Question about compression.

[liquidlion]

Are there any benifits to compressing things (textures, audio, ect.) in a game?
People over on another fourm were dogin the Resistance team saying that the only reason the game was 22 gigs was because of them being to lazy to compress stuff.

[CARTIER90]

From what I understand, it is better to have un - compressed data than compressed for the simple fact that it takes CPU time to 'unpack' such compressed textures.....I only have a faint understanding of all things technical, im sure someone else would know here ?

What has surprised me about the 360 versus PS3 argument has been the absence of any devs stating that there game will be on PS3 due to their inability to cram the amount of data onto a DVD.
The Getaway team has stated this back in E3 2005, something about being able to sustain the 'fidelity' of the video they were then showing. Again such a lack of comments is another indicator of aiming towards the lowest common denominator - DVD. We cant blame them, who doesnt want to make money on 3 systems (including PC)....

[liquidlion]

So that would mean uncompressed data= faster load tome right? Also couldn't dev's compress data for the 360/pc and just leave it uncompressed for the ps3?

[Luis]

I'm afraid they ignore that the disc will include several audio languages. Audio can't be heavily compressed withouth a huge loss of quality. I wouldn't be surprised if all of the voice acting in all languages required 5 GB in TrueHD Dolby Digital or DTS, which is unthinkable for a 360 title. However, that's not all.

There are different kinds of compression. Lossy one used for audio and video and non-lossy used for other kinds of data. Non-lossy compression isn't usually very effective, which means that 22 GB wouldn't magically become 7 GB without getting rid of a serious amount of data in ways that would affect the quality of the content (lower resolution and less detailed textures, for instance).

There's a whole different cathegory as well which I'd like to mention here. Any knowledgeable member is free to correct me, but procedurally created content takes little space on the disc and long load times to create on the console memory. With Blu-ray, there's no need of these long loading times since these don't depend that much on the drive speed, but on the speed of the CPU to recreate the content procedurally. If the CPU doesn't have to waste time processing that, it becomes a win-win: a portion of the CPU horsepower can be used for other useful purposes and the loading times are shorter.

In any case, saying developers are lazy to perform compression, withouth delving in that subject at all, is a totally preposterous argument.

[Crossbar]

There are a lot of benefits from compression.
Compressed textures saves system memory, you can keep more textures in RAM for fast access. It also helps cut load times when textures needs to fetched from disk, it helps cutting time when new levels need to be fetched.

I think VG is right that high quality audio and video takes lot of space and that data can also be streamed from disk when used, so that's probably where the blu-ray disk give most benefits.

[archy121]

Just came across thins interesting opinion whilst browsing another forum

I just noticed that Dead Rising is 7.8GB. I think we're definitely approaching the DVD storage ceiling

Seems like there will be plenty more games with highest compression for XBOX360. Games are just reaching 2nd generation & they are hitting the ceiling already. Things may get very tight year or two down the road. Seems Microsoft may have made a mistake not including HDDVD instead of DVD.

Archy

[woundingchaney]

Just came across thins interesting opinion whilst browsing another forum



Seems like there will be plenty more games with highest compression for XBOX360. Games are just reaching 2nd generation & they are hitting the ceiling already. Things may get very tight year or two down the road. Seems Microsoft may have made a mistake not including HDDVD instead of DVD.

Archy

For MS including HD DVD or BR would have been a potential catastrophy. I dont think that the whole DVD9 is as big of a concern as many would make it out to be but I dont doubt that it is a concern.

I fully expect MS to move to 2 disks probably by the end of the the next year, or at least they will be relatively common.

VG I believe your referring to procedural synthesis in which a program compiles objects randomly from a data base (of course the sets boundaries so an elephant doesnt appear in city or something LOL). This is being used a an upcoming game for the 360 called Just Cause, the game doesnt seem too impressive although the whole concept of procedural synthesis is intriguing - judging the tech on the game wouldnt be right either LOL.

http://www.wonderlandblog.com/wonder...ural_synt.html

http://nintendo.about.com/library/pr...rocedural1.htm

[Luis]

The main reason why MS uses DVD9 is simply because they didn't want to lose so much money on subsidized hardware sales. They probably wanted to keep costs low as well as not risking too much with new technology.

When I talked about procedurally created content, I talked about the concepts behind .kkrieger:

The entire game uses only 97,280 bytes of disk space. Much of this small size is attributable to the game's use of procedurally generated content. In contrast, most popular first-person shooters fill one or more CDs or DVDs. Unreal Tournament 2004, for example, requires more than five gigabytes, which is more than 50,000 times the disk space in comparison. (It must be mentioned, however, that .kkrieger only contains one level.) According to the developers, .kkrieger itself would take up around 200-300MB space if it had been stored the conventional way.

Some things can be done like this, but it requires a really long time to process, which I don't find practical in a commercial game. Anyway, .kkrieger is quite an extreme example.

These two generation processes explain the extensive loading time of the game - all assets of the gameplay are reproduced during the loading phase.

[woundingchaney]

The main reason why MS uses DVD9 is simply because they didn't want to lose so much money on subsidized hardware sales. They probably wanted to keep costs low as well as not risking too much with new technology.

Pretty much what it comes down to and the fact that both formats stand a good chance at failure (although I would say HD DVD more so than BR). Also there wasnt an option of any HD optical format when MS launched.

[Luis]

Pretty much what it comes down to and the fact that both formats stand a good chance at failure (although I would say HD DVD more so than BR). Also there wasnt an option of any HD optical format when MS launched.

I always thought they should have waited one more year. I also hoped that Sony wouldn't have needed to release PS3 until mid-late 2007.

[woundingchaney]

I always thought they should have waited one more year. I also hoped that Sony wouldn't have needed to release PS3 until mid-late 2007.

In all honesty Im really satisfied with the situation as it is. Sony came a little late and MS came a little early but everything seems to be working reasonably well for the consoles and the consumers.

2007 would have just been too long. IMO

[woundingchaney]

The main reason why MS uses DVD9 is simply because they didn't want to lose so much money on subsidized hardware sales. They probably wanted to keep costs low as well as not risking too much with new technology.

When I talked about procedurally created content, I talked about the concepts behind .kkrieger:

Some things can be done like this, but it requires a really long time to process, which I don't find practical in a commercial game. Anyway, .kkrieger is quite an extreme example.

What do you mean by process. Are you referring to the longer loading times, if content is generated on the fly why would it take longer to load????

If so I would agree that longer loading times would be a pain but think of all the advantages that this would bring, particularly in the dev. stages of the game. Although I only somewhat familiar with the concept and havent really looked into it.

[Luis]

Instead of wasting CPU time on recreating content on the fly or dedicating long loading times for this purpose, I'd very much prefer having all the content directly available on the Blu-ray disc and stream it from the disc all the time with the help of the HDD as well, and saving CPU time and resources for other important things. Same would apply for heavily compressed content, even though this is not so easy to elaborate on. In any case, calling the developers "lazy" and assuming compression can do miracles is simply wrong.

People over on another fourm were dogin the Resistance team saying that the only reason the game was 22 gigs was because of them being to lazy to compress stuff.

Plain ludicrous argument.

I'm no expert either, but I'm sure the space Blu-ray discs provide will be used by many developers in effective ways. It's something they can rely on and I'm sure they will take advantage of it. Besides of having more space for game content, they will always have space for nice extras: soundtracks, all voice acting in all languages in one disc, other games (think of Tekken 5 including Tekken 1, 2 and 3) making of documentaries (HD quality), generally higher quality audio and video and so on.

[woundingchaney]

Instead of wasting CPU time on recreating content on the fly or dedicating long loading times for this purpose, I'd very much prefer having all the content directly available on the Blu-ray disc and stream it from the disc all the time with the help of the HDD as well, and saving CPU time and resources for other important things. Same would apply for heavily compressed content, even though this is not so easy to explain. In any case, calling the developers "lazy" and assuming compression can do miracles is simply wrong.

Plain ludicrous.

I'm no expert either, but I'm sure the space Blu-ray discs provide will be used by many developers in effective ways. It's something they can rely on and I'm sure they will take advantage of it.

Well it would depend on just how much cpu performance would be compromised, Im not thinking it would be very demanding for a cpu to randomly generate objects.

I wonder if the tech. would save on ram seeing as how specific objects wouldnt have to be placed at specific spots. But then again the procedure may require more ram as well.

[Luis]

Well it would depend on just how much cpu performance would be compromised, Im not thinking it would be very demanding for a cpu to randomly generate objects.

No, that's not what it is about. Go read that .kkrieger article and I suggest you to download it and execute it to get an idea of how troublesome it could become.

[woundingchaney]

No, that's not what it is about. Go read that .kkrieger article and I suggest you to download it and execute it to get an idea of how troublesome it could become.

Which article??

[Luis]

Which article??

Didn't you see the link in my previous post about .kkrieger???

[woundingchaney]

The Wikipedia article???

Doesnt really give much info but this is rather interesting.

Textures are stored via their creation history instead of a per-pixel basis, thus only requiring the history data (possibly as low as ~300 bytes per texture at any resolution) and the generator code to be compiled into the executable, producing a relatively small file size.
Meshes are created from basic solids such as boxes and cylinders, which are then deformed to achieve the desired shape - essentially a special way of box modeling.

Sounds pretty intriguing Im sure there is a downside to everything though.

[Luis]

Sounds pretty intriguing Im sure there is a downside to everything though.

That's what I've been saying all the time...

[woundingchaney]

That's what I've been saying all the time...

lol

Gotcha/understand