bugeyeandy

I went from being a PS1 then PS2 fan to the Xbox. Initially it had a poor selection of games and I didn't hold out much hope for MS as a games console provider.
Then came the 360, again initially there was a lack of decent games and the high price put me off but now it's a fantastic console and has a huge amount of very, very good games. Can't see me ever buying a PS3 now, I think Sony missed the boat being so far behind with their next gen console and bringing it out at such a ridiculous price.
Blue-ray / HD-DVD means nothing to me , playing normal DVD's on my HD telly with a £70 upscaling dvd player and I can't fault the picture quality.

Whay Sony needs are some must have games and a lower price. Until that happens i'm sticking to the 360.

PeteBrant

BluRay is outselling HD DVD between 2:1 and 3.5:1. It's over.

Where your going to start to see some difficulties is with the 360 DVD drive opposed to the PS3 BluRay one. Already developers are complaining of lack of space on DVD, and some games just aren't suited to multidisc (prime example being PGR4, which had a biazarre employee state that there was not enough room on the DVD to have both daytime and night time with weather on all tracks. MS and Bizarre officially denied it. Guess what isn't in the final game? Yup - Daytime and night time are missing for a lot of the cities - It's one or the other.)

bugeyeandy

Yep, I suppose as a storage medium Bluray or HD-DVD has a lot to offer.
Shame the drives inside the 360 are upgradeable - ie MS release a new version just pull out the DVD and slot in a HD-DVD or Bluray.
I can see how the larger games would be suited to the PS3

Iain Young

Very likely, although I don't see the need for either format personally. Upscaled dvd can look almost as good and at a fraction of the price

Only the ones being paid by Sony There have been numerous dual platform releases in which the game fills the blu-ray disc, but still they managed to fit it a dvd ok, (and the 360 version looked better - COD3 for example). One of the reasons for this are the slow access time for blu-ray compared to dvd, and the need to put uncompressed data on the disc, (there isn;t time to read it and uncompress it).

Lighting effects have absolutely nothing to do with space on the disc. The textures don't get changed simply so they can make the lighting dimmer. The reason there aren't any transitions in PGR4 is purely down to sloppy / lazy programming.

PeteBrant

MS have said that this is not going to happen.


TO be fair, it's going to be a while before we see any widespread impact. If you follow the curve, there is a increase by a factor of 10 for the size of the average game, around every 6 or 7 years. It's going to be 2009, 2010 before game sizes that are larger than DVD capacity are the norm,

Iain Young

At which time it'll be about time for the next generation of console to appear (the 360 will have been on sale for 4-5 years by then).

PeteBrant

I'm not talking about transistions. I am talking about the fact that you can only play , say, Vegas at night, or Macau during the day. You cannot play it in daylight/night time. That is down to new lightmap textures being required, and there not being the space.

PeteBrant

Quite possibly.

Iain Young

Yet they have the space for dodgy rain effects on the menus etc...

PeteBrant

Sorry, are you saying that that rain drops on a screen take up a similar space to an enitre city rendered at a different time of day?

Vegas, Tokyo, Shanghai are only playable at night. Macau, London, New York, St Petersberg are only playable at day.

Why is that if it's not disc space?

If its purely a lighting overhead, then you would include the option to have day or night. The reason they could do it in PGR3 was because there was a third of the amount of tracks.

Iain Young

It should be purely a lighting overhead if they've coded it right

All I'm saying is that other games have done it, with a larger "world" than pgr4, and they didn't have any problems. Look at the world sizes in numerous recent FPS games for example. Simialr levels of detail to the backdrops in pgr4, but they manage day/night transitions with no problem. Heck, even Obvlivion managed it (admittedly with less detailed backgrounds, but a vastly larger world), and that game is 2+ years old...

PeteBrant

Bizarre Creations said this:

"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."


Then, when MS went mad at the them, they said this:

"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."


Notice how they don't deny at all that DVD wasn't big enough?


The proof of the pudding is in the eating. PGR does not have day to night transisitions. It doesn't even have the option to play cities seperatly at day or night.


Your Oblivion comparison doesn't stand up, The texture maps for PGR are of a hugely higher resolution than that of oblivion. They aren't a "similar level of detail". They aren't even close. Indeed graphically, PGR4 makes Oblivion look last gen. You are also holding a far smaller area in RAM. And you are traversing that area far slower, giving a far larger oppotunity to cache transisitions.

Case closed as far as I can see. Bizarre said they didn't have room on a DVD for day/night. And it turned out that this was exactly the case.

Iain Young

Bizarre offically denied it though. This "fact" came from the blog of a disgruntled employee from what I heard. Personally I'm not that impressed with PGR4 at all...

Oblivion is only one example, there are lots of other games which have great dynamic lighting effects, and maps just as big (if not bigger) than pgr4, which move at a decent pace as well. Not that this has any bearing on the argument in any case because transitions cached, or streamed from disc have to be stored somewhere regardless. If they are streamed, then this should in theory give the 360 an advantage because of the slow speed of the blu-ray disc in the PS3.

This is going a bit off topic anyway

360 for games, all the way at the moment. There's just no contest in my book until Sony pull their finger out and get something worth playing on the machine

SideShowBob

Cheers for the responses, going by all of the above the best console at the moment seems to be the XBOX, and by the time the PS3 is starting to move ahead through using the harware/blu ray, it'll be time for the XBOX 720, so getting a PS3 now doesnt seem to make sense.

Recon an XBOX Premium from Play with Halo looks about right.

bugeyeandy

If you decide to go for the Xbox, I can recommend Woolworths for the games.
New releases are generally £34.99 in there instead of £44.99
Get a charge and play kit too , saves buying batteries for the controllers and means you're not left short if your batteries run out and you haven't got any spares.

RB5-Black

woopee ....

just got Transformers HDDVD

stick that in yer blu gay

chrisowe

Lol.

rik1471

That made me

messiah

where's that "for f**k's sake" smiley.

Pirates of the Caribean, Spiderman, Die hard, stick them in yer Betamax

MS are so worried about it they're giving 5 away free to any muppet that buys one.

RB5-Black

Pirates of the Caribean ...Gay Pirate

Spiderman... wierdo in a lycra skin suit

Die hard .... old man

Give me big robots any day

GaryK

Where did you read that Iain? Thats a big blow.

Gary

PeteBrant

Sony are dropping BC - Once the exsiting stock of 60GB machine sis sold out, then you will only have 40 GB machines available.


(which has done the trick apparantly, PS3 sales are up 175%)

kernel

I'm sure the 75 quid price drop has helped to for the 60GB model.

PeteBrant

Of course.

messiah

Actually, I was gutted Paramount went HD DVD exclusive - but the only other film I'd want on the format is King Kong... so getting the add-on just isnt worth it for 2 films when I reckon they'll both be on Blu-Ray eventually anyway.

PeteBrant

Course they will.

Iain Young

It's been widely reported all over the interweb Gary

GaryK

Thanks Iain, found it now, yes hence the sales increase, scarcity of a product/service can increase demand.

Panic, panic panic what do I do, if Im gonna buy a ps3 it has to be now. Amazon doing a 60gb one with 2 games for £349 any other good deals around?

Gary

messiah

Dunno if the price has dropped but my bundle from HMV was 2 games, 2 BR's and a 2nd Sixaxis - all for £425 and the games rewards points paid for the HDMI cable.

PeteBrant

The whole bundle price has dropped.

You can get a 60GB PS3 + 4 games for £349 from gamestation.

Or obviously you can muck around with trade ins and probably get a PS3 & 3 games and a sixaxis.