Question on Helmets in Pro Bowl for Madden 12

[poulka]

Quote: Originally Posted by The GIGGAS

Alright, I'm going to try and explain this. CHooe might be able to do it better, but I'll give it a shot. Let's go with the PS2. In the PS2, there was 32MB of RAM. Helmet textures back in "ye olden days" were small, let's say they were 512KB (a terrible guess, but go with me). With that, it would only take 16MB to load all 32 teams' helmets, which would leave 16MB for the rest of the game. Thanks to the small sizes of the textures, it was doable, but from what other people have said on the issue, there were some problems with a consistent framerate (I don't remember ever playing the Pro Bowl). Let's look at the Xbox 360. It has 512MB of RAM. This, obviously, is a large increase over the PS2. however, texture sizes have ballooned for high-definition gaming. Let's say that each helmet texture (+ lighting maps, etc) is 20x larger: 10MB per. That means that loading all 32 will take 320 MB. That's over half, and those textures aren't the only things that have been increased, so there's not enough memory to have everything that the game needs to work with. Here's a quote from CHooe, who is also a programmer, and has been a game dev at a small iPhone/Android game shop: If you want the Pro Bowl helmets, go to Sony and Microsoft and petition them for more RAM in their machines.

I understand what you are saying, but taking out features from the past because now we have sharp pictures and better lighting just seems backwards. The reason I say this because is while playing you cannot fully appreciate the sharpness or lighting. It is during replays or screenshots we you fully see sharpness or lighting. But I guess we will never see it, shame too, because when put together with sharpness and lighting on these console it could have been a beautiful thing.

[CM Hooe]

Quote: Originally Posted by poulka

I understand what you are saying, but taking out features from the past because now we have sharp pictures and better lighting just seems backwards. The reason I say this because is while playing you cannot fully appreciate the sharpness or lighting. It is during replays or screenshots we you fully see sharpness or lighting. But I guess we will never see it, shame too, because when put together with sharpness and lighting on these console it could have been a beautiful thing.

Tell that to EA and the rest of the AAA gaming industry. The field now is dominated by the need for great graphics.

That said, the all-32 Pro Bowl helmets feature would have to come at the expense of graphical fidelity on the helmets. You can't store all the color textures and light mapping textures at their current texture resolutions needed to pull off such an operation; refer to The GIGGAS' post for a more thorough explanation. This loss of fidelity was evident even in PS2 Madden, the helmets in the Pro Bowl didn't look as good as they did in regular games.

[Exonerated]

needs more ram.

Surely the ps4 will have at least 4gb (hopefully 8).

Ram is $99 for 8 gbs these days.

[poulka]

I understand about ram, but some testing should have picked this issue up. Which is why I am not moving up to the new systems because of all the issues that have taken place with these systems. I remember the old days when systems kept all features and just enhanced them. Good discussion. (Lower resolution helmets would have been better than none at all)

[mestevo]

Quote: Originally Posted by Exonerated

needs more ram. Surely the ps4 will have at least 4gb (hopefully 8). Ram is $99 for 8 gbs these days.

No chance. The PS Vita, designed to run PS3-quality games and you'd think would be designed to have some comparability with the PS4... well it will only have 512mb of RAM, and that's only if the rumors of that being reduced to 256 to better compete with the 3DS on price aren't true. It will also have 256mb of video RAM, the same amount as the PS3.

You can do a lot more with these amounts of RAM on machines designed for playing games like they are, and with newer components they will be faster loading things in/out of that memory, but loading a bunch of assets and keeping them there? Should have the same limitations.

Console makers don't just place an order at Newegg, and are dealing with economies of scale in the millions of units and projected over sometimes a decade, so a few more dollars spent per unit adds up, with quite the hit to the bottom line early on.

As development was winding down, Microsoft made a billion dollar decision to go with more RAM in the 360.

Quote:

"So what happened was, my partner Tim Sweeney, we kept arguing and we really wanted a hard drive in every single machine; that was something we really wanted but we realized that the 512 megs of RAM was way more important, cause otherwise you couldn't do this level of graphics if you had to both write your program and do your graphics in 256 megs. Nothing would really look that HD. "So we argued and argued, and what Tim did is he actually sent a screenshot of what Gears of War would look like if we only had 256 megs of memory. So the day they made the decision, we were apparently the first developer they called; we were at Game Developers Conference, was it two years ago, and then I got a call from the chief financial officer of MGS and he said 'I just want you to know you cost me a billion dollars' and I said, 'we did a favour for a billion gamers'."

Quote: Originally Posted by poulka

I understand about ram, but some testing should have picked this issue up. Which is why I am not moving up to the new systems because of all the issues that have taken place with these systems. I remember the old days when systems kept all features and just enhanced them. Good discussion. (Lower resolution helmets would have been better than none at all)

It's not a matter of testing, but simply the limitations of the platforms they are building for. Hopefully the development infrastructure is in place in Madden so that all of that extra work that's had to be done over the last few years doesn't have to be reworked for the next generation of consoles.

[Lieutenant Dan]

Quote: Originally Posted by mestevo

It's not a matter of testing, but simply the limitations of the platforms they are building for. Hopefully the development infrastructure is in place in Madden so that all of that extra work that's had to be done over the last few years doesn't have to be reworked for the next generation of consoles.

That's my hope I don't want to take even a tiny step backwards for the first Madden game on the successor to the 360 in gameplay, gfx, features and modes.

I don't think I could handle another 'tear down' for the new systems and have it take several cycles before we get back to where we are now, but prettier. lol

[mirrored32]

I miss having the actual helmets of teams for the new maddens, but if it is RAM I would love for EA to state that as such.

I hate to speculate.

[Segagendude]

Probably won't be in till the next gen systems, depending on their RAM.

As it is now, same reason The Show can't put individual uni's in the All Star game-----it would turn the game into a slideshow.