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[krazyshane]

QUOTE(mikeandbandit @ Aug 20 2005, 02:46 AM)

Im not sure whats wrong which both of you, its CLEARLY faster to load directly to ram than to cache to HD and then send to ram. 

[incognegro]

QUOTE

I e-mailed Major Nelson the day the pricing was announced about the lack of a standard hard drive and a few other things. I hope he forwards that to you. I also wanted to add some additional thoughts about the matter now that I’ve had more time to think about it.

First of all, I wanted to point out an inconsistency from something a few people posted earlier. Every Xbox 360 game will be able to play custom soundtracks even without a hard drive by utilizing an external MP3 player like an iPod.

That being said, there are other points that are still valid:

Backwards compatibility is definitely out the window without a hard drive. Game saves, patches, and the like will obviously fill up a 64MB memory unit extremely fast. I wish I had some raw numbers, but I know memory units are not Elder Scrolls, KOTOR, or Jade Empire friendly. Also, game levels such as the Halo 2 multiplayer maps will load slower every time instead of just loading slow once. I also think it’s ridiculously ignorant to say that games will faster straight from the DVD-ROM. A 12x DVD-ROM will read at 15,000 KBps (roughly 14.6 MBps) max. I think the slowest SATA Hard drives these days run 150MBps max. That is 10x the speed. I’ve even read that some SATA drives are as fast as 3Gbps (384MBps if my math is correct). What is the speed of that detachable external 20GB SATA hard drive? Given that there are six possible threads running at a time for the CPU, I don’t think pre-caching information on the HDD can really affect the frame rate of games compared to the idea of it not being there at all.

There is also one key feature the hard drive gives developers that I don’t think anyone has mentioned and it will affect gameplay. The hard drive is more important than just load times. If there is a fractured HDD install base, we will almost certainly lose persistence in game levels or some level of graphical quality if not both. From what I now the current Xbox keeps game levels persistent by saving changes to the environment such as a building being blown up, tire marks on the ground, car paint marks on a rail, a spoiler that was broken off because someone ran into the back of your car, etc. to the HDD until the gamer walked or drove back to that area in the level/racetrack (Forza). Are we to believe that the original Xbox’s 64MB of RAM is capable of storing all statistical information about a certain game and still keep Halo 2’s level of graphical fidelity and that the HDD did nothing to help achieve this? You might say that this doesn’t really mean anything because the 360 has 8x the RAM of the original, but I would ask you how much RAM do you think PC’s will use for their requirements 5 years from now? This is a console with a 5-year shelf life. How many people thought 64MB of RAM was a ton in 2001? Also remember that both the 360 and the original Xbox use the same RAM for the CPU as well as the GPU.

With the current state of the 360, there is no guaranteed swap file. Does that mean that we’ll lose those changes to the environments? What if FASA Studios made a game like MechAssault 2 on the 360 and couldn’t count on a hard drive? There are Mechs that can jump on top of buildings in game levels. Are we to expect that a building that gets crumbled will magically reappear after a certain amount of time because there isn’t enough memory to remember that particular item’s state or are we to expect that the game cannot look as good as it could have because the developer really wants the persistent features in order to keep that gameplay balanced? How many developers do you think will burden themselves with setting two different quality levels to maximize graphical fidelity for the users with a hard drive while accommodating the ones without one by downgrading the graphical quality in order to keep the persistent environments or will they just not make levels large enough to reach this barrier? Games are getting more difficult to develop and gamers want bigger, better, faster, and more of everything. Is MS going to stick it to developers who will then stick it to gamers because of a few bucks at the launch of a 5-year console? You, personally said at GDC 2005 that with XNA, the only constraint to developers would be their imagination. By not having a hard drive, MS is indeed constraining that imagination. Developers won’t be able to make games as beautiful as they can be or if they do, we lose our persistent/changeable environments or the levels will be smaller or they will have to make a decision to just shaft the users without a hard drive with something cut or shaft all the users because of a deadline. Also, no one will know what the final percentage of users with a HDD will be unless it’s 100% from the start. How many other ideas are there now or in the future that would require a hard drive that won’t happen because of this move?

You have a golden opportunity to straighten things out and future-proof this console and give the gamers and developers what they really want. The first generation of 360 games probably won’t suffer from any of this because it is such a leap in memory and the developers really don’t have the time to tap into its full potential. However, when they do really want to start tapping into the untapped potential of those 3 cores, they’ll hit this brick wall unless you change things now. This is a genuine advantage you have if you don’t blow it. It’s a lot easier to add more power as standard than to cut something out. On top of that, this is huge bang for the buck too since it’s detachable.

What I’d recommend is making the HDD standard in every Xbox 360 now and in all future releases. Tell developers that they can rely on a hard drive being there. You also need to let them know exactly how fast it is. Knowing that this “Ferrari” can take a sharp turn at 80mph is important and will keep them from either crashing into the wall or taking the turn at 20 just to be on the safe side. Consoles are meant to be standard hardware so the software can be optimized to that specific hardware with zero variations. As I said in my earlier e-mail to Major Nelson, the hard drive is much more than a peripheral that can be used as a big memory card. It should be an integral part of the system if only for the reasons above.

Thank you for taking the time to read this long dissertation. Please address this in the chat tomorrow. I’ll be looking forward to hearing what you have to say and basing my purchasing decision on it.

thought this would be relevant to this discussion..............

[mikeandbandit]

Just in case Im still not clear

IT is better to load A,B,and C data directly into ram and make it STAY in ram then to have A,B, and C data go to ram , then the hard drive, and back to ram. as it DECREASES performance. Therefore only certain types of data should be cached to the HDD rather then using it as an extension of ram and tossing any and everything in it.

