to bullshit about it a decade + after the fact, but ok.

 

[DeepEnigma]

MGS4 was sub HD and had pretty bad performance. I don't know what you're smoking but I would like to partake.




In practice they look virtually identical, and there's no macroblocking artifacts that you see in 99% of 360 games which use Bink video

Lighting pops more in the PS3 shots for some reason.

 

[adamsapple]

Lighting pops more in the PS3 shots for some reason.

Of course, it has 4x more bandwidth to work with but this result is 99.9% better than most 360 games like even the first party Gears games which used heavily macoblocked bink video encoders.

FF13 also used very poor video encoders in its initial 360 launch.

 

[cireza]

Well of course the game would run on 360. Too bad for Konami to decide against it. Wasted sales, especially if the game was already ported/demonstrated.

 

[RaduN]

The game is so big because of pre-rendered cutscenes occupying all that space, they could just make those cutscenes in-engine and save all that space but "Kojima didn't want to compromise his creative vision" by running the wrong career. Therefore, they skipped Xbox 360.

You are completely false, and quite cocky about your lack of knowledge too.
All cutscenes in MGS4 (except the live action intros featuring the voice actors, and a couple others, one in chapter 3 and another in 5) are fully realtime rendered. Even the power point style info cutscenes are fully real-time in MGS4.
Imagine having all those cutscenes pre-rendered with all possible octocamo patterns. Imagine that....

 

[TGO]

I don't think anyone would have had an issue with the game being multi-disc on the 360. There were 3 disc games on the 360 less than one year after the console launched. There were also multiple 4 disc games on the system as well. Worse comes to worse, they could have split acts among different discs like how PS3 had separate installs per-act.

I don't think people would have a problem if that was the case.
But the installation was only needed on PS3 if the data exceeded a limit which was usually over a DVD size.
If the areas were below that then the PS3 could have just streamed it.
Which makes me believe the data was a little over a DVD size.
With a few cuts and compressed audio they would of fitted a Episode per Disc
Also I don't know if MGS4 works this way but some games the audio files on PS3 actually streamed from disc wasn't in the installation.
This was obvious when some game would audio problems due to the disc.
If that is the case then MGS4 install doesn't even include audio.
But like I said I don't know if that's the case or not.
But it definitely possible in some capacity.

 

[Kataploom]

You are completely false, and quite cocky about your lack of knowledge too.
All cutscenes in MGS4 (except the live action intros featuring the voice actors, and a couple others, one in chapter 3 and another in 5) are fully realtime rendered. Even the power point style info cutscenes are fully real-time in MGS4.
Imagine having all those cutscenes pre-rendered with all possible octocamo patterns. Imagine that....

Then WTF is so heavy in that game? Uncompressed assets? I said it was pre-rendered cutscenes because that's what's been said since forever, probably with emulator it got confirmed they weren't.

 

[RaduN]

Then WTF is so heavy in that game? Uncompressed assets? I said it was pre-rendered cutscenes because that's what's been said since forever, probably with emulator it got confirmed they weren't.

All games directed by Kojima have realtime cutscenes. The guy explained once, his design philosophy regarding this stuff.

Regarding the amount of data in 4, among other things, there's a lot of high quality audio. A lot.
I don't think the game is bigger than ~ 25 gb though, so with decent compression in audio and a few cuts here and there, 3 discs would have easily been sufficient.

 

[Esppiral]

Wasn't the problem because the games had many uncompressed audio and languages?

Text files don't use a lot of space... The game only came in English...cheap Konami...

 

[M1chl]

Cuck your profit to own the rats

 

[OCASM]

Beautifully, but without the active Octo Camo looking that way is almost a certainty IMO because that graphical feature was accelerated on SPUs IIRC, and the 360 just didn't have the extra compute for such things and the Xenos was already 500M quads/s less than than the RSX with optimised mesh geometry - which we know Kojima would have been exploiting.

What exactly is expensive about octocamo? It's just texture sampling and blending. CELL was a crutch for the RSX.

 

[VulcanRaven]

Then WTF is so heavy in that game? Uncompressed assets? I said it was pre-rendered cutscenes because that's what's been said since forever, probably with emulator it got confirmed they weren't.

Every Kojima made MGS game since PS1 has used in-game cutscenes.

 

[Moses85]

 

[S0ULZB0URNE]

how lazy do you have to be to think that lol

More like how un-capable to run this game the 360 is to cause me to not only need a bunch of discs, but to also make me get off my ass!

I'm sure the 360 still has the installing/loading of the PS3 and likely with each disk anyway lol

Checks URL… nope didn’t accidentally go to GameFAQS.

What?

 

[Muffdraul]

Good, that means they can get it running beautifully on PS5. Hurry up and make that happen so I can die.

