HDD = bigger levels. Nope, you're still limited to 512MB of the 360's RAM.
MYTH:
HDD = bigger textures. Nope, you're still limited to 512MB of the 360's RAM.
etc.
The 360 is fast enough that it can load compressed assets from disc and decompress them without the harddrive middleman.
Two, if you have an easily user-removable harddrive, you want your developers to know that they can't always depend on it being there.
Three. 360 games can and do cache on the HDD. Bioware developer is full of shit, if it was even an actual Bioware employee. For example, load a campaign level on Halo 3 after playing another game. Notice how long it takes to load? Now turn off your 360, reboot into Halo 3, and load that level again. Oh shit, it loaded a lot quicker. Halo 3 also stores recent films and gametypes in the cache, and they'll go away if you play another 360 game or an OXbox game.
Four. The harddrive was honestly a crutch for the 4x speed OXbox DVD drive. the OXbox would have had a lot longer load times without that HDD. Nintendo compensated for slow DVD by making the disc smaller. Now both the 360 and Wii have full-speed DVD drives (12 or 16x, whichever is the highest).
I don't really see the issue. 360 games can and do take advantage of the HDD, if you have it. If you don't have one, you can still play your games, you'll just have longer load times and can't download massive DLC. You don't lose anything by owning a harddrive, and 360 games are not suffering due to the lack of a standard HDD. If Nintendo can fucking fit Ocarina of goddamn Time into 32MB, everyone else can fit their awesome game into DVD9, by simply just not using shitty prerendered FMV. And if they honestly need more space, it doesn't cost that much to just make a multi disc game. And yes, you can publish a multi disc game, MS will let you.
Even though your post is a gigantic troll, I'll reply to it.
Sports games shouldn't need two discs - text data can be compressed, and there's no sport I know of that needs that many different textures to even come close to DVD9 capacity.
Tales of Symphonia was non-linear and used two discs just fine on GameCube. What mostly takes up space is high quality audio and video. Geometry, etc, doesn't actually take up too much space compared to that - once you got through enough of the story, you can safely play the rest of the game from disc 2.
There was also a two disc racing game on Gamecube and nobody had problems.
Your second point is just nonsensical trolling.
Third is the same, but it's obvious that most FMV in games is crap, and just there for the sake of outsourced FMV.
I wouldn't describe the 360HDD as anemic. It's only small if you're downloading movies all time and like to hoard huge game demos. I still have plenty of space left on my HDD and I have a bunch of DLC, Xbox Originals, and hundreds of music tracks.
Now, if you'd like to, oh I don't know, actually contribute a post worth reading without resorting to personal insults, feel free to do so. Otherwise, feel free to go elsewhere.
I'm confused. Would you rather it not reserve those seven gigabytes for game cache and the Xbox 1 emulator? I mean, then what would be the fucking point of having a hard drive?
that wasn't really advertised, but honestly i have zero intentions on every playing a oxbox game.
I take it you haven't played Psychonauts?
I take it you think people on the Interwebs don't have XBOX-class PCs? We must be using our consoles and handhelds to make these posts.
The PC game is $4 or less almost anywhere you can still find it and it is FREE through GameTap. Check Big Lots.
The reason HDD > DVD in the case of the 360 & PS3 isn't due directly to transfer rates but more to seek times. If you aren't careful with how you layout your data on the disk it's not impossible to see seek times of 500ms or more on some DVD drives.
This is why you see texture pops and the like, the disk is stalling waiting for the head to seek to where the next data it needs to read is at.
Can we have someone in here who actually knows how these games are programmed rather than the frenzied imaginations of a semi-tech savvy gamer?
Last I was aware the texture pop in on games had nothing to do with a lack of HDD and everything to do with the specific manner in which UE3 handles textures. And nothing to do with seek times either.
I own a PS3 and the only game Ive seen that couldnt be possible on the 360 is probably Ratchet.
