Jonnyboy117
Member
I can see two models working if it is easy and cheap to upgrade an HD-less system into one that does have an HD.
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Chittagong
Gold Member
Microsoft isn't leaking this much on accident. I think Microsoft is seeding this stuff on purpose, for three reasons:
1. Keep Xenon the main focus of hardcore gamer discussions pre-E3
2. Field-test the reactions while allowing time for an emergency turnaround
3. Educating people unofficially - putting the main focus on E3 on the games, not on discussion of "WTF is that name??!"
1. Keep Xenon the main focus of hardcore gamer discussions pre-E3
2. Field-test the reactions while allowing time for an emergency turnaround
3. Educating people unofficially - putting the main focus on E3 on the games, not on discussion of "WTF is that name??!"
Ghost said:
Well Guild Wars (yeah yeah not a complete MMORPG) is only a 97KB (or something like that) install on your computer. The rest of the game is entirely streamed. I predict most MMORPGs will eventually take that route when they get capable programmers like ArenaNet has.
Phoenix
Member
Razoric said:Well Guild Wars (yeah yeah not a complete MMORPG) is only a 97KB (or something like that) install on your computer. The rest of the game is entirely streamed. I predict most MMORPGs will eventually take that route when they get capable programmers like ArenaNet has.
How can we save this quote for posterity? I can't wait to install 97K on my machine and spend the next few hours downloading art. Hell if they're doing that, they don't even need to sell at retail
Phoenix
Member
mrklaw said:
I doubt seriously if there are two "versions". I think there will be one version and the HDD accessory may be bundled in a pack the same way the broadband adapter thing is with PS2. It seems to make more sense for the HDD to just be like any other USB/Firewire drive that you can just plug into the unit as opposed to an entirely new hardware design - that would be beyond stupid from a manufacturing perspective.
Phoenix said:
More beyond stupid than simply having a HDD as a plug-in accessory? If you are only using it for save games then flash should be plenty. Any accessory won't be fully supported by developers, so you can't suddenly have 1GB saves.
And any 'leet' nutters out there who want custom soundtracks etc will probably be able to stream them from their PC network anyway.
Phoenix said:How can we save this quote for posterity? I can't wait to install 97K on my machine and spend the next few hours downloading art. Hell if they're doing that, they don't even need to sell at retail
Ok ok, so the initial run of the game it downloads about 16 megs then starts streaming the rest onto your computer while playing... but after that it's done.
See for yourself:
http://www.guildwars.com/downloads/clientdownload.html
Beta weekend starts today too! :O
Here's how I'd like to see the optional HD integration turning out ideally:
-Base 360 unit with no HD actually still has a small HD that can support game saves and possibly about 20 songs for custom soundtracks.
-The HD itself is simply a footprint that plugs onto the footprint of the base unit, much like the Game Boy Player. The HD unit bundle includes this, the non-HD bundle doesn't, but the HD add-on is available seperately for $50-75. When something huge like Halo 3 or a promising MMO comes around, MS makes it the poster child for HD integration, and offers a percentage the game optionally bundled with the hard drive add-on for those that don't have it yet.
-The only games that really require the HD to play should be MMOs. The function of the HD otherwise should only be for optional things like DL content and additional music custom soundtrack storage.
-Base 360 unit with no HD actually still has a small HD that can support game saves and possibly about 20 songs for custom soundtracks.
-The HD itself is simply a footprint that plugs onto the footprint of the base unit, much like the Game Boy Player. The HD unit bundle includes this, the non-HD bundle doesn't, but the HD add-on is available seperately for $50-75. When something huge like Halo 3 or a promising MMO comes around, MS makes it the poster child for HD integration, and offers a percentage the game optionally bundled with the hard drive add-on for those that don't have it yet.
-The only games that really require the HD to play should be MMOs. The function of the HD otherwise should only be for optional things like DL content and additional music custom soundtrack storage.
Ghost of Bill Gates
Banned
Shig said:
MS would never do that.
And like I said, add-ons do not work.
I've got a feeling they'll include SOME kind of storage inbuilt, they have to, otherwise they're going to look pretty stupid for all the comments they made about the PS2 hard drive back in the day...
Perhaps they will have two versions though, one with a hard drive and one without BUT, both consoles will have the ability to use PCs via network for storage?
Perhaps they will have two versions though, one with a hard drive and one without BUT, both consoles will have the ability to use PCs via network for storage?
