Developer duplicates data due to slow PS3 load times

[Steven W]

Bethseda are trying to solve the problem of long loading times in the PS3 version of Oblivion by filling up the Blu-Ray disc with redundant data.


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[5lab]

doesnt really explain how that helps at all - perhaps if the game data is nearer the edge then the read speeds are quicker?

[Steven W]

doesnt really explain how that helps at all - perhaps if the game data is nearer the edge then the read speeds are quicker?

Yeah, he doesn't go into details.

Possible explanation: Put important game data on multiple places on the game disc and that way you decrease the amount of space the laser needs to travel to load the data you use often?

[kalniel]

But no-one's saying anything about seek time - the article just mentions how bandwidth is slower for blue-ray. Seek time would surely be negligable compared to loading things.

However I can see them having duplicate data within a loading chunk - for example: Say you normally have cells that are loaded one at a time for the areas. With a cache system you can load the surrounding areas as well, ready for when the player crosses them. This is all adjustable in the PC version.

Now say that you want to reduce data loading from the CD - instead of loading cells one by one you actually store information in 'super cells' which are say 4x4 cells. Now you load up more at a time, but have less loads - however you have a problem in crossing some boundaries that mean you're having to load up quite a lot of 'super cells'. So what you can do is design supercells to have some overlap and cache the next one - this then requires these super cells to contain duplicate information, ie the same cell might be contained in more than one super cell. This would be data intensive, but might help with loading times.

Just a theory

[DavidM]

Software devs used to use the same tricky on floppy drives to get around long seek times...

[MadduckUK]

Just a theory

why would you need to physically have more than one copy of the info on the Disc for that? surely the PS3 could take the nessasairy "cells" for the surrounding area anyway, all a super cell would do is force the PS3 to load bigger chunks of data at once? id do the opposite and have it constantly loading small pieces.

bit of a puzzle this one. cant be for seek time tho surely? thats really clutching at straws

[Speedo]

Why not just make it possible to 'install' to the hard drive, as some other games have done? Seems a bit silly to avoid the option when all PS3s have at least a 20GB HDD.

[Stoo]

*nod*

Just offload a couple of gigs worth of the most used data to the HDD which *all* PS3's have.. Problem solved..

Or you could bitch about it to EGM and pocket the backhander from Microsoft..

[ErickAnderson]

Maybe these slow load times are the reason Sony needed all this extra disc-space so badly. I'm not a developer, but that sounds like a major bottleneck and a big hardware design issue....

[Stoo]

Not really, especially if you use the hardware properly, which they obviously aren't if they're not using the HDD to get around this problem..

[kalniel]

why would you need to physically have more than one copy of the info on the Disc for that? surely the PS3 could take the nessasairy "cells" for the surrounding area anyway, all a super cell would do is force the PS3 to load bigger chunks of data at once? id do the opposite and have it constantly loading small pieces.

bit of a puzzle this one. cant be for seek time tho surely? thats really clutching at straws

Well the idea is that you no-longer store individual cells on the disk, you only store supercells. I'm not explaining it very well And also the benefits are not always as obvious as they seem - sometimes you just have to try alternate ways of loading things and seeing what ends up fastest.

[SmileyUK]

Not really, especially if you use the hardware properly, which they obviously aren't if they're not using the HDD to get around this problem..

do sony allow devs to use the hdd for games? i think it would cause whining from the gamers as well moaning that X amount of their 20gb is taken up by one game

[ExceededGoku]

do sony allow devs to use the hdd for games? i think it would cause whining from the gamers as well moaning that X amount of their 20gb is taken up by one game

There are 60gb versions... And I don't think I could imagine Oblivion loading any slower...

[Speedo]

do sony allow devs to use the hdd for games? i think it would cause whining from the gamers as well moaning that X amount of their 20gb is taken up by one game

I know Ridge Racer 7, and at least one other game allow you to 'install' to HDD to improve loading times. Nothing to stop you removing the data and just having slower loading times when you've moved on to a new favourite game .

[Spud1]

Not really, especially if you use the hardware properly, which they obviously aren't if they're not using the HDD to get around this problem..

but thats part of the point - they wouldnt be *solving* the problem, just working around it...but they are not developing windows here, so that wont do

They could put in an option to install on the hard disc to improve load times, but that is only going to work for a few users who dont have many games or movies on the drive so it is still preferable to get the optimum load times direct from the drive.

[Dooms]

Oblivion on the 360 caches on the HDD to speed up loading times