 

[Gp1]

Text files don't use a lot of space... The game only came in English...cheap Konami...

Wtf... Just English audio? Not even Japanese?

 

[Muffdraul]

Wtf... Just English audio? Not even Japanese?

The NA version had only English audio and the JP version had only Japanese audio.

 

[Umbasaborne]

Lmao I’ll never forget forum posters telling me the 360 wasn’t powerful enough to run mgs 4 back in the day

 

[Katatonic]

Lmao I’ll never forget forum posters telling me the 360 wasn’t powerful enough to run mgs 4 back in the day

So far there's nothing to prove the contrary.

 

[PaintTinJr]

What exactly is expensive about octocamo? It's just texture sampling and blending. CELL was a crutch for the RSX.

The RSX is actually more feature rich than the Xenos, because one was an faux 10bit precision colour rendering typically falling back to 8bit and the other was a true floating point colour capable card like a Nvidia Quadro of the time, with twice the Quad Polygon mesh rendering throughput (1.1Billion/s vs 500-600M/s) so it wasn't quite the crutch compared to the Xenos; especially when it was designed for full HD framebuffers size with triple buffering, and the Xenos' 10MB edram was designed around 1024x768 PC res at 24bit colour and struggled to double buffer at native 720p because the launch model didn't even have a hdmi.

As for the octo camo I'm pretty sure the fx had to sort geometry prior to rendering for the transparency and surface sampling and blending, so that would have been a big chunk of data occupying the tiny edram that would need to utilise that memory's bandwidth, for processing the last part with the alpha blending of the Xenos.

How it would do the sorting for transparency, without using graphics techniques that didn't get published until after the game IIRC is anyone's guess. Also the textures on snake weren't 8bit given the normal mapping they used for muscle definition IIRC - as bump mapping would be too low res - so that would have been another issue, along with the polygon counts on snake's animations were through the roof - I seem to remember - for games of the time, and given the cleanness of animation on snake, I suspect animation blending was offloaded to the SPUs too, much like the cloth simulation physics I seem to recall early on before we see the octo camo.

 

[OCASM]

The RSX is actually more feature rich than the Xenos, because one was an faux 10bit precision colour rendering typically falling back to 8bit and the other was a true floating point colour capable card like a Nvidia Quadro of the time, with twice the Quad Polygon mesh rendering throughput (1.1Billion/s vs 500-600M/s) so it wasn't quite the crutch compared to the Xenos; especially when it was designed for full HD framebuffers size with triple buffering, and the Xenos' 10MB edram was designed around 1024x768 PC res at 24bit colour and struggled to double buffer at native 720p because the launch model didn't even have a hdmi.

As for the octo camo I'm pretty sure the fx had to sort geometry prior to rendering for the transparency and surface sampling and blending, so that would have been a big chunk of data occupying the tiny edram that would need to utilise that memory's bandwidth, for processing the last part with the alpha blending of the Xenos.

How it would do the sorting for transparency, without using graphics techniques that didn't get published until after the game IIRC is anyone's guess. Also the textures on snake weren't 8bit given the normal mapping they used for muscle definition IIRC - as bump mapping would be too low res - so that would have been another issue, along with the polygon counts on snake's animations were through the roof - I seem to remember - for games of the time, and given the cleanness of animation on snake, I suspect animation blending was offloaded to the SPUs too, much like the cloth simulation physics I seem to recall early on before we see the octo camo.

Is this an AI generated response? What does octocamo even have to do with transparencies?

 

[PaintTinJr]

MGS4 was sub HD and had pretty bad performance. I don't know what you're smoking but I would like to partake.

Sub HD on a console that didn't have any issues with lack of frame buffer memory to do a game at 720p without screen tearing, so you can imagine how just that would have translated to a console with a measly 10MB edram if all the texturing and geometry was occupying so much GDDR3 of the PS3 that it had to save on VRAM by reducing the final deferred buffer size. Although that does bring up a different point, that the final resolution was clearly compromised to maximise the deferred targets sizes by render bandwidth and VRAM, and it really does show in how pristine the game looks even with a scaled up final buffer.

IIRC the game also launched prior to all the OS reduction to free up memory and prior to the ICE Team providing an easier means to exploit the SPUs - think it was called SPUR - which came a year or so later, so this wasn't even the Kojima getting access to PS3 hardware and SDK at it finest, where the 360 had all that extra maturity.

 

[Raonak]

Yeah, this is literally BS.

there's a reason why MGS4 has yet to be ported to anything.
The game engine was custom made for PS3 hardware and was fully designed from top-to-bottom to be a PS3 exclusive.