That would be more than fine *as long as* the base unit includes a large scratch file of some sort that'll decrease loading times. The lack of a dedicated drive would mean the initial game startup would always be a few seconds long (instead of just once with the dedicated HD) but I'm willing to live witht hat as long as loads in game are minimised.
We've been given a lot of indication that they're going to have an HD unit and a non-HD unit. I'm not saying that's true or false, but if that happens, it would be complete stupidity to not allow non-HD unit owners to upgrade easily. The alternative to offering the HD as an add-on is to make two completely seperate systems (which means higher production costs), and if the owners of the non-HD one want to upgrade, they have to buy a whole new system. That would be collosally retarded.Ghost of Bill Gates said:
radioheadrule83
Banned
Will it be called "Xbox 360" or just "360"? I'd actually prefer the latter.
The name is evocative of so many things, infinity, coming full circle, maximum degree of control / power / whatever you want... but what it instantly made me think of instead is all this "EXTREEEEME!!" type branding. "360! WOOOOOOO! X-TREME! XBOX! 360! X!"
Not my cup of tea, but I won't give a shit what it's called if they deliver on the promises.
To me - it sounds like - if they haven't sussed backwards compatability by the time they want to launch, they'll release an emulator further down the line if and when they do. It sucks, but at least it's a reason to keep the good ol' crystal box around somewhere >_<
As for the hard drive. HD was the best thing about Xbox from my point of view. But from their point of view its probably not that hot considering how it opened up piracy so well. I'll be watching that development closely... bring on E3!
The name is evocative of so many things, infinity, coming full circle, maximum degree of control / power / whatever you want... but what it instantly made me think of instead is all this "EXTREEEEME!!" type branding. "360! WOOOOOOO! X-TREME! XBOX! 360! X!"
Not my cup of tea, but I won't give a shit what it's called if they deliver on the promises.
To me - it sounds like - if they haven't sussed backwards compatability by the time they want to launch, they'll release an emulator further down the line if and when they do. It sucks, but at least it's a reason to keep the good ol' crystal box around somewhere >_<
As for the hard drive. HD was the best thing about Xbox from my point of view. But from their point of view its probably not that hot considering how it opened up piracy so well. I'll be watching that development closely... bring on E3!
i think the big problem is that way too many of you bought into the whole HDD is good for gaming line they used for xbox..
DLC can be handled either realtime (pay for it, stream it when needed) or have the most used files locally cached in flash memory and have some sort of online locker for the rest (again, it gets streamed when you need it). The rest of the "benefits" of a HDD can be recreated with a better file system, tighter controls on load times and a faster DVD drive (see: gamecube)
In reality the whole loading excelleration thing is a total non-issue. Every game has to be able to do everything its designed to without needing to have anything cached to the HDD the first time it is run. Its only subsequent loads that get the benefit so its never going to stop people from doing anything if its not there, because you have to treat it like its not there to make your game run right in the first place and it wont prevent backwards compatibility at all.
See, that makes no sense. If you play more than 3 games on xbox in rotation you already dont get any benefit from the HDD cache. And even if you dont do that you only get the benefit the second time you load some data!
what you seem to be proposing is that the game would have to pre-cache all its data at the start? that would massively increase load times! during an average session a game would be using a minute fraciton of the total data on the disk and so the resulting load times are fairly low, having to transfer everything before you could play might take upwards of 10 minutes! (especially with how badly some titles data is arranged on the disk)
Unless you are proposing they have enough cache to do this for multiple games would you really want to wait that long before you could play?
DLC can be handled either realtime (pay for it, stream it when needed) or have the most used files locally cached in flash memory and have some sort of online locker for the rest (again, it gets streamed when you need it). The rest of the "benefits" of a HDD can be recreated with a better file system, tighter controls on load times and a faster DVD drive (see: gamecube)
In reality the whole loading excelleration thing is a total non-issue. Every game has to be able to do everything its designed to without needing to have anything cached to the HDD the first time it is run. Its only subsequent loads that get the benefit so its never going to stop people from doing anything if its not there, because you have to treat it like its not there to make your game run right in the first place and it wont prevent backwards compatibility at all.
See, that makes no sense. If you play more than 3 games on xbox in rotation you already dont get any benefit from the HDD cache. And even if you dont do that you only get the benefit the second time you load some data!
what you seem to be proposing is that the game would have to pre-cache all its data at the start? that would massively increase load times! during an average session a game would be using a minute fraciton of the total data on the disk and so the resulting load times are fairly low, having to transfer everything before you could play might take upwards of 10 minutes! (especially with how badly some titles data is arranged on the disk)
Unless you are proposing they have enough cache to do this for multiple games would you really want to wait that long before you could play?
Ghost of Bill Gates
Banned
ninge said:
Don't be silly. Gamecube use these little discs that helps with loading..but comes at a price to users..less data.
Games like Morrowind would not be possible on consoles without a hard drive.
Not true - gamecube does not read data any faster than the XBOX dvd drive. Perhaps i should have made that more clear. Only the Data layout and load time control comments were directed at the gamecube. The size of the disk reduces seek times only - and they can be erradicated through better file layout and/or by combining files into large "pak" style files for reading large amounts of data without the need for seeks. ALL consoles would have better load times with a faster DVD drive next gen.
Tell me, what is it about morrowind that makes it need the HDD? I see nothing it is doing that requires any form of re-writable media asside from storing its save game data. Feel free to prove me wrong tho!
in fact:
fixed properly.
Does anyone know the size of a morrowind save file?
Ghost of Bill Gates
Banned
ninge said:
And this doesn't help with load time?
Morrowind constantly writes to the hard drive, which did break many DVD drives.. but yes, you walk across Morrowind and only get hiccups when the game streams data to the HD.
ok, you've managed to post two non-answers there. do you want to actually explain why the fact that the gamecube has a better seek time makes the argument that HDDs are required for faster loading correct?
And, what exactly does morrowind write to the HDD all the time? Save game data i assume - because it surely isnt anything else, there's no support for anything else! I still fail to see how that is something you can only do with HDD.
If you can tell me that the morrowind save file is so big that you couldnt store it in memory all at once and only write it when you wanted to, or that it wouldnt fit on, say a ps2 memory card, then i'll accept that argument. but even then i would suggest that better data management would reduce their save data size needs considerably.
It's times like these that i wish i had managed to get into that game and hadn't traded it for ralisport challenge..
And, what exactly does morrowind write to the HDD all the time? Save game data i assume - because it surely isnt anything else, there's no support for anything else! I still fail to see how that is something you can only do with HDD.
If you can tell me that the morrowind save file is so big that you couldnt store it in memory all at once and only write it when you wanted to, or that it wouldnt fit on, say a ps2 memory card, then i'll accept that argument. but even then i would suggest that better data management would reduce their save data size needs considerably.
It's times like these that i wish i had managed to get into that game and hadn't traded it for ralisport challenge..
Ghost of Bill Gates
Banned
This guy thinks you can play Morrowind on Gamecube with a memory card! How often the Morrowind writes data, that little memory card will be all flashed out... :lol
satterfield
BIGTIME TV MOGUL
Well, honestly, Xbox has to be the dumbest name ever. Yes, even dumber than GameCube. People thought it was retarded when it was first announced, but just like any other word, if you say it enough it becomes a regular part of your vocabulary and you don't think twice.
Ghost of Bill Gates
Banned
ninge said:
you're the one who posted GC had better loading times "The rest of the "benefits" of a HDD can be recreated with a better file system, tighter controls on load times and a faster DVD drive (see: gamecube)"
And I posted why this is true on some games, but most of xbox games that would be comparable are not on GC.
It loads parts of the game onto the HD via stream to HD. Have you even played Morrowind? do you know how large the game play area is? To walk across Morrowind would literally take you almost an hour.. it would with the expansion pack, and for you not to realize the HDD is being use here without the hint of a 2min load screens between sections is beyond me.
Ghost of Bill Gates
Banned
Society said:
Any game came be pulled off on said systems..I just played GTA on NES yesterday.
ninge said:
Not true. Halo 2 is a perfect example of this. Long load time at the start of a gameplay session as data is streamed to the HDD. Then, after that, most (if not all) data is loaded directly into memory from the HDD itself. This is why the cutscenes have the texturing problem - it is accessing data from different parts of the disc that would, in the course of a normal gameplay session already be on the HDD. A faster DVD drive might fix this, but the problem will just crop up again as texture size increases, don't you think?
I'm not 100% sure this is accurate, but it is an educated guess.
ninge said:
Or the game can load your current level from the DVD, then run a background transfer of the next level to the HDD. Sure your initial load time doesn't improve, but the second level can read from the HDD instead of the DVD.
edit - pretty much what Nerevar wrote
Having an extra layer of cache is never a bad thing. Would you argue that we should eliminate L2 cache since things should just be laid out better in main memory?
I think you guys are getting off track. Because MS wants to make the HDD optional, does not mean that they won't have a scratchpad or page file for prefetch. This is not something that needs to be GB's in size. There are several options they could use, a hard drive is only one option. And given it's cost, power requirements, noise, and pirate friendly nature, it's not the option that MS wants to pursue.
jedimike said:
I agree, but ninge seems to think that the scratchpad is completely worthless, which I don't think is true. I think some sort of internal memory level between the DVD and system memory is necessary, especially for PC developers moving to the console space.
The problem is that the current xbox design does not allow developers to copy data to the HDD. Its as if it isnt even there! you can't pre-load stuff or do any of the fancy things you guys are suggesting it can. You can only let it automatically cache data the first time the game requests it and write saves to it so it is only a benefit after the first load.
The size of morrowinds world has no bearing on the pressence of the HDD. Jak and Daxter and GTA seem to manage huge worlds with no loads and the ps2 doesnt need a HDD to do it! Games have used intelligent streaming ever since the ps1.
I dont believe the idea of a cache is worthless - it can certainly speed up the reloading of data that has already been read.. but i do not believe that having a cache gives you any significant advantage and in fact only encourages developers to be lazy when it come to load times.
Losing the HDD support in xbox 2 will not make it some how inferior to xbox in any way.
The size of morrowinds world has no bearing on the pressence of the HDD. Jak and Daxter and GTA seem to manage huge worlds with no loads and the ps2 doesnt need a HDD to do it! Games have used intelligent streaming ever since the ps1.
I dont believe the idea of a cache is worthless - it can certainly speed up the reloading of data that has already been read.. but i do not believe that having a cache gives you any significant advantage and in fact only encourages developers to be lazy when it come to load times.
Losing the HDD support in xbox 2 will not make it some how inferior to xbox in any way.
Ghost of Bill Gates
Banned
ninge said:
That maybe so..but why is Sony's and Nintendo next consoles schedule to have hard drives if there's no benefit?
ninge said:
Are you sure about that? If that's the case, why is there a long initial loading on Halo 2 when you play, yet not later on down the line? And why is there texture pop-in during the cutscenes which Bungie admittedly did "so there would be no load times as the data was loaded off the disc"? The only real explanation I can think of is that they were loading a large batch of data to the HDD first before they put you into the level, and then streaming the rest onto it in the background so there would be no loading times.
I don't know if it's a good move for Microsoft to lead the pack this time. It's relatively inexperienced, and honestly, it gets its best ideas from other companies. As far as I can tell, Xbox 360 (which will grow on us, by the way), is just an uber-Xbox -- something tells me Sony might have something else up its sleeve.
Ghost of Bill Gates
Banned
Redbeard said:
If you notice I didn't say officially..that's just the word going around.. Just like this thread topic you are posting in.
Let's not simply be enablers for MS to step back from what they initially offered coming onto the console scene. Both portable and set-top consumer electronics devices with sizable, built-in hdds are more and more common these days. MS was right on top of the trend when they debuted the Xbox and I see no convincing reason that suggests it's the wrong direction in which to continue until some other technology can come along and match the storage benefits an hdd offers to multimedia devices such as this while also offering significantly better benefits in areas like cost and power requirements. Noise wouldn't be any worse than that coming from a DVD spinning at 12x-16x speeds. And while I sympathize with piracy concerns, I don't want to see such concerns hamstring the featureset of a device for which they've had 4 yrs to prepare for such concerns.jedimike said:
Nerevar:
I believe that bungy pre-load a lot of data into memory that is then used over and over such as characters, animation. weapons etc. Then all they have to load is the level data itself and anything that is specific to certain areas.
The levels in Halo are much too large to fit into memory all in one go so like many other games they are broken up into sections. At the start of the game you load up the area the player starts in and the next section (quite a long load). As the player reaches a predeterminded location in the second section the first secition is free'd from memory and the game can start to load the third section of the level into the space that is now available.
The idea is that from mid-way through any section of a level the game should have enough time to load either the next or the previous area (depending on which way the player travels) before they reach it or can even see it.
Any game that has zero load times will be using this method or a variation of it. Racing games like burnout etc are another good example they load the next section of the track as you race towards it - in fact in burnout one and two it is possible to go fast enough that the game doesnt have enough time to load the next section of track and you end up falling into oblivion!
