Rage and id's Love/Hate Relationship with the PS3 Options

[Xbox-Scene]

Rage and id's Love/Hate Relationship with the PS3 Posted by XanTium | August 1 21:53 EST | News Category: Xbox360

From kotaku.com: [QUOTE] Last night John Carmack took to the stage at QuakeCon and inadvertently ignited a fanboy flamewar. Id's upcoming open-world shooter Rage, he told the assembled gamers, will look worse on the Xbox 360 [than PS3 or PC] because of storage issues. "We have concerns (about the 360 version of Rage) because of the economics of the platform in terms of what it costs to go to multiple discs," Hollenshead said. "There is disc space issue on the 360, and if we cant find a clever way or compromise with Microsoft to address that issue... even though we feel the 360 has superior hardware, the size limitations may mean that we may not have as much texture density or resolution on the 360 version. "Let me be clear, this is an open question, we have these tech issues and we are working with Microsoft to solve them." And the issue isn't just about the game being too big, Hollenshead says that developers lose upwards of 2 gigs of space per a disc because of information Microsoft requires developers to put on the discs. While allowing the game to be installed on the Xbox 360's harddrive may help, it actually wouldn't solve that problem, Hollenshead added. [/QUOTE] Full Story: kotaku.com

[wassco]

One of 360's biggest faults is gonna really screw them soon...

yea they have the hardware to push the limit on graphics and all...but what good is that if your limited in memory, and have to dull it down to get it to fit...

and i agree the *installing to hdd* fix M$ is looking to allow on 360's wouldnt help much, i htink it'd bog down the system more...

[HotKnife420]

I'd like to know more about the issue. What's the specific problem? Is it losing out on the capacity they need initially that's the fundamental problem (likely, as the engine is supposed to make cross-platform development a breeze)?

More importantly, I wonder what this "nearly 2 gigs" of data that MS is requiring devs to put on the disc? Surely the video partition isn't that big (is it?).

Also, the kotaku writer needs to look up the definition of "irony".

This post has been edited by HotKnife420: Aug 2 2008, 04:03 AM

[trentdadi]

It can't be 2 gigs worth, but the devs have to build support for Microsofts friend's list and all that into their games. That is the only thing I can think of though. Also I believe Microsoft chose not to go into blu-ray or HD-DVD for that matter because it would mean they would lose backwards compatibility right? Isn't that one of the trade offs Sony took. They go blu-ray but lose bacwkards compatibility with the ps2 games?

I think it is a bit late this generation to add something as big as built in blu-ray players into their console, hopefully next generation they won't have this problem. Also I hope they do something like including hard drives with every system or at least let devs develop their games under the assumption that everyone has a HDD.

[AcidPenguiN]

negative trent.

HDDVD was backwards compatible with regular DVDs, moreso than blueray is because it was based on the same technologies that DVDs are. Microsoft didn't use it simply because of the extra cost in using the drives.

[koolkid1935]

I am sort of confused. Wouldn't the PC have a similar limitation as far as how much can fit on a single DVD? It seems as if their concern is the cost to go with multiple discs, but he also inferred this problem is not as big on the PC. I am going to take a guess and say that a DVD designed for the 360 (Microsoft licensing included) costs more than just a 'normal PC' DVD? Meaning that they *could* do multiple discs for the PC and still be OK as far as cost to manufacture?

[iceman72]

This is a very very interesting article. I think M$ should snatch up the HD-DVD technology and start putting those in the 360's. For those that own the drives now, they should put out a patch that allowed us to play games on them as well. I think that would fix the issue. I dont think it would be as expensive to put a dvd and hd-dvd version on the same disc.

What I find funny is that he said the PS3 is not what Sony pumped it up to be. I guess hindsight Sony going out on a lim and putting that BR drive in it was the best thing they could have done. But whats funny is that with all this extra space most of the games still fall short of the 360 counter parts. I think it would be easier to fix M$'s problem with size over programming issues. If programmers dont want to program for your system do to severe complexity you are gonna loose out. They want to have ease of use so they can put most of their effort into making the game play, look and have nice bunch of features.

[Devedander]

Isn't that one of the trade offs Sony took. They go blu-ray but lose bacwkards compatibility with the ps2 games?

Backwards compatability was an issue of cost. Do you include the actual PS2 hardwrae inside the PS3 which then can obviously play PS2 games, or do you emulate the PS2 in software which is much more complicated and time intensive and is likely to result in at limited support (ie 360 supported backwards compatability due to software emulation).

[Devedander]

I am sort of confused. Wouldn't the PC have a similar limitation as far as how much can fit on a single DVD? It seems as if their concern is the cost to go with multiple discs, but he also inferred this problem is not as big on the PC. I am going to take a guess and say that a DVD designed for the 360 (Microsoft licensing included) costs more than just a 'normal PC' DVD? Meaning that they *could* do multiple discs for the PC and still be OK as far as cost to manufacture?

While DVD9 has the same size between PC and 360 (not accounting for whatever MS forces them to put on 360 discs) there is a difference in a system where you are expected to install the vast majority of the game to a hard drive vs a system that you can't assume that there even is a hard drive.

Imagine this, a DVD holds 9GB (for easy math) and a game has 4GB of actual game code (3d engine, physics engine, AI etc) all of which has to be available any time the game is playing regardless of where you are in the game and 12GB of maps.

Now you would think, total 16GB, no proble as 2 DVD9s hold 18GB, split it up so you put 8GB on each disc, problem solved!

Not so fast... think about the break down... half the maps on each disc is 6GB of maps per disc. Ok...

Now for the game code... half on each disc is 2 GB per disc, total 8GB, golden!

Wait... you can't have half the game code on each disc... you can't leave out the AI portion for the first half of the maps and leave out the physics engine for the second half...

So really what you have is 4GB required to be on each disc you use.

So really it will take 3 discs:

Disc 1 4GB game cod and 4GB Maps

Dsic 2 4GB game code and 4GB Maps

Disc 3 4 GB game code and 4GB maps

Now your good to go but you spent 3x the price producing discs... ouch.

Now on the PC front, you really can do 2 discs with 8GB on each.

Disc 1 has 4GB of game code and 4GB of maps

Disc 2 has 8GB of maps

Copy the contents of both to the HD, voila, whole 16GB game ready to go!

Even more, on the PC you can count on an HD so you can heavily compress a lot of stuff (stuff you can't decompress on the fly due to processor overhead and storage needs of the uncompressed data) then uncompress it all during install.

It might even be possible to compress the entire 16GB game onto 1 DVD9 then decompress the whole thing during install to the HD.

So you see DVD size is not the only factor in distributing games.

[steveju]

Do you include the actual PS2 hardwrae inside the PS3 which then can obviously play PS2 games, or do you emulate the PS2 in software which is much more complicated and time intensive and is likely to result in at limited support (ie 360 supported backwards compatability due to software emulation).

What do you mean? The 40Gb model does not have bc. Certainly some, even limited bc is a whole lot better than absolutely nothing.

[Charbless]

I think I remember Epic saying the same thing when the first Gears Of War was released but they don't seem to be having any issues now so it's to do with the company programming not the disc at this present time.

I do think disc size issue will start to play a part in the future which might be the reason that MS will launch there next console before Sony.

Really HD DVD is dead as such so I think MS should just buy the technology and use it for there next console and then offer a blu-ray add on.

[eduardor2k]

The problem with id new engine, it's that they use REALLY HUGE textures (up to 128000x128000), that means they can take each one more than 1 GB, i don't think they will use these textures on a game for x360 or PS3, a game i suppose would have a lot of these.

The demonstration with which the new game engine was shown had 20 GB of texture data (using a more advanced MegaTexture approach using textures with up to 128000x128000 pixel resolution) and a completely dynamically changeable world.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Id_Tech_5

The thing that carmack doesn't like it's that it will cut his revenue, since a 1 DVD game at 60$, it's not the same than 3 DVD game at 60$, i suppose he losses 3$ more per game, poor boy!

This post has been edited by eduardor2k: Aug 2 2008, 10:51 AM

[Avenger 2.0]

The biggest problem is that ms only allows 7GB of the DVD to be used. These lost 2GB is used for security I guess (which is useless now as it the copy protection has been cracked anyway). Guess the developpers need to use 2 or 3 DVD's to put their games on and use hard disk copy if possible. Next Xbox (720) will probably have a blue-ray drive.

This post has been edited by Avenger 2.0: Aug 2 2008, 02:44 PM

[mik30]

Hollenshead tells plain bullshit. The cost of an additional DVD is in production about 1US$.
That is absolutely neglectable.

Besides this one has to consider the following facts:

The XBOX DVD Format keeps 1 GB at the outer diameter of the disk free for safety reasons.
That is because in this area the quality of the media is normally worse than in the inner diameter.
The precaution of leaving this area unused is necessary because of the 12x reading speed
of the DVD drive.
The nominal formatted capacity of a DVD9 would be around 8.4 GB. The XBOX DVD offers about
6,8 GB. So the extra stuff from MS wastes just around 600 MB. That is acceptable in relation to the
safety advantage and to the 6.8 GB space and the neglectable costs of additional disks.

MS did everything right with the Medium structure.

This post has been edited by mik30: Aug 2 2008, 03:19 PM

[Chancer]

Hollenshead tells plain bullshit. The cost of an additional DVD is in production about 1US$.
That is absolutely neglectable.

You missed the cost point. The reference is not to the physical media cost but is to do with licensing costs

According to Shacknews Carmack noted three DVDs will be needed for the Xbox 360 version, although royalty fees to include a third disc would rule out this option.

This post has been edited by Chancer: Aug 2 2008, 03:41 PM