[incognegro]

Ok so my question, lets just say that i bought the core system, give me some reasons why i should get a hard drive (except for live)

I dont want no friggin memory cards so dont mention anything about them pls (we are in the fucking 21st century damnit! )

[m_hael]

QUOTE(mikeandbandit @ Aug 20 2005, 05:42 PM)

again Oblivion somehow manages to SIMULTANEOUSLY manage over 1000 radiant individual NPCs exhibiting high level AI and 1000s of lesser AI world creatures. Each character will actively manage their own stats and interact dynamically with one another even if you are on the other side of the world. YET it all somehow manages to fit into 512MB ram WITHOUT a HDD. People fail to realize how small game code can be. Most 1st gen games wont even fill up HALF  of the 360s ram. Bethesda has also said oblivion may only use 20% of the system total processing power

[m_hael]

They will have impressive AI... but the scale of it WILL NOT be as advertised.

[aepuppetmaster]

long story short the hdd would help a lot, but i think where u make ur mistake mikeandbandit is that u are still thinking in an old game style.  true u can save data about objects in a t/f way, but then what u get is normality and stuff thats not realistic.  wouldn't it be better if there where dozens of way, or even a physics engine that lets buildings be destroyed in unique way and the ruble land in a unique way rather then having say ruble pile A ruble pile B.  with a hdd u can have a lot less uniformity in things like that, personaly i want a game that saves every singal bullet hole, every crashed car, and every destroyed building and in a unique way to boot.

[m_hael]

QUOTE(aepuppetmaster @ Aug 20 2005, 09:26 PM)

long story short the hdd would help a lot, but i think where u make ur mistake mikeandbandit is that u are still thinking in an old game style.  true u can save data about objects in a t/f way, but then what u get is normality and stuff thats not realistic.  wouldn't it be better if there where dozens of way, or even a physics engine that lets buildings be destroyed in unique way and the ruble land in a unique way rather then having say ruble pile A ruble pile B.  with a hdd u can have a lot less uniformity in things like that, personaly i want a game that saves every singal bullet hole, every crashed car, and every destroyed building and in a unique way to boot.

[aepuppetmaster]

lets see how it plays out too.  for example if the user base is 50/50 or even 60/40 (in favor of cores) then the devs may just do easy cacheing (if that).  but if its more likly 99/1 (in favor of premiums) then they may use it to its fullest.  u guys keep saying it can be done w/o it, but the point is in 4 years will we need the hdd and i think the answer is yes, and it will make our gaming experince much richer

[m_hael]

mike

your example is true - to load from hdd in the instance when you REQUIRE an asset to render is a bad thing... but only if its required THAT frame. An example of what  ACTUALLY happens is this

00   01   02   03   04
05   06   07   08   09
10   11   12   13   14
15   16   17   18   19
20   21   22   23   24


you're in section 18, you have loaded with you (for rendering, AI purposees) sections 12,13,14,17,18,19,22,23,24

you're walking towards section 13, at the point when you cross between 18 and 13 the engine begins its work. You unload sections 22,23,24 and you load up sections 07,08,09. This happens Asynchronousl, meaning without affecting framerate, as and when the sections are loaded the game begins to use them... the only section required for gameplay purposes (by design) is the section you are in so this works fine.

Any alterations made to a section for gameplay progress purposes would be on the saved game currently loaded and thus take affect during the normal load of the game.

... other methods exist but they ALL work ASYNCHRONOUSLY meaning they do not require the game to stop during a load. Only level based (none continuous) games require a level load and even those can be designed/engineered around to minimise the hit.

One large thing that hasn't been mentioned before is this... the HDD will load data at maybe 50MB/s... if they use a really expensive one (unlikely) then that could go up to 100MB/s. Now lets say a section is 50MB of data that needs to be loaded... with good engineering that 50MB would read in a single read (single file) and so take around 1second from HD. DVD speeds would peak at around 17MB/s thus the same read would take about 3 seconds. Lets complicate things (as we are wont to do) and compress the filesystem. This bumps the READ speed of DVD to effectively double the rate (average compression being around 50%) thus we're getting 34 MB/s read speed with a slight delay for decompression (the cpu's are fast enough to decompress at 200MB/s + easily). Now we're seeing a read speed that is comparable to HD speed and all we did was program around the issue.

Now you could say that the same compression could be applied to the HD version (and it more than likely would) however if we designed the engine properly in the first place then the required read speed would be the speed the DVD system offers.

In short the DVD system with a streaming game shouldn't really affect the ability to do streaming worlds nor will it result in pauses. It just requires design and thought... and we're full of thoughts.

[Devedander]

I still say that the fear of bad word of mouth from people who don't have the HD suffering from poor performance will keep developers from relying on the HD for much in the way of performance.  

Considering how educated lots of consumers are the conversations something like: Yeah I played taht on my buddies XBox360, it sucked and I guess he has to go blow $100 on some hard drive thing to make it play right.  Screw that, I am gonna get a PS3!

The core and standard packages differ enough in hardware to pretty much count as a seperate system.  As we ahve all seen when something is cross produced for seperate systems it's always the lowest commone denominator that defines what most of the game is going to be like.

[Carlo210]

The developers would rather make the game HDD compatible so the majority of Xbox360 owners will buy the game than make the game appealing to the minority of Xbox360 owners and sell shitty amounts of the game.
Games are using the HDD, not just because of basic economics, but because we have proof.

[KAGE360]

QUOTE(Devedander @ Aug 21 2005, 06:30 PM)

I still say that the fear of bad word of mouth from people who don't have the HD suffering from poor performance will keep developers from relying on the HD for much in the way of performance. 

[incognegro]

[Shinamano]

The point is...not everyone has a HD and Devedander is pointing this out...

Personally I think Devs will use it and people need not worry about it...