The game requiring constant installs (C360 didn't come with a HDD for years).
Playstations controllers and consoles everywhere ingame.
Literal voice lines proclaiming the joy of bluray.
and most importantly...

usage of sixaxis motion to control... rose's funbags.

 

[PaintTinJr]

Is this an AI generated response? What does octocamo even have to do with transparencies?

IIRC in third person camera the camo provides both a resampling of the contact surface as the partially transparent top surface to let you see snake's underlying model through the FX so you can control him to move subtly at just the right moment, typically when hiding in alert mode I think.

 

[Lord Malachite]

I wonder how much love they really had for it:

Mr. Takabe literally introduced the technology adopted in "MGS4", its implementation history, and the implementation process, but it was revealed that it was a battle with restrictions and restrictions everywhere. It was shocking. The point is that instead of ``I considered implementing it but gave up,'' it was a series of painful decisions, ``I implemented it but it was impossible on PS3, so I had to try another method.'' .

ＫＯＮＡＭＩ、「METAL GEAR SOLID 4」関連セッションレポート

I dunno, this feels a tad disingenuous. I specifically was giving reasons for why developers might choose to develop for only a single platform, not arguing that the PS3 was so awesome a platform why would developers have wanted to make games for anything else.

Third party developers having issues making games on PS3 is a very well known issue, so much so that Naughty Dog ended up giving out free seminars teaching developers from second and third party studios how to make games not suck on PS3 in the middle of the generation. MGS4 specifically was in development pre-PS3 launch and still launched at a time when the system had been on the market for only 19 months or so. So yes, I'm sure there were many difficulties in the making of MGS4. But again, that's a testament that the PS3 was difficult to program for, not a testament as to why studios wouldn't want to focus on a single platform.

 

[OCASM]

IIRC in third person camera the camo provides both a resampling of the contact surface as the partially transparent top surface to let you see snake's underlying model through the FX so you can control him to move subtly at just the right moment, typically when hiding in alert mode I think.

Objects turning transparent when close to cameras was a thing since at least the PS2 generation. That's unrelated to octocamo.

I dunno, this feels a tad disingenuous. I specifically was giving reasons for why developers might choose to develop for only a single platform, not arguing that the PS3 was so awesome a platform why would developers have wanted to make games for anything else.

Third party developers having issues making games on PS3 is a very well known issue, so much so that Naughty Dog ended up giving out free seminars teaching developers from second and third party studios how to make games not suck on PS3 in the middle of the generation. MGS4 specifically was in development pre-PS3 launch and still launched at a time when the system had been on the market for only 19 months or so. So yes, I'm sure there were many difficulties in the making of MGS4. But again, that's a testament that the PS3 was difficult to program for, not a testament as to why studios wouldn't want to focus on a single platform.

That always depends on the platform in question. The PS3 was not only difficult, it was a disappointment from the original target given to developers, including Kojima Productions, hence the massive downgrade MGS4 was hit with.

 

[PaintTinJr]

Objects turning transparent when close to cameras was a thing since at least the PS2 generation. That's unrelated to octocamo.

That's not what I'm talking about, it is actually not near the front clip plane of the frustum and is actually needed for the fx to be both visually appealing and useful to gameplay, and requires geometry sorting AFAIK.

Multiple surfaces of the camo fx can overlap each other, meaning that with techniques of the time rendering out of order transparency would have broken the fx and caused graphical glitching, hence why I said the fx is done on the SPUs where geometry sorting per frame would have been needed, which the much weaker 360 console didn't have.

 

[OCASM]

That's not what I'm talking about, it is actually not near the front clip plane of the frustum and is actually needed for the fx to be both visually appealing and useful to gameplay, and requires geometry sorting AFAIK.

Multiple surfaces of the camo fx can overlap each other, meaning that with techniques of the time rendering out of order transparency would have broken the fx and caused graphical glitching, hence why I said the fx is done on the SPUs where geometry sorting per frame would have been needed, which the much weaker 360 console didn't have.

Even PS1 games sorted thousands of triangles every frame. Also, there's no need for complex sorting for octocamo: either you blend all the textures in a shader in a single pass or if you're going multi-pass you render the model several times at the same point in the render pipeline. Other objects are irrelevant.

 

[01011001]

the much weaker 360 console

yeah, the 360, so much weaker that the PS3 had to use its CPU in order to keep up graphics quality wise lol... wtf

 

[Esppiral]

That's not what I'm talking about, it is actually not near the front clip plane of the frustum and is actually needed for the fx to be both visually appealing and useful to gameplay, and requires geometry sorting AFAIK.

Multiple surfaces of the camo fx can overlap each other, meaning that with techniques of the time rendering out of order transparency would have broken the fx and caused graphical glitching, hence why I said the fx is done on the SPUs where geometry sorting per frame would have been needed, which the much weaker 360 console didn't have.

