Why 22gb of textures is a ridiculous notion for a games console:
Swam Mollen
http://www.ati.com/products/fireglv7350/index.html
The Fire GL graphics card, from ATI, features 1gb of fast texture
meory, and a massively paralell multi-threaded GPU - it costs over
$1600, and is aimed at 3d artists imaging scenes with as much detail
in realtime a possible.
There is a very good reason it has 1gb of texture RAM, - and even these
cards can't hold more than a handful of multi-megabyte textures.
For anyone to claim that the PS3 will use TENS OF GIGABYTES OF TEXTURES
in a game ignores the fact that even 3d artists barely use more than a
few gigabytes of textures.
The PS3 has just 256mb of Video RAM, and Sony expects us to beleive
that 256mb is adequate when ATI thinks it's not for that kind of
detail???
No, the real reason Resistence: Fall of Man uses 22gb is because it
contains all versions of the game, european, US and Japanese, all in
one package, plus loads and loads of FMV.
Mark my words, long, drawn out, high quality FMV sequences are going to
be the hallmark of PS3 games. Not pin-sharp gigabyte textures...
Jonah Falcon
generation, which eliminates garbage like that. Heck, check Mass
Effect. It's like a cut-scene you play, but doesn't use that much space
because it's basically in-engine.
Having FMW, etc, etc is basically unnecessary fat (see: Diablo II).
Jonah Falcon
Procedural generation in video games
The earliest computer games were severely limited by memory
constraints. This forced content like maps to be generated
algorithmically on the fly: there simply wasn't enough space to store a
large amount of premade levels and artwork. Pseudorandom number
generators were often used with predefined seed values in order to
create very large game worlds that appeared premade. For example, The
Sentinel supposedly had 10,000 different levels stored in only 48 or 64
kilobytes. An extreme case was Elite, which was originally planned to
contain a total of 248 (approximately 282 million million) galaxies
with 256 planets each. The publisher, however, was afraid that such a
gigantic universe would cause disbelief in players, and the number of
galaxies was therefore limited to eight in the final version.[1]
Today, most games include thousands of times as much data in terms of
memory as algorithmic mechanics. For example, all of the buildings in
the large gameworld of Grand Theft Auto were individually designed and
placed by artists. In a typical modern video game, game content such as
textures and character and environment models are created by artists
beforehand, then rendered in the game engine. As the technical
capabilities of computers and video game consoles increases, the amount
of work required by artists also increases. First, high-end gaming PCs
and next-generation game consoles like the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3
are capable of rendering scenes containing many very detailed objects
with high-resolution textures in high-definition. This means that
artists must invest a great deal more time in creating a single
character, vehicle, building, or texture, since gamers will tend to
expect ever-increasingly detailed environments.
Second, the number of unique objects displayed in a video game is
increasing. In addition to highly detailed models, players expect a
variety of models that appear substantially different from one another.
In older games, a single character or object model might have been used
over and over again throughout a game. With the increased visual
fidelity of modern games, however, it is very jarring (and threatens
the suspension of disbelief) to see many copies of a single object,
while the real world contains far more variety. Again, artists would be
required to complete orders of magnitude more work in order to create
many different varieties of a particular object. The need to hire
larger art staffs is one of the reasons for the rapid increase in game
development costs.
Some initial approaches to procedural synthesis attempted to solve
these problems by shifting the burden of content generation from the
artists to programmers who can create code which automatically
generates different meshes according to input parameters. Although
sometimes this still happens, what has been recognized is that applying
a purely procedural model is often hard at best, requiring huge amounts
of time to evolve into a functional, usable and realistic-looking
method. Instead of writing a procedure that completely builds content
procedurally, it has been proven to be much cheaper and more effective
to rely on artist created content for some details. For example,
SpeedTree is middleware used to generate a large variety of trees
procedurally, yet its leaf textures can be fetched from regular files,
often representing digitally acquired real foliage. Other effective
methods to generate hybrid content is to procedurally merge different
pre-made assets or to procedurally apply some distortions to them.
Supposing, however, a single algorithm can be envisioned to generate a
realistic-looking tree, the algorithm could be called to generate
random trees, thus filling a whole forest at runtime, instead of
storing all the vertices required by the various models. This would
save storage media space and reduce the burden on artists, while
providing a richer experience. The same method would require far more
processing power (though somewhat less disk access), but with CPUs
getting faster, the problem is gradually becoming smaller. However it
is not easy to develop such an algorithm for a single tree, let alone
for a variety of species (compare Sumac, Birch, Maple and its species),
moreover assembling a forest could not be done by just assembling trees
because in the real world this introduces interactions between the
various trees which dramatically change their appearance (although this
is probably a minor detail).
In 2004, a PC first-person shooter called .kkrieger was released that
made heavy use of procedural synthesis: while quite short and very
simple, the advanced video effects were packed into just 96 Kilobytes.
In contrast, many modern games are released across several CDs, often
exceeding 2 gigabytes in size, more than 20,000 times larger. Several
upcoming commercial titles for the PC, such as Will Wright's Spore,
will also make use of procedural synthesis. If this trend continues in
the console world, it will require special hardware support.
Accordingly, the Xbox 360 and the Playstation 3 have impressive
procedural synthesis capabilities.
* * *
In other words, YOU DON'T NEED THAT MUCH SPACE.
Swam Mollen
It's like suggesting you need an entire room to store clothes, when
using a vacume bag would reduce it to a 10th of the space.
Jeremy Reaban
"Jonah Falcon" <jonah...@mindspring.com> wrote in message
news:1156378224....@m73g2000cwd.googlegroups.com...
> Will Wright would be giggling. He's making Spore purely on procedural
> generation, which eliminates garbage like that.
Well, wait a minute. The first game in the Elder Scrolls series, Arena, used
procedural generation (and covered the whole continent, not just 1
province). Oblivion doesn't. So is Oblivion worse than Arena?
Jonah Falcon
Where did I say "worse"? And Obilivion has its own engine.
Jonah Falcon
Oh, and Oblivion doesn't do rendered cutscenes. Everything is in-engine.
get...@1upandup.com
everything, then spool it off the BluRay disk, so the BluRay disk will
be a MUST.
- Richard Hutnik
spaceman
Doug Jacobs
> No, the real reason Resistence: Fall of Man uses 22gb is because it
> contains all versions of the game, european, US and Japanese, all in
> one package, plus loads and loads of FMV.
When you say "all versions" surely you just mean 1 version of the game
with different language directories for the dialog and menus, right? I
mean, why would you put a multiple, complete copies of a game onto a
single disc if the ONLY differences was just the language? Yes? Please
don't tell me the video game industry has ignored the past 10 years of
localization methods...