Big HDD space and Big Disc space most of the time = less compression and bloated games. I know that Uncharted especially is plagued by this (the amount of animations is nice, but ridiculously space consuming)
Three. 360 games can and do cache on the HDD. Bioware developer is full of shit, if it was even an actual Bioware employee. For example, load a campaign level on Halo 3 after playing another game. Notice how long it takes to load? Now turn off your 360, reboot into Halo 3, and load that level again. Oh shit, it loaded a lot quicker. Halo 3 also stores recent films and gametypes in the cache, and they'll go away if you play another 360 game or an OXbox game.
I've had a 360 for a week, and I've noticed this.
Just because the HDD is not *required* doesn't mean developers can't use it if it's there.
Can we have someone in here who actually knows how these games are programmed rather than the frenzied imaginations of a semi-tech savvy gamer?
I'm currently a developer on a title working close with UE3, I know a bit about this stuff but I don't claim to have the answers to everything.
Seek times can be killer when it comes to this. Data rate does play a part but if you start hitting seek times of 200ms+ it completely kills any data your are trying to get to. The PSP is pretty bad about this, I can't quote exact numbers but putting a disk on that system was the worst choice Sony made.
FyreWulff, the Cube didn't have any two disc racing games, unless you count Freaky Flyers, also we went through this over a year ago when the forums were awashed with DVD-9 and BD arguments.
The only posts the DVD-9 diehards make ever seem to be one of the following:
A.) Two disc games are fine
B.) FMV is shitty
without exception. You're embarassing yourself.
Especially considering that the whole DVD-9 argument that you brought up really has no place in this thread, since we're trying to discuss the benefit the Xbox 360 would have if developers could count on a hard drive being standard. Not a hard drive to alleviate the scant seven gigs of space that an Xbox 360 game is limited to, but to alleviate overly large seek times that result in textures popping in here and there, and side benefits from a mandatory hard drive, like much larger file sizes for XBLA games.
Also, I was under tha understanding that the Mass Effect texture issue was caused by UE3 and the facial animation system that ME used not getting along as well as they could? But the elevators, good god the elevators, I'm pretty sure that was just pure load time that would have been significantly decreased if the data was coming off of a hard drive as opposed to a DVD.
FyreWulff, the Cube didn't have any two disc racing games, unless you count Freaky Flyers, also we went through this over a year ago when the forums were awashed with DVD-9 and BD arguments.
The only posts the DVD-9 diehards make ever seem to be one of the following:
A.) Two disc games are fine
B.) FMV is shitty
without exception. You're embarassing yourself.
Especially considering that the whole DVD-9 argument that you brought up really has no place in this thread, since we're trying to discuss the benefit the Xbox 360 would have if developers could count on a hard drive being standard. Not a hard drive to alleviate the scant seven gigs of space that an Xbox 360 game is limited to, but to alleviate overly large seek times that result in textures popping in here and there, and side benefits from a mandatory hard drive, like much larger file sizes for XBLA games.
Also, I was under tha understanding that the Mass Effect texture issue was caused by UE3 and the facial animation system that ME used not getting along as well as they could? But the elevators, good god the elevators, I'm pretty sure that was just pure load time that would have been significantly decreased if the data was coming off of a hard drive as opposed to a DVD.
Is it known that Mass Effect doesn't take advantage of the hard drive?
Like the elevator times are the same with and without one?
One thing that really annoys me is that MS didn't design their hard drives with another socket, so you could just stack storage. That would have been way better than the way things currently work:
when you buy the 120GB drive, and decide to transfer your 20GB drive's data, you have to use their process, which wipes anything that was already on the 120 drive, then makes an identical copy of the 20GB drive (only with more room left over) and then wipes the data from the 20GB drive. There's no way to selectively copy data, for instance, to keep an XBLA 20GB drive, and a separate DLC drive for movies, TV shows and game demos. Well, you *could* do that, but if you've already downloaded a movie to your 20GB drive, you can't just copy it over to the 120 drive, you have to delete it from the 20GB drive, then re-download it to the bigger drive.
And there is no reason apart from greed to justify the retail price of the 120GB drive.
So is there anything stopping devs making a game with two mode, HDD enabled and Non-HDD enabled?
They could optimise the game to have extra pretties and stop issues like texture pop up, and remove/decrease load times for people with HDDs.
