EIF 2007: Xbox 360 Unreal Tournament III to get fewer maps? Options

[sinister slipknot]

I dont think that marks all there..

Although i always said they should of built the hddvd drive into the 360 and used that as there format choice, then hddvd would of been the most popular hd format because they got it out before the ps3.

I still think that atm the current dvd disks are good enough.

im def not getting a ps3 with all the amazing games coming on the 360 (fable 2, halo 3, gta 5 ect)

GTA V? What happened to GTA IV? But yeah theres enough games coming out over the next year, excluding UT3 even if it is as good as the ps3 version, to entertain me.

[flashfreak]

Whats the bet that in a few days they'll do another report saying "thats not what we meant" when ms get to them, just like the pgr 4 issue

[twistedsymphony]

Whats the bet that in a few days they'll do another report saying "thats not what we meant" when ms get to them, just like the pgr 4 issue

I'd say that's a pretty safe bet.

And as for lack of maps there are literally hundreds of ways they could deliver them simply saying "dvd is too small" is just a lame excuse...

And I agree that Mr Rein has been quite anti Xbox as of late. I'm betting they did something that pissed him off.

[ProfDrMorph]

what I find most interesting about Mark Rein's statement is that part about compression. Why compress "some" things but not everything? I've always been a huge fan of Unreal/Unreal Tournament (plus I also liked the games Epic made before Unreal. Epic is one of my favourite dev teams) but one thing that always "annoyed" me about their engine is the lack of compression. Sure it had some compression features (like using Ogg Vorbis for music or something similar to bzip2 for server to client downloads while connecting to a server) but except for the music the engine used no compression for the files stored on the users HDD. I don't know if they added compression to their latest engine but judging from this news I guess they haven't done it properly.

If the situation is similar to that of UT2004 they could easily double the space they effectivly can use by compressing the maps, textures, models, etc. Especially UT2004's maps compress extremily well. Of course there might be changes in their latest engine which decrease compressability (meaning worse compression ratios) but my guess is that even if Unreal Engine 3 files compress worse compression would still help to some degree.

Of course there may be downsides to comression:
- Loading times. Depending on how much CPU power is left unused while reading data from the DVD in between map changes the additional processing required might slow down loading. However if they use fast algorithm (which offers just enough compression to fit everything on the disc) it could also make loading faster because less data has to be transferred from the DVD to the RAM. Without inside knowledge about how the engine works it's difficult to know how exactly loading times might be affected. My guess? Even if the effect is negative I guess it's rather small and since you'd get additional content it should be worth it.
- Level streaming. Gears of War reads additional texture data while playing. Sometimes you notice this when a surface has a low res texture and suddenly addtional detail gets added to it. Depending on how fast textures can be decompressed and how much CPU power is left (of course there's far less power left compared to while the game is loading ) you'd get to see things like that more often (low res textures magically getting more detailled). At least for premium/elite users this issue could be made less significant by caching uncompressed versions of the textures on the HDD. About the CPU power needed: Epic already said the engine is optimized for dual core use. They didn't specifically mention triple core CPUs (like in the 360) but said that for players a quad core CPU wouldn't add any real benefit. Only for devs those CPUs might be interesting. Thus I assume there might be some power left of the 360's third CPU core which could be used for on-the-fly decompression.



Having mentioned caching on the HDD in the part about level streaming makes me wonder how'd the situation would be (Microsoft's market share, audio-visual quality of the games, etc) if MS hadn't offered the Core SKU and thus devs wouldn't have to worry about that there might be no HDD present when the game is played. Or maybe offering things like games being able to install part of themselves on the HDD (like some can do on the PS3). This way you could reasonably create multi-disc multiplayer games. However the Xbox' cost would've surely been affected negativly because especially for installing games on it you'd need a bigger HDD so that it doesn't run out of space too fast.

And on a side-note: I wonder what's wrong with Epic/Mark Rein/whatever. Lately their comments/statements get more and more... aggressive (in a negative way). Not only towards the 360 but also e.g. towards the Wii.

I hope my post is not too confusing, I didn't re-read it before posting. (got a bit too long maybe ^^)

This post has been edited by ProfDrMorph: Aug 15 2007, 01:30 PM

[cerealkillajme]

wine abought dvd size some more please. seems using 2 disk is like cancer to game devs these days. im not kidding there you dont have to sqeez your game on 1 dvd yet these devs act like they have to. for a fps you can but the campane on 1 dvd and all the multplayer bliss on another hence more maps.

Hate to quote this one, but that's my exact thoughts. They could easily just put the single player campaign on one disc and the multiplayer/Live on a 2nd disc, shouldn't be a problem at all.


