HD-DVD won't be used for games on Xbox 360?

'How 'coding' has anything to do with disc capacity/utilization I'll never know. This would be the most ignorant thing I will probably read today... thanks for sharing, you made me smile and slightly shake my head.'

funny you say that and talk about ignorance. coding has a lot to do with capacity/utilization. wasted space in data structures? uselessly over-aligned data? lack of compression on repetitive data? loops useless unrolled? useless inlined functions?

to swat off future questions, this also negatively affects load times, since the bottleneck is usually reading/seeking the disc. although in fairness, some of it has nothing to do with laziness, but rather limitations of the system. for example, if a game is already processor intensive after optimization and the frame rate occasionally drops, designers/developers may opt to make uncompress some data and just stream it directly from the disc to save cycles, since the disc operations, of course depending upon the CPU utilization caused by the system libraries/OS, this may not always work ;)

lots of games i've looked at still do a lot of uncompressed audio. the PSX had tons of it, and it wasn't even quite CD-quality in many cases (when it was the CD-XA streams, like the audio from SOTN) if you look on your modern discs, they also have a lot of uncompressed data, which can usually be compressed rather easily, with free crossplatform libraries like zlib.

"funny you say that and talk about ignorance. coding has a lot to do with capacity/utilization. wasted space in data structures? uselessly over-aligned data? lack of compression on repetitive data? loops useless unrolled? useless inlined functions?"

I write highly optimized (for size) C and assembly for embedded devices's, that's my job. I have some experience in the area of code optimization.

I agree with the rest of your post (as it pertains to data compression for media). However, the optimization problems listed above, if corrected, would shave 10s to (maybe) 100s of Kb from the game executable/modules/libraries... Hardly a drop in the bucket.

GTA san andreas for xbox used the whole 9 gigs, and as far as I know the xbox is the most powerful console out there.

GTA in the psp its taking advantage of the firmware updates to use more complex compresion.

Damn Dreamouse ... you are the very EPITOME of what I'm talking. Does no one read around here?! Good lord.

I debunked what you said BEFORE you said it. Please read my post:
Posted Nov 1, 2005, 5:15 PM ET by gmrc

Some of the people on here remind me of Ralph Wiggum to no end. "My kitty smells like cats" is what some of these comments are starting to sound like. Or "10 gigs keyboard, My CPU 89 in those." TOTAL NONSENSE. Or "AMD stuff works cause 9 gig games blah blah I Should know cause blah blah blah" No, you're wrong. I swear to god half, the "techies" on here are always wrong. Geez Louise.

There was an article some time back about how current generation games are using nowhere near the full capacity of a DVD. Something like most are using less than half the space. And with newer technologies and better compression appearing all the time, it's possible to use even less space. Anyone familiar with Microsoft's software tools for the 360?

About the only reason to use more than 8 or 9 gigs of space is to have a massively huge game (beyond everything anyone knows) or feature uncompressed audio as well as video.

didnt doom 3 take like 3-4 gigs on the pc version?

"If some game GENUINELY needs 18 gigs of data, then I'm sure no one will mind 2 discs. Just thinking about a PROPERLY made 18 gig game spins the mind."

Why does MSFT not use double sided double layered DVDs in case a game needs more than 2 layers? That should be enough.

"The simple fact of the matter is ... 9 GIGS is ENOUGH for GAMES for now."

I doubt it. If some of the best games this generation fill a DVD or surpass one layer, I'm sure a lot more will do that next-gen. And not only because of graphical content, but also because it is set to be displayed in High Definition. High Definition video and textures take a lot more space than Standard Video stuff.

"The only games that are more than a SINGLE LAYERED DVD are: Xenosaga, The Guy Game and Champions of Norrath.

"Now, each of those games are *barely* 6 gigs. And each of those games are all SUPER cut-scene and voice over happy. And seeing how they happen to PS2 games (Guy game excluded) I imagine there's ZERO compression going on."


"Look at screen shots for Xenosaga and that other one and tell me they look good. You can't, cause the 6 gigs used is ALL un-compressed video and audio. Nothing else to it."

And that's just for PS2. Optimize them for Xbox 1, and it'll surely need more space. Optimize them for the 360 power, let alone High Definition, and it will surely fill 2 layers or surpass that; or force the developer to water down the game so it can fit in a Dual Layered DVD. Of course, you can always "compress" but it's not like Data is left unchanged. Not compression algorithm is perfect. And also, as someone said above, decompressing takes processing time, so it also takes quality away from the game.

I've heard a lot of morons say "BUT PS3 WILL NOT HAVE EFFICIENT GRAfIX PROCESSING LOLZ" but having to compress info. isn't efficient either.

