Heavenly Sword packed with 10 GB of sound data

Impressive on how much spin sony can put on uncompressed audio with 11 different lanuages on the disc.

What's even more impressive is that Heavenly Sword was able to generate so much hype when it's so completely average. It's ironic, though, because I'm also excited to play it, if only because there's literally nothing else for me to do on the PS3 besides PS2 games. I guess many others share the same sentiment!

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sheesh, this developer should really investigate this little thing called compression. It works pretty darn well for audio.

What a waste of space. Seriously, the only reason you would need 10 GB of space for audio files is if you aren't using compression. They could have used a fraction of the space and still had great sounding audio if they had used a good compression tool, but instead chose to create a false demand for disc space to try to sell Blu-Ray.

Have fun with your 2X Blu-Ray drive trying to read uncompressed audio files in addition to the other game content, you might just have even longer load times because of it.

As a person that loves audio, I think uncompressed audio in my games is very important to me. The difference in resolution is large to someone who has fine ears.

No matter what, compression is always a degradation. If you think that compressing audio/video is a good thing, then you are completely retarded.

I own both systems. I just feel that the PS3 is trying to give me the highest quality of video and sound. The 360, on the other hand is extremely fun to play and has more good games at the moment.

"Have fun with your 2X Blu-Ray drive trying to read uncompressed audio files in addition to the other game content, you might just have even longer load times because of it."

I have actually encountered faster loading times when playing on the PS3. This may not be a fact, but I think its a good example of someone talking out of their ass because they hate a machine.

I love both my systems. Heavenly Sword looks awesome. So does Mass Effect. Video games FTW!

In other words is has 0.9 GB of sound in one language?

The ONLY language you'll ever use!?

And people wonder why I hate Sony?

"As a person that loves audio, I think uncompressed audio in my games is very important to me. The difference in resolution is large to someone who has fine ears."

(I'm going to assume you mean "lossy compression" rather than "all compression including lossless". Probably a safe assumption, I imagine.)

Depends how heavily it's compressed. Not all signal degradation is actually perceptible, even to the best ears. And that's assuming a theoretically impossible 100% accuracy in the speakers. Even the best speakers have a certain threshold above which they can no longer provide accurate sound reproduction. And at that threshold, the difference is so minuscule anyway that no human, no matter how well trained, can perceive a difference (the hairs in our inner ears are only so accurate). The only way to perceive such differences would require some sort of cybernetic augmentation.

Please don't take this as an insult, because it isn't intended as such, but anyone who thinks they can tell a difference between, say, a 256kbps vorbis/wma/aac stream (note I didn't say MP3: MP3 sucks) and the uncompressed source is only fooling themselves - a victim of the placebo effect.

To test it, just set up a double-blind test: have someone switch between playing you an uncompressed and high bitrate (say, 256kbps vorbis/wma/aac, or 400-or-so-kbps MP3) version of the same 16/32-bit 44/48 KHz audio clip. Try that for a few different audio clips and see how often you were actually correct. It'll likely be somewhere around 50/50. Incidentally, the same sort of test can be used to see why Monster Cables are a rip-off. Yes, their signal is technically better, but not perceptibly.

An even more interesting test is setting up an A/B switchbox and *telling* someone who believes they can tell a difference that 'A' is a monster cable or uncompressed audio and 'B' is a cheap cable or compressed audio. BUT, don't actually connect the switchbox's cables to anything. Let them switch between A and B and tell you which looks/sounds better. If they don't suspect shenanigans, most people will swear up and down that 'A' looks/sounds better.

Now I'm obviously not saying that all compression is imperceptible. If it's compressed enough, yea, you'll notice. I'm just saying that not all lossy compression is humanly perceptible.

@Abscissa

I loved your post and I agree with you 100 percent. The point that I am trying to make is against comments like these:

"sheesh, this developer should really investigate this little thing called compression. It works pretty darn well for audio."

They make it sound as if its stupid to not compress your audio. If you have the space available, why not take full advantage of it by using high resolution audio?