Also, my guess as to why Mark Rein is having an attitude...

Maybe he's still sour about the crap M$ pulled for the DLC they made. http://www.1up.com/do/newsStory?cId=3158580

Hell they only gave Epic the ultimatum of "we're charging for it, or they don't get it".

And damn I hate seeing these news articles about DVD size being a problem when half of them could easily just be resolved by compressing textures/data or splitting the disc. It always makes the Sony fanboys think the BluRay really was needed. For the $200 price difference I'd rather have games split onto 2 disc. IMO BluRay is a convenience and not a necessity this generation (but surely next gen will either have to use huge HDD's and/or need a larger media format).

This post has been edited by cerealkillajme: Aug 15 2007, 01:52 PM

[halofun121]

Why does everyone take offense when someone says something like this? I'm not a PS3 fanboy, but this might just be a sad reality that we have to cope with. I for one, will be pissed off if we have to pay the same price for the Xbox 360 version as we do the PS3 version and have less content. (If we did, and they made it DLC, we'd be paying more!).

[qifanxi]

The Epic gameplan ™:

1. Create successor to wildly popular franchise.
2. Promise to include the latest generation game engine equipped with high-resolution ultra realistic graphics.
3. Size game content to slightly larger than what will fit on console medium.
4. Publicly whine about said console medium.
5. ???
6. Offer missing content as "bonus add-on" downloadable content.
7. Profit!

I, for one, welcome our micro-payment seeking overlords.
But will it run on Linux?
In Soviet Russia, Linux runs Unreal!

^^ Kids, this is what happens when you read Slashdot before your morning coffee.

[GeToChKn]

Or just take out the 80 zillions hours of cut scene CGI and do it real time instead. Thats probably what eats most of the space as it does on PC games. Some games you install that are like 5 gig, the game is maybe a gig and the other 4 gig is all cgi movie crap.

[qifanxi]

Or just take out the 80 zillions hours of cut scene CGI and do it real time instead. Thats probably what eats most of the space as it does on PC games.

You don't know that, but thanks for speculating. I always love it when people make insightful, well-researched posts like yours. They make a real difference in the gaming industry.

[ProfDrMorph]

Or just take out the 80 zillions hours of cut scene CGI and do it real time instead. Thats probably what eats most of the space as it does on PC games. Some games you install that are like 5 gig, the game is maybe a gig and the other 4 gig is all cgi movie crap.

That's true for some games (mostly ones developed in Japan). But unfortunatly I can't remember an Unreal brand game that used pre-rendered cutscenes. (and I do have played them all) So I don't think this is an "option" for UT3.

I don't know what the singleplayer in UT3 will be like (I'm more interested in the multi player part ) but if it is similar to what the previous UT games offered than you won't save any disc space by seperating the two game modes to different discs because the single player is basically the multi player maps with some front-end and "story" to connect the different maps. But afterall you're still playing Deathmatch or whatever on the maps the game uses for multi player matches.
Also changing discs while the game is running can't be done because the console unfortunatly automatically loads the dashboard as soon as you open the disc tray. I hope MS "fixes" this some day so that we can try cleaning the disc and continue the game when a disc read error occurs. I don't want to know how much time in Enchanted Arms I lost due to DREs (before I startet saving my progress every 5mins). -.-

This post has been edited by ProfDrMorph: Aug 15 2007, 03:22 PM

[Tiuk]

Has it been confirmed or denied that you'll be able to use keyboard and mouse for UT3 on 360? I know you can on PS3. You'd think MS would be all over that, since they have a monopoly on the PC gaming OS. I never understood why they didn't embrace the keyboard and mouse as a controller for Xbox/360.

[rooter75]

I don't know about you guys but I'm tired of the lazy attitude being adopted since larger media has been introduced. "I'm not going to compress, because who needs too i have 50gigs of space." Well why not continue with the trend of optimizing/compression so that the extra space is just not sucked up by what use to fit on dvd9. On the other hand why even bother, I don't think disc media has that long of a life span with all the digital distribution taking place atm.

This post has been edited by rooter75: Aug 15 2007, 05:30 PM

[highbomber]

By legroom they mean inefficient.

[dmitri]

I'm starting to love Mark Rein.. it's a great change from the politically correct sales speak they like to neuter us all with.

There are limitations to everything. It doesn't mean you have to buy something else, or shoot the messenger.

And just because he says "compress some things" doesn't mean everything isn't already compressed. They are a first class studio, I'm sure they know they can account for every single megabyte. It just means something might need FURTHER compression to fit. Sound samples, etc..

-dp

[Barnolde]

50GB > 7.5GB, whoda thunk it?