Project Gotham Racing 4 might not prove to be the game that developer Bizarre Creations want it to be. According to a forum posting on the Bizarre's forum that appears to be from an employee, the studio has had to cut things from the finished game due to lack of space on the DVD format.
'Ben' tells us:
A DVD will store up to 9GB of information. A Blu-Ray disc, by comparison, can store up to 50GB on a dual-layer disc.
Up until now the discrepancy in disc storage space has not proved a problem, with games being developed for both the PS3 and 360 simultaneously. In this case, however, the extra storage afforded by a Blu-Ray disc would easily have accommodated the textures in question.
Microsoft's format choice would seem to be catching up with it.
Of course, it could just be a random pathological liar who has nothing better to do with his time than sow seeds of discontent with the 360.
'Ben' tells us:
"You won't see different times of day per city because this involves recreating all the textures again (one for day and one for night). Whilst this wasn't a problem for our dev team, it was a problem fitting all this data onto a single DVD. So we've worked around the problem by providing different lighting models per city. For example, Macau is always in the daytime, but if you play it during a storm everything looks darker and more foreboding. If you play during a blizzard then things are slightly tinged blue and everything seems more frozen. Of course, playing this track in sunshine will make everything appear bright and yellowy."
A DVD will store up to 9GB of information. A Blu-Ray disc, by comparison, can store up to 50GB on a dual-layer disc.
Up until now the discrepancy in disc storage space has not proved a problem, with games being developed for both the PS3 and 360 simultaneously. In this case, however, the extra storage afforded by a Blu-Ray disc would easily have accommodated the textures in question.
Microsoft's format choice would seem to be catching up with it.
Of course, it could just be a random pathological liar who has nothing better to do with his time than sow seeds of discontent with the 360.
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Comments
ajmetz 31 Jul 2007 20:04
1/7
It was interesting to see Bev Bright's texture lecture at Develop in Brighton, and how different channels in photoshop are used as light maps, or reflection maps for each texture, etc. Although not a techy developer, so a lot of it went over my head, I walked away with the feeling that the size of textures used, was due to the demands on "through-put" rather than storage. However, I could well be confusing this with bump mapping, which they have removed from PGR4 because it was so minute, you couldn't notice it in PGR3, making it a waste of time, and resources, so perhaps that's what freed up "through-put", and storage for textures is another matter altogether.
On older formats we have seen epic games split over multiple discs. I guess in this case, it made more sense to be efficient with textures and cram them into one disc, than to be bloated, and make it multi-disc.
It's certainly interesting to chart the differences in X360 and PS3 as they become apparent.
I wonder how long it'll be before a super elite X360 comes along with built in HD-DVD, or, if BluRay becomes standard, even a BluRay drive. =P ^_^ That'll be funny.
On older formats we have seen epic games split over multiple discs. I guess in this case, it made more sense to be efficient with textures and cram them into one disc, than to be bloated, and make it multi-disc.
It's certainly interesting to chart the differences in X360 and PS3 as they become apparent.
I wonder how long it'll be before a super elite X360 comes along with built in HD-DVD, or, if BluRay becomes standard, even a BluRay drive. =P ^_^ That'll be funny.
soanso 1 Aug 2007 04:00
2/7
I find it a bit ironic also that the very first developer to complain about DVD capacity on the 360 is one of the exclusive Xbox 360 developers.
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config 1 Aug 2007 10:31
3/7
I think you'll find that Bizarre Creations is working on The Club for PS3.
PreciousRoi 2 Aug 2007 03:40
4/7
Bizarre Creations web site wrote:
As I'm sure you've seen, some of the comments made on our forum have been blown out of all proportion. This has been reported on certain web sites. It seems that a number of fanboys have jumped on the topic... sigh. So it's time we cleared this one up...
When we started designing PGR4 our primary goals were to create a great and unique experience over and above PGR3, to push the hardware as far as we could, and obviously to ensure that we give great value for money. DVD size is absolutely not a factor that we consider when designing our games... and PGR4 is no exception. DVD9 gives us more than we need to create a fabulous experience for you guys.
The previous game, PGR3, had five environments. That's how much we could create given our time and resources for that game. With the longer development cycle we've had for PGR4, as well as the advantage of having final hardware, we wanted to create a far bigger and better game by this time including 10 environments, as well as a whole bunch of new gameplay features.
Rather than having two "fixed" times of day, this time around we decided to use our time to create a dynamic weather system, which effectively creates a much more dramatic palette from which to work with. To show you where we're coming from, have a look at this screenshot crop sheet. This is something we use internally to compare our environments, lighting, and weather effects... but it's certainly useful for demonstrating the breadth of the game here!
We've never had to cut content to fit on the disc, and we probably never will.
Each next-gen format has its own merits. We should know, as we're currently developing games for all of them in one form or another. It's not a case of one system having less of this, and the other having more of that. As developers we are given a fixed platform, and that's what we work with. At the end of the day we're games developers, and we try to create the best we can irrespective of platform. We hope you end up agreeing with our design decisions when you see the game for yourself.
When we started designing PGR4 our primary goals were to create a great and unique experience over and above PGR3, to push the hardware as far as we could, and obviously to ensure that we give great value for money. DVD size is absolutely not a factor that we consider when designing our games... and PGR4 is no exception. DVD9 gives us more than we need to create a fabulous experience for you guys.
The previous game, PGR3, had five environments. That's how much we could create given our time and resources for that game. With the longer development cycle we've had for PGR4, as well as the advantage of having final hardware, we wanted to create a far bigger and better game by this time including 10 environments, as well as a whole bunch of new gameplay features.
Rather than having two "fixed" times of day, this time around we decided to use our time to create a dynamic weather system, which effectively creates a much more dramatic palette from which to work with. To show you where we're coming from, have a look at this screenshot crop sheet. This is something we use internally to compare our environments, lighting, and weather effects... but it's certainly useful for demonstrating the breadth of the game here!
We've never had to cut content to fit on the disc, and we probably never will.
Each next-gen format has its own merits. We should know, as we're currently developing games for all of them in one form or another. It's not a case of one system having less of this, and the other having more of that. As developers we are given a fixed platform, and that's what we work with. At the end of the day we're games developers, and we try to create the best we can irrespective of platform. We hope you end up agreeing with our design decisions when you see the game for yourself.
(emphasis added)
tyrion 2 Aug 2007 07:49
5/7
PreciousRoi wrote:
We've never had to cut content to fit on the disc, and we probably never will.
PGR3 had day and night for all of its environments, PGR4 won't have. Putting nice weather effects (and they do look awesome) into the game doesn't cover up for the fact that some tracks will always be in the day time and some will always be at night.
If you remove a feature from a sequel, is it "cutting content" or just a design decision? I don't know, all I see is a missing feature. One that can't easily be done without lots of extra content, and one that's been dropped from a game on a platform that doesn't have as much storage space on its primary medium as one of its competitors.
We'll never know for sure, but I'll bet that if the 360 came with an HD-DVD or Blu-ray drive as standard PGR4 would have the day/night choice on all tracks.
RayGamma 2 Aug 2007 12:17
6/7
PreciousRoi wrote:
Bizarre Creations web site wrote:
As I'm sure you've seen, some of the comments made on our forum have been blown out of all proportion. This has been reported on certain web sites. It seems that a number of fanboys have jumped on the topic... sigh. So it's time we cleared this one up...
'Ben' from Bizarre Creations in a previous forum post wrote:
"You won't see different times of day per city because this involves recreating all the textures again (one for day and one for night). Whilst this wasn't a problem for our dev team, it was a problem fitting all this data onto a single DVD. So we've worked around the problem by providing different lighting models per city.
Seems to me like somebody is firefighting ... or 'Ben' was lying.
What I don't get is, why are they recreating loads of textures for night time? Can't the 360 take care of it all with dynamic lighting, or is it too much for the console?
Bizarre Creations web site wrote:
We've never had to cut content to fit on the disc, and we probably never will.
What about those 16bit floppy games that BC created? some content must have been cut from them to keep the number of discs down. that was a common occurnace in the 16 days
Bizarre Creations web site wrote:
Each next-gen format has its own merits. We should know, as we're currently developing games for all of them in one form or another. It's not a case of one system having less of this, and the other having more of that. As developers we are given a fixed platform, and that's what we work with.
Def sounds like a marketing boy is taking over the asylum.
Course it is! 360 has 9gb DVD and PS3 has 25gb bluray. All PS3s have a harddisk, not all 360 do. 360 has better GPU, but PS3 has cores to spare to pick up the slack and do other stuff.
tyrion 3 Aug 2007 08:11
7/7
RayGamma wrote:
What I don't get is, why are they recreating loads of textures for night time? Can't the 360 take care of it all with dynamic lighting, or is it too much for the console?
You don't want to do everything with dynamic lighting because then you'd have to simulate a light in every window you want to be lit, plus every neon sign, plus every light on a street sign, plus every streetlight. I don't think there are any computers that can do that lot in realtime at 1080p@60Hz.
So what game devs do is create different textures for day/night environments that fake most of the above light effects. With PGR's high resolution textures that all adds up to a huge amount of data. So much that it won't fit on a DVD apparently.