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Bizzare Creations talks about PGR4 disc space
Author: Joe MartinPublished: 2nd August 2007
Bizzare Creations now recants previous statements and says space was not a problem in designing PGR4.
Just yesterday, Project Gotham Racing 4 was in the news because of rumours that some of the content, specifically the day and night lighting cycles, had been removed from the game because of disc space restrictions.
Sony was quick to gloat, claiming that it never would have been a problem for the Blu-ray ready PlayStation 3.
Today however, Bizarre Creations is claiming that the the DVD format was not the reason for the cut.
The rumour originally started when a PGR4 staff member posted on the official PGR4 forum and explicitly said that "It [day and night cycles] 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."
Soon enough, the forums were alight with outrage that the DVD format may be holding back game development.
In a new post though, Bizarre Creations is blaming the fans for grasping the wrong end of the stick. Apparently DVD space is not an issue at all.
"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."
However, as Kotaku mentions, the post only talks about the process of 'designing' the game - not the actual development process of creating the game.
The post goes on to say that the cut was made because of insufficient developer time and resource problems, not because of the DVD format. Bizarre decided to focus on implementing a dynamic weather system rather than day and night cycles.
Is all this media spin making you see red, or is this most likely a simple miscommunication? Share your thoughts in the forums.
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Comments (18)
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Personally I don't really care. The challenges of weather is more interesting than day and night driving anyway... that's been done in every game.
Sam
Hey guys, please buy this game we didn't really finish how we would of liked to have done, thanks :D
Very true. But like any project, rarely do things go to plan. So i s'pose it's a trade off of,
"Do we delay the project X many months and p1ss off the game community but release it as we [the developers] want it",
or,
"Do we release it with the all the must-have's, some of the should-have's but none the could-have's at a relatively decent time scale?".
Who knows... Maybe with the 120gig hdd for the Elite 360 there'll be a "day/night" cycle patch :D
EA is taking Spore the other route though...
Not too keen on the bikes though.
Can't the developers put the content into 2 dvds and just copy over some files over to the HDD (maybe track or car textures) and just lazy load them from the hdd when needed? There would be a game dvd and a content dvd. hehe
Yeah it may have some pros but im sure as hell there would be a lot of cons too. But it's an idea =)
Feel free to comment, critisize, and
flame...Rockstar are doing it with GTAIV now. Q2 2008 :'(
Essentially yes, they are using different textures, the sky for one which could be several different textures used in sequence, they could also be using lighting maps which are used to cut down on the processing required for lighting.
The basic lighting scheme for a level is "baked" into a lighting map that tells the game's rendering engine where the light cast by the global and ambient occlusion light sources, like say the moon, falls and how it is obscured by level geometry at any particular point. Street lights, car lights, and such are dynamic lights and handled in real time along with the shadows for mobile geometry like cars.
With the requirements of rendering to HD sizes and HDR lighting these textures tend to be rather huge, hence the vague push by the industry to procedurally generated content.