Realistically this would result in gimped versions for people with core/arcade systems, and dev costs would increase, and full efficiency that could be offered by the HDD wouldn't be achieved as long as it wasn't required.
It would be a bitch for people without HDDs, but number of people with HDD consoles are certainly buying more games than those without. Basically the same as games needing an HDTV for higher resolutions or an internet connection for Live features.
One thing that really annoys me is that MS didn't design their hard drives with another socket, so you could just stack storage. That would have been way better than the way things currently work:
when you buy the 120GB drive, and decide to transfer your 20GB drive's data, you have to use their process, which wipes anything that was already on the 120 drive, then makes an identical copy of the 20GB drive (only with more room left over) and then wipes the data from the 20GB drive. There's no way to selectively copy data, for instance, to keep an XBLA 20GB drive, and a separate DLC drive for movies, TV shows and game demos. Well, you *could* do that, but if you've already downloaded a movie to your 20GB drive, you can't just copy it over to the 120 drive, you have to delete it from the 20GB drive, then re-download it to the bigger drive.
And there is no reason apart from greed to justify the retail price of the 120GB drive.
There are methods that people use to do exactly that... mostly to cheat up Gamerscore by altering saves. The reason why they make it hard to do is so they can make rules against it to keep people from altering game files and ban those that do.
Can we have someone in here who actually knows how these games are programmed rather than the frenzied imaginations of a semi-tech savvy gamer?
Last I was aware the texture pop in on games had nothing to do with a lack of HDD and everything to do with the specific manner in which UE3 handles textures. And nothing to do with seek times either.
I own a PS3 and the only game Ive seen that couldnt be possible on the 360 is probably Ratchet.
Big HDD space and Big Disc space most of the time = less compression and bloated games. I know that Uncharted especially is plagued by this (the amount of animations is nice, but ridiculously space consuming)
I've never played the PS3 Ratchet, but it doesn't look all that impressive to me (in relation to this topic, not dissing the quality of the game). Why is something (from all HD videos / trailers I've seen) cartoony, for lack of a better word, like Ratchet impossible on the 360? It's not exactly a long game and graphically, I wouldn't say it outclasses Gears or Mass Effect and the 360 could do those perfectly fine. I'm honestly curious why you chose Ratchet as impossible.
So is there anything stopping devs making a game with two mode, HDD enabled and Non-HDD enabled?
No because they do it now
every time a thread like this pops up this question comes up
there are 7 gigs available on the drive for games to pre-cache whatever if the developer chooses to do so
If I remember right, it's less than 4GB of space, split up into three banks (one bank per game similar to the way the Xbox handled hard disk caches), and the remaining space is used for the software Xbox BC, and game patches.
Also, having a mandatory hard drive of a decent size might have been nice so we could avoid having to redownload game updates (from games that haven't been played in a while) that the system has purged.
i think in the next couple of years they'll release a new "360-HD" spec (and all-in-one 360 HD machine) - games which fall under this specification will both require a hard drive and run on hd-dvd. that way it doesn't totally undercut the early adopters this generation, but it means they'll be able to keep up with the PS3 as games get bigger and developers realise they can do a lot more with access to storage.
i think it's a great idea - i don't think i'll buy a 360 until something like this happens, but when it does, count me in
I got an Arcade pack for Christmas by an unsuspecting wife. I now am trying to get up the guts to drastically overpay for an official money-grab by Microsoft. I want to buy Psychonauts, Castlevania SON, and the upcoming Street Fighter II HD Remix, and that little 265MB card is pretty much useless. I really don't care too much about caching or slightly longer load times. I just want to buy some XBLA games.
Can we have someone in here who actually knows how these games are programmed rather than the frenzied imaginations of a semi-tech savvy gamer?
Last I was aware the texture pop in on games had nothing to do with a lack of HDD and everything to do with the specific manner in which UE3 handles textures. And nothing to do with seek times either.
I own a PS3 and the only game Ive seen that couldnt be possible on the 360 is probably Ratchet.