Much weaker? Lol

 

[PaintTinJr]

Much weaker? Lol

Putting aside comparison with a base level 360 that didn't have a HDD, do you really think the extra bit of alpha blending afforded by the tiny edram, the two extra general purpose CPU cores and the unified DDR memory that gave the 360 a ~20MB RAM size advantage - could offset the PS3's gains of the extra 500M polygon's per second capability of the RSX over the Xenos, and the 6x SPUs,(of 7) for gaming at around an extra 75GFLOP/s to do FMA workloads among other things, and the RSX being a proper floating point RGB colour card with actual hardware gamma correction? And that's not even listing all aspect.

It is like comparing a Dreamcast to a PS2 and suggesting the Dreamcast could run SnakeEater looking the same.

 

[YeulEmeralda]

Installing>>>swapping disks.

You will now remember how much noise spinning disks made.

 

[S0ULZB0URNE]

You will now remember how much noise spinning disks made.

Who hears it with PS3's DTS-ES blasted

 

[OCASM]

Putting aside comparison with a base level 360 that didn't have a HDD, do you really think the extra bit of alpha blending afforded by the tiny edram, the two extra general purpose CPU cores and the unified DDR memory that gave the 360 a ~20MB RAM size advantage - could offset the PS3's gains of the extra 500M polygon's per second capability of the RSX over the Xenos, and the 6x SPUs,(of 7) for gaming at around an extra 75GFLOP/s to do FMA workloads among other things, and the RSX being a proper floating point RGB colour card with actual hardware gamma correction? And that's not even listing all aspect.

It is like comparing a Dreamcast to a PS2 and suggesting the Dreamcast could run SnakeEater looking the same.

Unified shaders, unified memory architecture and 256GB/s of surplus memory bandwidth are nothing compared to a GPU that had to use a CPU as a crutch.

Well, the results speak for themselves.

 

[PaintTinJr]

Even PS1 games sorted thousands of triangles every frame. Also, there's no need for complex sorting for octocamo: either you blend all the textures in a shader in a single pass or if you're going multi-pass you render the model several times at the same point in the render pipeline. Other objects are irrelevant.

How does tha twork with the market place sections with the geckos under the market canopies where you would have solid occludder, semi transparent octo camo sticking out from under the canopy while getting samples from the normal mapped cobble stones beneath, and still with a situation of self transparency from the octo camo.,

Snakes model was so polygon heavy it couldn't trivially be rendered several times at the same point as you put it.

 

[OCASM]

How does tha twork with the market place sections with the geckos under the market canopies where you would have solid occludder, semi transparent octo camo sticking out from under the canopy while getting samples from the normal mapped cobble stones beneath, and still with a situation of self transparency from the octo camo.,

Snakes model was so polygon heavy it couldn't trivially be rendered several times at the same point as you put it.

The list of materials is obtained via raycasting. Happens long before rendering.

Also, Snake's model is about 15k triangles. Barely an improvement over high-end previous gen games. Leon in RE4 is 10k triangles.

 

[PaintTinJr]

The list of materials is obtained via raycasting. Happens long before rendering.

Also, Snake's model is about 15k triangles. Barely an improvement over high-end previous gen games. Leon in RE4 is 10k triangles.

Have you got a link to that 15k (quad mesh)? as I have serious doubts, it looked magnitudes greater than a PS2 15K poly model.

 

[01011001]

Have you got a link to that 15k (quad mesh)? as I have serious doubts, it looked magnitudes greater than a PS2 15K poly model.

it does?
you can count the polygons on his arms...

here a model from Gears 3:

 

[OCASM]

Have you got a link to that 15k (quad mesh)? as I have serious doubts, it looked magnitudes greater than a PS2 15K poly model.

"Yes, but how many polygons?" An artist blog entry with interesting numbers

Metal Gear Solid V: Ground Zeroes Metal Gear Solid V: Ground Zeroes Idroid - 526 polygons Metal Gear Solid V: Ground Zeroes XOF Soldier - 11,768 polygons Metal Gear Solid V: Ground Zeroes Snake - 18,210 polygons XOF soldier is a surprise, could pass off for much higher, Impressive job from...

forum.beyond3d.com

SOFTIMAGE|XSI Case Study: Konami - METAL GEAR SOLID 4 news

Softimage Case Study for Metal Gear Solid 4. It's a long article, but it's packed with great information and plenty of tricks for using Softimage for game production.

www.moddb.com

SOFTIMAGE|XSI - Metal Gear Solid 4 part 1

The model in the reveal trailer was far superior with about 60,000 vertices just to simulate hair. The final game is basically the Wii version of that: