EIF 2007: Xbox 360 Unreal Tournament III to get fewer maps? Posted by XanTium | August 15 00:10 EST | News Category: Xbox360

From xboxer.tv: [QUOTE] Speaking at this year's Edinburgh Interactive Festival, VP of Epic Games Mark Rein indicated that Unreal Tournament III for the Xbox 360 might have to get cut down in order to cope with the limitations of the console's hardware. Answering a question from the crowd about whether disc size would be a problem with an Xbox 360 port, he stated that "We'll compress some things. But you know, we may have fewer maps on the 360 version...Blu-Ray has definitely given us a lot of legroom. [/QUOTE] Full Story: xboxer.tv

Ouch not suprised was bound to happen sooner or later. Dont see it impossible to just download the maps though... if that were the case itd still be a drawback for online-less players. But who would buy UT3 for offline play anyways lol. JK there are always those who do. Hope they fix this.

grrr...

That's it... I'm buying a PS3... I hope the boyz can play well together. lol

"We'll compress some things. But you know, we may have fewer maps on the 360 version...Blu-Ray has definitely given us a lot of legroom."

and theres no such thing as dl content

Epic really have turned into a bunch of bitches lately. It's become increasingly obvious that they are pissed off with MS and don't give a crap about 360 fans anymore.

Did MS p*ss in this guy's Kool-Aid or something? Mark Rein has been nothing but bashing the 360 as of late. Well you just made one less sale Epic, thanks for talking me out of the crippled 360 version because hell will freeze over before I buy a PS3.

I'm not programmer but there are games that are much larger than UT3 fitting just fine on DVD9.

You think the game will cost less with fewer maps?? NO!

fvck off Epic.

cant imagine why, but oh well UT doesnt have my interest i can wait for GoW2 while playing h3

Hear, Hear!

Imagine that games could use 2 discs. That would be awesome.

Oh, wait...

someone better try to tell them that bunch of bitches, what happened to them being pissed at Sony because the statement they made about next gen graphocs begin when the say the do or something of that sort.?

Mark Rein is a complete muppet, thats what his statement proves here. Remember the comments about Gears on the PS3.... "Gears would never run on the PS3 due to the limited memory of only 256mb for graphics"


LOL, this guy is such a troll.

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)

Does that mean the PC version will also be getting fewer maps? Since I guess that wont be coming on blu-ray. Thats bound to anoy more than a few people....

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.

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.

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.

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 ^^)

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).

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!).

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.

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.

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.

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). -.-

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.

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.

By legroom they mean inefficient.

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

50GB > 7.5GB, whoda thunk it?

will they include a dedicated server thingy, like there was for the original unreal for the xbox?

I hate the way all you people think its acceptable to have 2 discs. I wish only to visit my console once to insert a disc, and not again. Epic understands this and will remove some maps to allow me to be more comfortable yeeeeeeeah

I guess your gaming library isn't too diverse, eh? Seriously though, what's the big deal? Getting off your ass once in a while might be good for your health.

I know my first post in this thread was quite long. So here's a short summary: Epic's previous game use virtually no compression at all! So it's quite realistic their current games do so, too.

has everyone forgottten how they distributed the halo map pack? they could easily bundle a map cd with the game.. but for the maps to be installed on the hd not be played of the disc basicallyt you buy the game install the maps then just play the first disc campain and maps that would come there and the other maps of the hd

The console goes to dashboard when you eject the disc, that sounds real effective to me.
"I want to play on CTF-FaceClassic guys, but I can't because I don't have a HDD so I can't download the map" - 360 core owner
"I want to play on it as well but I never installed my extra content add-on disc to my HDD" - 360 Pro/Premium/Elite owner
-or-
"I want to play on it too but its on the other disc let me reload the game so I can chose an add-on map to play" - 360 owner if there is not an option to install the maps to HDD or if you don't have one.
-or-
"I want to play on every map and I have no issues at all." - PS3 owner the map loads from the disc no swapping required or being a disc jockey to install all the add-on content or if a user mod is played it just downloads the needed files automatically to your built in HDD (similar to PC mods are in UT and 2003/2004) and then you connect to the match.

Oh and compression is not always the right answer, no matter how well something is compressed it WILL lose quality.

The mouse and keyboard is not supported by the 360 so that there will always be a level playing field, you can buy a device that will allow you to connect a mouse and keyboard and PlayStation style controller.

PC won't be missing any maps at all, there is more available space on a DVD formatted for computers than there is for the 360. PC users are also used to installing games on multiple CDs and DVDs, once the install is done they only need the one play disc and all the needed info is stored on the HDD.

M$ shot themselves in the foot by not making a HDD standard on the console. If there was one on every console like the xbox1 and the ps3 epic would have just had the maps uncompressed to the HDD and this issue would not be here.

You're actually wrong about that. There are quite a few algorithms which are designed to compress data without any loss. Just think about ZIP/RAR/other-archive-formats. They compress whatever files you put into them using those kind of algorithms.

You are not very bright are you?
Can you find me an image format that is compressed and that Epic will use that is both secure and is lossless that will have its use be justified?
Since everyone seems to complain about loading times, having more compression will increase this load time no matter what system it is being run on.
We have no control over what they choose to use in their game, so this is utterly pointless.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portable_Network_Graphics
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gzip
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bzip2
The first one is a format specifically for compressing images. And despite the first paragraph on Wikipedia it supports an alpha channel and thus 32-bit images. It's also important to know that the color space limitation is irrelevant for games because only RGB is used for textures. Other color spaces are only used for prerendered movies (usually YV12).

gzip and bzip2 are lossless general purpose compression algorithms. This means you can compress ANY kind of data using those programs. Actually PNG (first link) uses the same algorithms as gzip does plus some additional stuff specifically for images.

All these programs are availible as free libraries which can easily be included by a professional programmer into his program. Those libraries aren't even GPL-licensed (meaning whoever uses them needs to publish the source code to his program) but use a BSD-style license. This means: no fee needs to be paid, no source code needs to be published, you don't even have to offer the possibility to replace the libraries with other compatible versions (the LGPL license requires this last part). It can't get any more "free" than that!

I DO know what I'm talking about!