Big HDD space and Big Disc space most of the time = less compression and bloated games. I know that Uncharted especially is plagued by this (the amount of animations is nice, but ridiculously space consuming)
I've never played the PS3 Ratchet, but it doesn't look all that impressive to me (in relation to this topic, not dissing the quality of the game). Why is something (from all HD videos / trailers I've seen) cartoony, for lack of a better word, like Ratchet impossible on the 360? It's not exactly a long game and graphically, I wouldn't say it outclasses Gears or Mass Effect and the 360 could do those perfectly fine. I'm honestly curious why you chose Ratchet as impossible.
There are a lot of areas in the game that I just dont think the 360 could do.
Also, the Sixaxis implementation is more than superficial in that game.
I mean Ratchet could be done on 360, but it wouldnt be the same game. Unlike say Uncharted which I could see easily being ported 'as is' with no changes at all.
While it seems the consensus is that it is possible for developers to cache maps and textures onto the HD on 360 clearly they aren't doing it uniformly. If they were there would be no good reason for the elevators in Mass Effect and so forth. Perhaps then what I mean to say is that developers need to start being required to load nearby game elements onto the HD using spare processor and reading time in order to optimize their titles.
I got an Arcade pack for Christmas by an unsuspecting wife. I now am trying to get up the guts to drastically overpay for an official money-grab by Microsoft. I want to buy Psychonauts, Castlevania SON, and the upcoming Street Fighter II HD Remix, and that little 265MB card is pretty much useless. I really don't care too much about caching or slightly longer load times. I just want to buy some XBLA games.
This is the strange irony of the "Arcade" pack; it desperately calls out for a hard drive the most, yet it's the only one that doesn't have it. You can buy secondhand 20GB drives for about $60 on eBay; I did with my Core and it works like a charm, even still had Hexic on it and everything.
While it seems the consensus is that it is possible for developers to cache maps and textures onto the HD on 360 clearly they aren't doing it uniformly. If they were there would be no good reason for the elevators in Mass Effect and so forth. Perhaps then what I mean to say is that developers need to start being required to load nearby game elements onto the HD using spare processor and reading time in order to optimize their titles.
Again... do you know that the load times would be reduced in ME if they were able to develop with "HDD required" in mind? I don't think that you do, but I keep asking because maybe someone will speak up.
While it seems the consensus is that it is possible for developers to cache maps and textures onto the HD on 360 clearly they aren't doing it uniformly. If they were there would be no good reason for the elevators in Mass Effect and so forth. Perhaps then what I mean to say is that developers need to start being required to load nearby game elements onto the HD using spare processor and reading time in order to optimize their titles.
Again... do you know that the load times would be reduced in ME if they were able to develop with "HDD required" in mind? I don't think that you do, but I keep asking because maybe someone will speak up.
The transfer rate from the Hard disk to the system RAM (100s of Mb/s) is MUCH faster than the transfer rate from the DVD drive to the system RAM (10s of Mb/s). So if the available next places to go, menu items, cut scenes etc were loaded onto the hard disk using spare time while you wander about the level you are on there's no way it could not be faster.
The only way that it could not be faster is if there isn't any spare processor cycles and disk reading time while you walk around the level. Then there would be no time to preload anything.
While it seems the consensus is that it is possible for developers to cache maps and textures onto the HD on 360 clearly they aren't doing it uniformly. If they were there would be no good reason for the elevators in Mass Effect and so forth. Perhaps then what I mean to say is that developers need to start being required to load nearby game elements onto the HD using spare processor and reading time in order to optimize their titles.
Again... do you know that the load times would be reduced in ME if they were able to develop with "HDD required" in mind? I don't think that you do, but I keep asking because maybe someone will speak up.
The transfer rate from the Hard disk to the system RAM (100s of Mb/s) is MUCH faster than the transfer rate from the DVD drive to the system RAM (10s of Mb/s). So if the available next places to go, menu items, cut scenes etc were loaded onto the hard disk using spare time while you wander about the level you are on there's no way it could not be faster.
