Just read a few threads on the recent Lost Odyessy 4-disc fiasco, and I gotta say that as a software developer, it's sad to see various pieces of misinformation about how hardware is used and have that kind of misunderstanding repeated over and over again until it becomes some sort of accepted truth.I'll try to explain what is really used for disk space (versus internal system memory and GPU memory), hopefully so that the clearly wrong and tired arguments are put to rest. As to whether people personally care about swapping discs, I'll leave that up to the current threads.Disk space is used mainly for media: pre-rendered video, audio, and textures. Note that the elements of in-game cutscenes take up space - stuff like characters speaking and new objects which can only be seen in that cutscene - but the animation itself and the movements are actually miniscule in size. For example, if you use existing game polygonal models and have characters talk to each other, the scene is going to be rather cheap in terms of diskspace. If your scene has explosions and you have to change a 'clean' model of a building to a 'destroyed' model, that's going to take up space. 'Gameplay' - the programming code that defines what you can/cannot do in a game, actually uses very little disk space by itself. Consider that the 100 million+ lines of Windows Vista code can be compiled into 100-200MB's of executable binaries, e.g., runnable code. Also consider how much gameplay is had for 1-2 MB's in the original Civilization and Simcity. By extension, the length of a game is not at all dependent on how much disk space is available. FFVI was 40-60 hours long and came on a 16MB cart, and of course Oblivion fits on a DVD9. What disk space buys you is the ability to have lots of different premade objects in your game world, such as a forest that has 200 different kinds of trees versus one tree repeated 200 times. (of course, it's unrealistic for a game dev. to spend time creating 200 different trees just b/c he has the disk space to do so) Games like Oblivion and even Diablo II get away with this because they procedurally generate their maps so it taxes the CPU instead; it wouldn't work for something like GTAIV which tries to model a highly recognizable city. For most games on mult. disks, a good chunk of the space on disk is the same; for example, for multi-disk RPG's stuff like the battle system, character models, overworld map, etc. are going to have to be copied on every disk because the player can control these things. In that sense, the reason for multiple disks really is for the cinematics, but it's not a simple 3 disks * 9 GB = 27GB of data.Ultimately, think of disk space as a way to save computational and rendering time. Having very high resolution texture of a chain-link fence means you don't have to spend the resources to render the thousands of polygons that make up each chain of that fence. Putting in a pre-rendered movie means you don't have to figure out how to animate your in-game characters within the limitations of the game engine (e.g., look at the limited range of animations for characters in FFVII in the game world). Having two models of buildings lit differently means you don't need a complex (and computationally expensive) lighting model on buildings to get day/night graphics.There's always going to be a compromise between CPU and disk space, and there's no hard-and-fast rule dictating whether having more disk space is good or not.
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