By the way, I can tell the difference between a CD and a 192-256kbps through my home audio setup, but not through my car stereo or my computer speakers. It only makes sense to have high res audio if you have a system that can really exploit it.

Thanks for your educated response.

@JL: Thanks for your thoughtful response to my response ;) It's nice to debate with other level-headed people.

In response to your comment of:

"They make it sound as if its stupid to not compress your audio. If you have the space available, why not take full advantage of it by using high resolution audio?"

I fully agree that you might as well use it if you have it. Why bother compressing if you don't need to right? (Well, except that it might help disc access times.) My main concern though, was of people making the faulty connection that "Well, this game NEEDED to use that much, therefore DVD is antiquated."

BTW, I made another response to one of your other posts further down. Please don't take it harshly.

@Abscissa,

well put, sir.
i think its crazy to pay more than the cheapest you can spend on audio/video cables. I did a component video test a while back using Monster Gold RCA, and some RCA from my dad's "hifi" stereo system from 1979. there wasn't even a flicker between the two HD signals

@Kye: Sometimes, just sometimes, there are people in a region like, oh I don't know, America, that speak more than one language within the region, and would feel more comfortable playing it in another language. Also regions like Europe sometimes share the same version across certain areas without translation, and this will help save the developer money on making a different disc for each country (like Spain, Germany, France, Italy). Think outside of your ass next time please.

Useful to Sony...

This is the strawman they "beat" to justify the current wanton excess of Blu-ray. Blu-ray is NOT necessary... right now. If PS3 lasts for a "10 year life cycle" then it might start to become relevant. But for right now, it is not necessary.

Let me rephrase it. This is like paying money to watch Kaz Hirai wrestle a stuffed toy crocodile into submission.

People need to realize that Sony choose not to promote compressed audio not for some next-gen dogma, but just so it justifies the size of the Blu-ray.

Wake up sheep.

It was kind of a joke.I guess people in the internet lost their sense of humor long time ago.

ALL SOUND and nothing else..... This better be worth my money.

Useful to people who speak TWELVE LANGUAGES.

lol...

Thats cuz they needed to render all the things you would never notice.
Like each individual brick being different. And dirt, oh hells yes dirt takes alot of programming, not to mention the super realistic physics.
And clouds, boy...

Oh no you didn't.

Oh man, now that's one funny burn. Ouch. (And yes, PS3 fans: I'm well aware it's probably not the actual case. And I'm pretty sure it wasn't intended to be.)

Down voted?!
Sheesh, you Sony fanboys are so fickle. I don't like having dozens and dozens of cut scenes in my games. So sue me.

Haha. I can't win.

You think Sony fanboys are bad,try to say anything about MMO without being voted down.

Also there are a lot of sour grapes here and there like radicoon(I remember it because his name rhymes with the word maricon)are voting down everyone.

IMO I would tell you that cutscenes are cool as long as you can skip them by simply pressing X.Really is a pain when you play in hard mode a game with long cutscenes that you cant skip.

Don't worry Samfish, I voted you up.

Me too.
Vote down is not cool.

Me three...but mainly just for nekkid Peach.

And I make it a point to vote up anybody who gives Naked Peach some luvin'.

4,500 is pretty standard, for this type of next-gen cinematic action game. You have three basic levels of dialogs in an action game: onomatopoeias, or the little vocal sounds such as a character jumping or getting hit; barks, short incidental lines during gameplay such as a character shouting "take this!" or whatever; and actual cutscene dialog. Just the onos and the barks make the number ramp up quite fast. And it's not that much when you realize that a fully-voiced RPG can have something like 200,000 lines of recorded dialog.

Bingo. Sony will continue to beat this drum over and over again. All they're doing is not compressing data. Most of the time this compression would be lossy, but it would be indiscernible by most normal human beings (I'm excluding those 1337 people that buy $500 speaker wire because "it makes a difference").

It's this attitude that lead to the development of high definition formats to begin with. If rather than using the antiquated MPEG-2 standard for video (which is lossy, but still..), producers had moved to MPEG-4, we'd have no problem fitting high definition content on a standard DVD (see downloadable movies on XBLM). While we would need new players, they would have been far, far cheaper and see much faster adoption.