Games tend to hide these breaks in what appear to be large seamless worlds by using sharp bends, ravines, tunnels, lifts, corridors with S bends (or in morrowinds case, lots of fog) - basically anything that prevents you from seeing directly from one section to the next. Then, where something is clearly too large to not be seen in a section that it doesnt really exist in (such as the central tower in Half Life 2's city) it is incoporated into each level section as a stand-in piece of geometry very much like a fake piece of set would be used in a film, thus giving the impression that the player is in a larger "seamless" world.
Play halo again and see if you can spot where you move from one section of each level to another of the same level! Once you know the breaks are there, they become pretty obvious
I believe that bungy pre-load a lot of data into memory that is then used over and over such as characters, animation. weapons etc. Then all they have to load is the level data itself and anything that is specific to certain areas.
The levels in Halo are much too large to fit into memory all in one go so like many other games they are broken up into sections. At the start of the game you load up the area the player starts in and the next section (quite a long load). As the player reaches a predeterminded location in the second section the first secition is free'd from memory and the game can start to load the third section of the level into the space that is now available.
The idea is that from mid-way through any section of a level the game should have enough time to load either the next or the previous area (depending on which way the player travels) before they reach it or can even see it.
Any game that has zero load times will be using this method or a variation of it. Racing games like burnout etc are another good example they load the next section of the track as you race towards it - in fact in burnout one and two it is possible to go fast enough that the game doesnt have enough time to load the next section of track and you end up falling into oblivion!
Games tend to hide these breaks in what appear to be large seamless worlds by using sharp bends, ravines, tunnels, lifts, corridors with S bends (or in morrowinds case, lots of fog) - basically anything that prevents you from seeing directly from one section to the next. Then, where something is clearly too large to not be seen in a section that it doesnt really exist in (such as the central tower in Half Life 2's city) it is incoporated into each level section as a stand-in piece of geometry very much like a fake piece of set would be used in a film, thus giving the impression that the player is in a larger "seamless" world.
Play halo again and see if you can spot where you move from one section of each level to another of the same level! Once you know the breaks are there, they become pretty obvious
Semjaza Azazel
Member
To me, this is just something to the effect of a 4MB RAM Pack on the N64. Yes, people are given the option from the start... however, are developers really going to want to sit and take into account both of these versions of the system? Is this going to result in an abundance of games that require the hard drive? Or even the opposite, games that really don't use the hard drives features at all? It just seems like more of a problem then anything.
i really think it will be transparent.
If the HDD is there you'll get your improved loading of cached files, your instant-access downloaded content, your custom soundtracks and your tivo/meida center functionality.
if its not there, then alternatives will be.
Flash ram cache for downloadable content and save games being the main concern. Everything else is just fluff, its not needed and your games wont be any worse off without it. If you really want it then go ahead and by the HDD version (i will do) but dont fret that this will somehow make the games worse..
Microsoft really are being a victim of their own hype here i think.
If the HDD is there you'll get your improved loading of cached files, your instant-access downloaded content, your custom soundtracks and your tivo/meida center functionality.
if its not there, then alternatives will be.
Flash ram cache for downloadable content and save games being the main concern. Everything else is just fluff, its not needed and your games wont be any worse off without it. If you really want it then go ahead and by the HDD version (i will do) but dont fret that this will somehow make the games worse..
Microsoft really are being a victim of their own hype here i think.
ninge said:Nerevar:
I believe that bungy pre-load a lot of data into memory that is then used over and over such as characters, animation. weapons etc. Then all they have to load is the level data itself and anything that is specific to certain areas.
...
Play halo again and see if you can spot where you move from one section of each level to another of the same level! Once you know the breaks are there, they become pretty obvious
Yeah, they're usually matched by checkpoints. I just assumed they were loading off the HDD though because I knew in the mod scene people were, after the initial precaching, going onto their HDD and fooling around with the levels in there. I just assumed that Bungie was loading the entire level onto the HDD then, instead of loading it from the DVD into memory in the background, going straight to the HDD itself. But like I said, it was simply an educated guess rather than a true fact.
And regardless, a developer could still forcibly pre-cache data by making a memory fetch call to the xbox. You said that the xbox uses the HDD as a cache - a well developed game could just use system calls to get all the data onto the HDD and then use that as the loading point (because, if the xbox is well designed, any further calls to the same memory would result in going to the much faster HDD than the DVD itself). I still think there are wasy to get around it, and a scratchpad is a very good addition to the game console itself.