Post by Fusion on Jun 11, 2008 10:21:53 GMT -5
We've heard it many times, that MGS4 was going to come to 360. Well, recently, due to something Mr. Kojima himself has said, along with a technical jargon-filled statement about it, it seems like it could be a reality, though not an immediate one.
Video
Hideo Kojima: "Right now, what I'm thinking is how I can change this around for other platforms."
Video
Hideo Kojima: "Right now, what I'm thinking is how I can change this around for other platforms."
It is funny that people think MGS4 wouldn't fit on the 360, not that the majority of 360 owners would even play it, but the other similarly named topic is just so full if uninformed tripe i had to make a response. First off, it assumes that Kojima is not exaggerating or out and out lying when he says they filled the disc. Maybe they got it close, but i would be very surprised if it is full to 50 GB. For the purposes of this thread though, we shall assume it is.
Wanna know where all the space goes? Uncompressed multi channel HD sound. Uncompressed multichannel sound as used in MGS4 consumes 5 Megabits per second, or 0.625 Megabytes per second. That is 37.5 Megabytes of data for every MINUTE of sound, or 2.25 gigabytes per hour. So we know for sure there are 9 hours if movies, so for 9 hours of sound you get over 20 Gigabytes used just on sound. Add in the radio and random in-game sound effects you could easily be looking at 22+ gigabytes of sound. But wait, the Japanese langauge track ships on the same disc, so you can add another 12-16 Gigabytes easily for the Japanese language track. So now you are up to 38 Gigabytes for sound only. That means only 12 is left for actual game assets other than sound, and those 12 GB are not compressed much, if at all. Additionally, that 12 GB could be significantly smaller if Kojima did not actually fill the disc to the brim, but we will have to wait for someone to check the data to know for sure.
As a comparison, WMA-HD audio delivers "full-spectrum response" (AKA you can't tell the difference unless you have a $500 audio receiver, and probably not even then) on the exact same 7.1 audio track with only 768kbps of data. That is 5.6 Megabytes of data every minute, or 337.5 Megabytes per hour. For the 9 hours of audio in WMA-HD you get around 3 Gigabytes of data, versus over 20 Gigabytes using the uncompressed HD sound.
The same applies to textures and basically every other part of the game, though it is not as easy to explain. Put simply though, using Microsoft provided compression and tools for the 360 developers can get over 6.5 times as much data into the same amount of disc space, and for all intensive purposes they look and sound exactly the same to 98% of users. The only caveat is pre-rendered video, which even with compression requires loads of space (BR movies are compressed and still need the 25-50GB of space) but as everyone knows all of MGS4's videos are rendered in-game so that is moot for this topic.
To simplify it, a developer could fit 52 Gigabytes of uncompressed data onto 1 Xbox 360 game disc.
What it all means, if Konami wanted to, they could put MGS4 on the 360, quite easily, and on a single disc. The main problems would come from recoding the engine to run on the 360 hardware, but the 360 has more memory and more easily accessed processing power, so they could probably achieve similar if not better performance with 6 months or so of work and retooling.
Wanna know where all the space goes? Uncompressed multi channel HD sound. Uncompressed multichannel sound as used in MGS4 consumes 5 Megabits per second, or 0.625 Megabytes per second. That is 37.5 Megabytes of data for every MINUTE of sound, or 2.25 gigabytes per hour. So we know for sure there are 9 hours if movies, so for 9 hours of sound you get over 20 Gigabytes used just on sound. Add in the radio and random in-game sound effects you could easily be looking at 22+ gigabytes of sound. But wait, the Japanese langauge track ships on the same disc, so you can add another 12-16 Gigabytes easily for the Japanese language track. So now you are up to 38 Gigabytes for sound only. That means only 12 is left for actual game assets other than sound, and those 12 GB are not compressed much, if at all. Additionally, that 12 GB could be significantly smaller if Kojima did not actually fill the disc to the brim, but we will have to wait for someone to check the data to know for sure.
As a comparison, WMA-HD audio delivers "full-spectrum response" (AKA you can't tell the difference unless you have a $500 audio receiver, and probably not even then) on the exact same 7.1 audio track with only 768kbps of data. That is 5.6 Megabytes of data every minute, or 337.5 Megabytes per hour. For the 9 hours of audio in WMA-HD you get around 3 Gigabytes of data, versus over 20 Gigabytes using the uncompressed HD sound.
The same applies to textures and basically every other part of the game, though it is not as easy to explain. Put simply though, using Microsoft provided compression and tools for the 360 developers can get over 6.5 times as much data into the same amount of disc space, and for all intensive purposes they look and sound exactly the same to 98% of users. The only caveat is pre-rendered video, which even with compression requires loads of space (BR movies are compressed and still need the 25-50GB of space) but as everyone knows all of MGS4's videos are rendered in-game so that is moot for this topic.
To simplify it, a developer could fit 52 Gigabytes of uncompressed data onto 1 Xbox 360 game disc.
What it all means, if Konami wanted to, they could put MGS4 on the 360, quite easily, and on a single disc. The main problems would come from recoding the engine to run on the 360 hardware, but the 360 has more memory and more easily accessed processing power, so they could probably achieve similar if not better performance with 6 months or so of work and retooling.