MC Hampster -

Sony is not tooting their horn in this case. Show me where in the interview that Garry Taylor tooted the Blu-Ray horn, how this game could never come out on another system due to the lack of Blu-Ray.

I have time; I'll wait.

They're just saying what's on the damn disc. Everyone's determined to jump up and down over nothing.

losttoys - the developers of Heavenly Sword are doing this project for Sony.

when else have you ever even heard of asset size on disc when it wasn't from a Sony developer?

its in their Sony development handbook, i know you can't really be that naïve.



.

"i can uncompress all the music on my computer like a jackass and brag about the tremendous amount of space all my audio takes, but common sense dictates that would make me a moron."

I use lossless formats when I rip CD's in. I have an external hard drive that I keep them all on. Once you compress a track to say 192kbs, youre never going to get back the quality that the track had in its raw form. This is a simple question of quality. Are you playing this through a high end home theater system or some rinky-dink klipsch computer speaker system? If its the latter, then who the fuck cares. But, if you are like me, and have it going through a high end system, you need lossless or it is going to sound like ass.

Too bad that MPEG-4's licensing involves so many different companies that it actually makes the format prohibitive to use.

"Once you compress a track to say 192kbs, youre never going to get back the quality that the track had in its raw form...But, if you are like me, and have it going through a high end system, you need lossless or it is going to sound like ass."

*OR* you could just move to 320kbps. Or better yet, come out of the 90's and switch from MP3 to something like Vorbis/WMA/AAC. Everyone, compressed audio is not always a 192kbps MP3. Hell even FLAC would cut the size in half, and that's not even lossy at all.

Did I say that everything is 192 MP3? Man, I didnt know I couldnt use examples. MP3 is still the most commonly used form of compressed audio, therefore, was a great example. So shut the fuck up.

It was taken harshly. But I forgive.

"So shut the fuck up." "It was taken harshly."

Heh heh, I see it apparently was ;). No offense taken on my part though.

MP3 is just a pet peeve of mine. I don't like seeing inferior solutions become dominant simply because they have a large mindshare. So MP3 sometimes strikes a nerve with me.

Of course, I didn't mean you couldn't use examples, it's just that your post sounded to me (and I may very well have misread) like there was no middle ground. So I pointed out (however harshly), that you can run compressed audio through a high-end system and have it not sound like ass (great phrase, BTW) as long as it's not too heavily compressed (or uses lossless).

But then, as we already agreed, there's no point in compressing if you don't actually need to, so in the case of Heavenly Sword the point becomes moot.

i said it below, but i'll say it again,
320kbps MP3 is as lossless as your going to get when it comes to compressed music, and the most quality crazy audiophile would be hard pressed to discern it from an uncompressed format on the best quality system.
and it's a 1/3rd of the size.
No one is comparing 128kbps to lossless which is really a joke, people need to realize that even the highest bitrate compressed file is still going to smaller and more efficient.
Pretty much all modern media uses some form of compression, the fact that people are defending lossless formats makes them seem like neandethals. uncompressed audio is like using a monster truck to do your daily commute to the grocery store.

I definitely suspect that they didn't compress their audio correctly.

When you consider that a single DVD can hold as much as 3 hours of high-quality VIDEO data (movie + extras), along with 3 hours of continuous AUDIO data, in numerous languages (all 3 hours each), and numerous commentary tracks (3 hours each), somebody seriously screwed up something, somewhere.

With a game, you shouldn't even need VIDEO files. I don't remember the last time I saw a cutscene that was not rendered in-engine. Modern games are pretty enough to do this now!

Simply awesome. The response to this from the anti-bluray camp can be summed up as "Who cares if they're doing it, they aren't doing it right."

As a fan of pointless excess, I say hurrah for 10gb of sound. This may not be a "necessary" use, but the fact that they can do this rocks, and it's just a matter of time before we'll see games that "need" to be on bluray.
Not that some people will ever admit to it.

mccomber: The problem is that it comes with a cost of an extra US$200 and slow disc access.