The only way that it could not be faster is if there isn't any spare processor cycles and disk reading time while you walk around the level. Then there would be no time to preload anything.
i think in the next couple of years they'll release a new "360-HD" spec (and all-in-one 360 HD machine) - games which fall under this specification will both require a hard drive and run on hd-dvd. that way it doesn't totally undercut the early adopters this generation, but it means they'll be able to keep up with the PS3 as games get bigger and developers realise they can do a lot more with access to storage.
i think it's a great idea - i don't think i'll buy a 360 until something like this happens, but when it does, count me in
While it seems the consensus is that it is possible for developers to cache maps and textures onto the HD on 360 clearly they aren't doing it uniformly. If they were there would be no good reason for the elevators in Mass Effect and so forth. Perhaps then what I mean to say is that developers need to start being required to load nearby game elements onto the HD using spare processor and reading time in order to optimize their titles.
Again... do you know that the load times would be reduced in ME if they were able to develop with "HDD required" in mind? I don't think that you do, but I keep asking because maybe someone will speak up.
The transfer rate from the Hard disk to the system RAM (100s of Mb/s) is MUCH faster than the transfer rate from the DVD drive to the system RAM (10s of Mb/s). So if the available next places to go, menu items, cut scenes etc were loaded onto the hard disk using spare time while you wander about the level you are on there's no way it could not be faster.
The only way that it could not be faster is if there isn't any spare processor cycles and disk reading time while you walk around the level. Then there would be no time to preload anything.
So still just assumptions then
Pretty much. For all we know it's a problem with the engine.
The UE3 engine is pretty bad at streaming, and mostly still incomplete.
ATM Machine
Mass Effect does a lot of things with UE3 that aren't normally supposed to work with UE3, like the huge areas and the facial animation and having such a heavy emphasis on streaming data. You average Unreal Tournament game just loads a single map, and it's done.
Having a guaranteed hard drive in the system would help considerably, since developers could spend all of their time developing software for a device that they know will be included. They wouldn't have to use development resources on getting their game up and running off of a DVD alone.
The UE3 engine is pretty bad at streaming, and mostly still incomplete.
ATM Machine
Mass Effect does a lot of things with UE3 that aren't normally supposed to work with UE3, like the huge areas and the facial animation and having such a heavy emphasis on streaming data. You average Unreal Tournament game just loads a single map, and it's done.
Having a guaranteed hard drive in the system would help considerably, since developers could spend all of their time developing software for a device that they know will be included. They wouldn't have to use development resources on getting their game up and running off of a DVD alone.
Hold the phone, now. When UE3 was hot shit and we were still seeing just tech demos of it, one of the things that was touted about it was that it would be *great* for MMO's because it could stream huge worlds seamlessly, much like we see in World of Warcraft right now. I distinctly remember hearing about this and thinking that the Doom 3 engine was going to be buried because of that difference.
The UE3 engine is pretty bad at streaming, and mostly still incomplete.
ATM Machine
Mass Effect does a lot of things with UE3 that aren't normally supposed to work with UE3, like the huge areas and the facial animation and having such a heavy emphasis on streaming data. You average Unreal Tournament game just loads a single map, and it's done.
Having a guaranteed hard drive in the system would help considerably, since developers could spend all of their time developing software for a device that they know will be included. They wouldn't have to use development resources on getting their game up and running off of a DVD alone.
Hold the phone, now. When UE3 was hot shit and we were still seeing just tech demos of it, one of the things that was touted about it was that it would be *great* for MMO's because it could stream huge worlds seamlessly, much like we see in World of Warcraft right now. I distinctly remember hearing about this and thinking that the Doom 3 engine was going to be buried because of that difference.
Epic was showing off its flagship product to potential customers and subcustomers. They would have said it cured cancer if they thought it would help hype it up.
Not that UE3 is a bad engine, but it isn't some crazy shit superior to everything else ever made, as it was initially billed.
All I remember from the UE3 promo material that I saw was thinking "Goddamn that's a lot of bloom".
It's a killer engine so far, but it's still fairly new. It hasn't matured like other engines that have been around for a few years and have had multiple additions made, like Source or id Tech 4.
There is a lot more that could be done with it if it had a more dependable place to read data from, as in a hard drive.
Didn't Bioware's original XBox games have major load times as well despite the fact that the hard drive was standard with the XBox? Seems to be more of a problem with the developer than the hardware.