"They will. Hey! It's Sony hardware after all. My brothers PS2 had to be replaced because of a faulty drive, and thats a slim-line PS2. THEN it had to be replaced (or the cable, IIRC) because of power cable problems. I wouldn't bother myself."

Cut the bull. I've had a PS2 since it launched and I only got one "disc-read error" because the disc was really scratched, so all DVD players had problem reading that disc (yes, I tried). This site is where I first read about people having problems with their PS2. I know a lot of PS2 owners and even when some have modified it, I haven’t heard of a single failure.

Also, what makes you think you won't get shit with 360? 14 million x-boxes had to be repaired (I don't care which part; it's still Xbox); There were several faulty DVD drives for Xbox also, and a lot got short-cuts too (Three of my friends had to get their Xboxes repaired for almost the price of a new Xbox because of short cuts... *Sigh*). If you want insurance for hardware, go with Nintendo. Their cubes (or other consoles) never fail (hardwarewise).
And please don’t call me a fanboy. It’s getting tired, and I’m getting all systems anyway.

I would just be great is MS could just replace everyone's drive down the road, so that all games could be put on an HD-DVD disc, but seeing as that would be way to costly, I'm sure they won't.

Having games come out on both mediums is a good idea, but it would take too many developer resources to make two versions of the game for one platform.

Microsoft better be thinking up some kickass compression.

"I write highly optimized (for size) C and assembly for embedded devices's, that's my job. I have some experience in the area of code optimization.

However, the optimization problems listed above, if corrected, would shave 10s to (maybe) 100s of Kb from the game executable/modules/libraries... Hardly a drop in the bucket."

Not necessarily true. some platforms it can shave a ton more space off. i've seen data files reduced by half the size just by not storing aligned data within them. some platforms, for speed reasons force all structures to be aligned, as the unaligned stalles are deadly. on VLIW platforms, a few unnecessarily unrolled loops and uselessly inlined functions can shave a lot more than just a few 10kbs. however, those were just a few of the possibilities, and since you have optimization experience, you must realize that many game programmers make C++ and make use of the STL and templates, which can inflate your code horribly. way more than just 10s of KB.

i've went through some previously 'optimized' code and shaved off library sizes by 50+K a piece(or more in some really bad cases). after a few libraries, that adds up. in some extreme cases, i've shaved off as much as 60% code size (mostly due to the data segments and the structures therein, again data alignment can be a killer). i've seen cases of people loading entire dynamic libraries for one or two simple functions, like ntohl. when you're working on tight deadlines, people generally don't think about these things, so long as things work and they're not out of memory.

that's far from a drop in the bucket, but it's all relative to the platform and bandwith you've got. the problem is that most programmers only learn to optimize for speed, and not for size. (or worse yet, having to optimize for size & speed!)

"Cut the bull."

you realize there's a class action suite pending against Sony for drive problems in the PS2, right? i've never personally had, them, but several friends of mine have had them repaired. you having heard about it or not, doesn't mean it doesn't exist.

According to some, which you can see in the links below, Sony requested people to pay 120$ to get theirs repaired, which is even more than Microsoft was supposedly charging for the xbox repairs. i've never seen anyone have to pay for either, so i have no idea how true that is.

http://consumeraffairs.com/news03/playstation.html
or from the law firm:
http://www.gttlawyers.com/CM/ClassActionCases/class_playstation.asp

I'm no Microsoft fan but we do have to respect their intellect when it comes to being smart businessmen. Gates and Balmer know how to make money. SONY on the other hand is laying people off and their financials are in the toilet. The only profitable division was videogames and that was hardly enough to lift their earnings.
What I'm getting at is that SONY is pouring a ton of money that they don't have into a technology that will not be key in their in how succesful their system is while M$ who has trucklads of money to spare has decided to save the money and make better games (much like Nintendo).
I own a PS2 and GCN and if I listed my 10 favorite games from this generation 6-7 would be the kid-style games from the GCN. Are they as graphically powerful as say Gran Tourismo 4? No. But they were a hell of alot of fun to play.
I hate to say it but Microsoft may be on to something.

hopefully this will force developers to kill the pre-rendered video cutscenes (and god-awful intros) once and for all. this gen promised to be able to do those videos in realtime anyway weren't they?

what could hurt the platform is noticeably repeated and compressed audio and textures. or framerate hits when the 360 has to decompress lossless compression.

after Genesis/SNES, next generation media usually came with next generation consoles (alas the N64). the benefits of the new medium pushed the developers and directly affected the scope of the games. this would be the first time in a long time that the media in a next-gen console doesn't get upgraded as well.

that said, i don't mind inserting Disc 2 on particularly expansive games, let's hope developers feel free to do that and aren't pressed to squeeze everything into one disc. if conventional games begin to take up a whole disc and 360 developers start cutting corners, then the PS3 versions of games will ride high on yet another technical advantage.