All I remember from the UE3 promo material that I saw was thinking "Goddamn that's a lot of bloom".
It's a killer engine so far, but it's still fairly new. It hasn't matured like other engines that have been around for a few years and have had multiple additions made, like Source or id Tech 4.
There is a lot more that could be done with it if it had a more dependable place to read data from, as in a hard drive.
It's still data. It doesn't matter where it comes from, a disc or a HDD. Every OXbox game would have worked without the harddrive, they would have just had shit load times.
Seeing as how Bungie and Infinity Ward and tons of other developers do not have problems, I'm just going to go with what people working in development houses and UE3, and the say that the engine is a shitfest and BioWare isn't that great of a technical developer, either.
FyreWulff, the Cube didn't have any two disc racing games, unless you count Freaky Flyers, also we went through this over a year ago when the forums were awashed with DVD-9 and BD arguments.
The only posts the DVD-9 diehards make ever seem to be one of the following:
A.) Two disc games are fine
B.) FMV is shitty
without exception. You're embarassing yourself.
Especially considering that the whole DVD-9 argument that you brought up really has no place in this thread, since we're trying to discuss the benefit the Xbox 360 would have if developers could count on a hard drive being standard. Not a hard drive to alleviate the scant seven gigs of space that an Xbox 360 game is limited to, but to alleviate overly large seek times that result in textures popping in here and there, and side benefits from a mandatory hard drive, like much larger file sizes for XBLA games.
Also, I was under tha understanding that the Mass Effect texture issue was caused by UE3 and the facial animation system that ME used not getting along as well as they could? But the elevators, good god the elevators, I'm pretty sure that was just pure load time that would have been significantly decreased if the data was coming off of a hard drive as opposed to a DVD.
I always thought that GT Cube was two-discs, but now I don't know where I read that.
Posts
HDD = bigger levels. Nope, you're still limited to 512MB of the 360's RAM.
MYTH:
HDD = bigger textures. Nope, you're still limited to 512MB of the 360's RAM.
etc.
The 360 is fast enough that it can load compressed assets from disc and decompress them without the harddrive middleman.
Two, if you have an easily user-removable harddrive, you want your developers to know that they can't always depend on it being there.
Three. 360 games can and do cache on the HDD. Bioware developer is full of shit, if it was even an actual Bioware employee. For example, load a campaign level on Halo 3 after playing another game. Notice how long it takes to load? Now turn off your 360, reboot into Halo 3, and load that level again. Oh shit, it loaded a lot quicker. Halo 3 also stores recent films and gametypes in the cache, and they'll go away if you play another 360 game or an OXbox game.
Four. The harddrive was honestly a crutch for the 4x speed OXbox DVD drive. the OXbox would have had a lot longer load times without that HDD. Nintendo compensated for slow DVD by making the disc smaller. Now both the 360 and Wii have full-speed DVD drives (12 or 16x, whichever is the highest).
I don't really see the issue. 360 games can and do take advantage of the HDD, if you have it. If you don't have one, you can still play your games, you'll just have longer load times and can't download massive DLC. You don't lose anything by owning a harddrive, and 360 games are not suffering due to the lack of a standard HDD. If Nintendo can fucking fit Ocarina of goddamn Time into 32MB, everyone else can fit their awesome game into DVD9, by simply just not using shitty prerendered FMV. And if they honestly need more space, it doesn't cost that much to just make a multi disc game. And yes, you can publish a multi disc game, MS will let you.
Anyone who brings up a decade old cartridge game in a discussion on the 360's lack of standard storage space is a dumbass.
Anyone who calls FMV shitty is a dumbass. Those grapes sure are sour, huh?
The 360's fucking anemic hard drive options wouldn't be a big deal if the drives weren't so greedily priced.
Steam / Bus Blog / Goozex Referral
Sports games shouldn't need two discs - text data can be compressed, and there's no sport I know of that needs that many different textures to even come close to DVD9 capacity.
Tales of Symphonia was non-linear and used two discs just fine on GameCube. What mostly takes up space is high quality audio and video. Geometry, etc, doesn't actually take up too much space compared to that - once you got through enough of the story, you can safely play the rest of the game from disc 2.
There was also a two disc racing game on Gamecube and nobody had problems.
Your second point is just nonsensical trolling.
Third is the same, but it's obvious that most FMV in games is crap, and just there for the sake of outsourced FMV.
I wouldn't describe the 360HDD as anemic. It's only small if you're downloading movies all time and like to hoard huge game demos. I still have plenty of space left on my HDD and I have a bunch of DLC, Xbox Originals, and hundreds of music tracks.
Now, if you'd like to, oh I don't know, actually contribute a post worth reading without resorting to personal insults, feel free to do so. Otherwise, feel free to go elsewhere.
I take it you think people on the Interwebs don't have XBOX-class PCs? We must be using our consoles and handhelds to make these posts.
The PC game is $4 or less almost anywhere you can still find it and it is FREE through GameTap. Check Big Lots.
This is why you see texture pops and the like, the disk is stalling waiting for the head to seek to where the next data it needs to read is at.
Last I was aware the texture pop in on games had nothing to do with a lack of HDD and everything to do with the specific manner in which UE3 handles textures. And nothing to do with seek times either.
I own a PS3 and the only game Ive seen that couldnt be possible on the 360 is probably Ratchet.
Big HDD space and Big Disc space most of the time = less compression and bloated games. I know that Uncharted especially is plagued by this (the amount of animations is nice, but ridiculously space consuming)
I've had a 360 for a week, and I've noticed this.
Just because the HDD is not *required* doesn't mean developers can't use it if it's there.
I'm currently a developer on a title working close with UE3, I know a bit about this stuff but I don't claim to have the answers to everything.
Seek times can be killer when it comes to this. Data rate does play a part but if you start hitting seek times of 200ms+ it completely kills any data your are trying to get to. The PSP is pretty bad about this, I can't quote exact numbers but putting a disk on that system was the worst choice Sony made.
The only posts the DVD-9 diehards make ever seem to be one of the following:
A.) Two disc games are fine
B.) FMV is shitty
without exception. You're embarassing yourself.
Especially considering that the whole DVD-9 argument that you brought up really has no place in this thread, since we're trying to discuss the benefit the Xbox 360 would have if developers could count on a hard drive being standard. Not a hard drive to alleviate the scant seven gigs of space that an Xbox 360 game is limited to, but to alleviate overly large seek times that result in textures popping in here and there, and side benefits from a mandatory hard drive, like much larger file sizes for XBLA games.
Also, I was under tha understanding that the Mass Effect texture issue was caused by UE3 and the facial animation system that ME used not getting along as well as they could? But the elevators, good god the elevators, I'm pretty sure that was just pure load time that would have been significantly decreased if the data was coming off of a hard drive as opposed to a DVD.
Steam / Bus Blog / Goozex Referral
Is it known that Mass Effect doesn't take advantage of the hard drive?
Like the elevator times are the same with and without one?
when you buy the 120GB drive, and decide to transfer your 20GB drive's data, you have to use their process, which wipes anything that was already on the 120 drive, then makes an identical copy of the 20GB drive (only with more room left over) and then wipes the data from the 20GB drive. There's no way to selectively copy data, for instance, to keep an XBLA 20GB drive, and a separate DLC drive for movies, TV shows and game demos. Well, you *could* do that, but if you've already downloaded a movie to your 20GB drive, you can't just copy it over to the 120 drive, you have to delete it from the 20GB drive, then re-download it to the bigger drive.
And there is no reason apart from greed to justify the retail price of the 120GB drive.
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They could optimise the game to have extra pretties and stop issues like texture pop up, and remove/decrease load times for people with HDDs.
Realistically this would result in gimped versions for people with core/arcade systems, and dev costs would increase, and full efficiency that could be offered by the HDD wouldn't be achieved as long as it wasn't required.
It would be a bitch for people without HDDs, but number of people with HDD consoles are certainly buying more games than those without. Basically the same as games needing an HDTV for higher resolutions or an internet connection for Live features.
There are methods that people use to do exactly that... mostly to cheat up Gamerscore by altering saves. The reason why they make it hard to do is so they can make rules against it to keep people from altering game files and ban those that do.
No because they do it now
every time a thread like this pops up this question comes up
there are 7 gigs available on the drive for games to pre-cache whatever if the developer chooses to do so
So is the issue is that devs are deciding to not use it fully/prioritizing making the non-HDD version not gimped?
Since that's pretty much their call, although I can see why it would be disappointing to people with HDDs...
which devs are deciding not to use it? I think that's the point here...
load times don't disappear when you run from a HDD... people are confusing the issue and think that "no HDD" = load time and "HDD" = no load time
I put it into the title because I'm getting tired of hearing about it in every 360 thread since ME.
I've never played the PS3 Ratchet, but it doesn't look all that impressive to me (in relation to this topic, not dissing the quality of the game). Why is something (from all HD videos / trailers I've seen) cartoony, for lack of a better word, like Ratchet impossible on the 360? It's not exactly a long game and graphically, I wouldn't say it outclasses Gears or Mass Effect and the 360 could do those perfectly fine. I'm honestly curious why you chose Ratchet as impossible.
If I remember right, it's less than 4GB of space, split up into three banks (one bank per game similar to the way the Xbox handled hard disk caches), and the remaining space is used for the software Xbox BC, and game patches.
Also, having a mandatory hard drive of a decent size might have been nice so we could avoid having to redownload game updates (from games that haven't been played in a while) that the system has purged.
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You're crazy. No way.
O_o
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There are a lot of areas in the game that I just dont think the 360 could do.
Also, the Sixaxis implementation is more than superficial in that game.
I mean Ratchet could be done on 360, but it wouldnt be the same game. Unlike say Uncharted which I could see easily being ported 'as is' with no changes at all.
This is the strange irony of the "Arcade" pack; it desperately calls out for a hard drive the most, yet it's the only one that doesn't have it. You can buy secondhand 20GB drives for about $60 on eBay; I did with my Core and it works like a charm, even still had Hexic on it and everything.
The transfer rate from the Hard disk to the system RAM (100s of Mb/s) is MUCH faster than the transfer rate from the DVD drive to the system RAM (10s of Mb/s). So if the available next places to go, menu items, cut scenes etc were loaded onto the hard disk using spare time while you wander about the level you are on there's no way it could not be faster.
The only way that it could not be faster is if there isn't any spare processor cycles and disk reading time while you walk around the level. Then there would be no time to preload anything.
touche
Pretty much. For all we know it's a problem with the engine.
ATM Machine
Mass Effect does a lot of things with UE3 that aren't normally supposed to work with UE3, like the huge areas and the facial animation and having such a heavy emphasis on streaming data. You average Unreal Tournament game just loads a single map, and it's done.
Having a guaranteed hard drive in the system would help considerably, since developers could spend all of their time developing software for a device that they know will be included. They wouldn't have to use development resources on getting their game up and running off of a DVD alone.
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Hold the phone, now. When UE3 was hot shit and we were still seeing just tech demos of it, one of the things that was touted about it was that it would be *great* for MMO's because it could stream huge worlds seamlessly, much like we see in World of Warcraft right now. I distinctly remember hearing about this and thinking that the Doom 3 engine was going to be buried because of that difference.
the nexus
Epic was showing off its flagship product to potential customers and subcustomers. They would have said it cured cancer if they thought it would help hype it up.
Not that UE3 is a bad engine, but it isn't some crazy shit superior to everything else ever made, as it was initially billed.
It's a killer engine so far, but it's still fairly new. It hasn't matured like other engines that have been around for a few years and have had multiple additions made, like Source or id Tech 4.
There is a lot more that could be done with it if it had a more dependable place to read data from, as in a hard drive.
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It's still data. It doesn't matter where it comes from, a disc or a HDD. Every OXbox game would have worked without the harddrive, they would have just had shit load times.
Seeing as how Bungie and Infinity Ward and tons of other developers do not have problems, I'm just going to go with what people working in development houses and UE3, and the say that the engine is a shitfest and BioWare isn't that great of a technical developer, either.
I always thought that GT Cube was two-discs, but now I don't know where I read that.