🚀 go-pugleaf

gme...@lindblat.cc.monash.edu.au (GM Enierga) writes:

>	But MOST people who buy these CD's assume that the game IS "playable"
>off the CD - in other words, they expect the CD-speed action of the game (if
>that particular bit makes sense) to equal that of the HD.  In case you have not

CDs are WAY slower than hard drives.  There will be a more noticeable wait
during loading.  Whether this load time is "reasonable" depends on the user and
the programmer: how fast the programmer wants the game to run, compared to how
much variety he wants to put into the game, and how much delay the user is
willing to tolerate.  A game may be "playable" off a CD without necessarily
running as smoothly as you want it to.

I agree there should be a move towards software which can be run well from CD,
but don't expect hard-drive-like performance from your CD until you see at
least 10x speed CD-ROMs.

>noticed, a lot of people (including a perhaps-would-be-myself) buy CD-ROMs
>because they do NOT want to install 50Mb on their HD's to play something,

True, however there is a trade-off: space or time.  If you're unwilling to
sacrifice the space, you have to sacrifice time.  However many games are nowhere
near 50Mb.  The most common ones I've seen are under or close to 10Mb.  Only
Origin's monstrosities take up 50Mb.

>probably because they do not have the HD space (or not a big HD even... not
>everyone these days HAS a 500Mb HD you know... and we all know how much
>professional applications take up - Coreldraw, Microsoft Office, etc etc etc).

I'm into programming apps myself, and my friends are into databases.

>	My point is that if you read on the label "you can play it off the CD"
>then that is what you believe.  When you go home and it turns out that the
>gameplay is THAT bad from a CD that you have to install to a HD, then that
>clearly spells false advertising.  This is not limited to Origin, either.

Maybe they need a label "You can play it *well* off of CD".  I can't think of
any game off the top of my head that plays just as fast on CD as it does on
my hard drive.  But then, my hard drive is SMARTDRV cached, my CD is not.
Simply telling you that you can play it off of CD is NOT false advertising if
it doesn't live up to your expectations, because your expectations are not
what is printed on the box label.

>>It is *NOT* unbearable.  It *IS* noticeable but the access time is fast enough
>>so that most of the time it's *really* slow is for a cinematic shot.

>	So what's the point of having it in the 1st place then?  You would not
>buy a Porsche if the engine performance was lower than your REALISTIC
>expectations - or would you?

Um, CDs are NOT porsches.  They are WAY SLOWER (4x?) than hard drives and the
main reason to buy them, as you said, is that they contain more information 
than is readily storable on a medium sized (200-300Mb) hard drive along with 
other information.

What I'm saying here is that your expectations are NOT realistic.  Playing
from a slower medium results in a slower game at least some of the time,
unless the entire game is loaded into RAM when the game itself loads.

>>>So far they are putting double speed drives as recommended for WC3.  So, if 
>>>you believe that, you won't need a triple speed drive YET.

>	I have a bad feeling that the end of the 2x spin drives will begin
>with WC3.

Perhaps but I still think they'll stick around.  Remember, the most common
package out there is the 2xspin/16-bit-sound combo so don't count them dead
for at least another year, maybe more.

I am glad though that the CD industry is moving forward.  I hope that within
2-3 years we see the end of floppies as a distribution medium, and within
2-3 years we also see, say, affordable 6x or 8x drives and perhaps affordable
4x floptical drives and "flopticies" instead of today's $20 optical floppies.

>>Besides which, isn't quad-speed out (still at insane prices, but ...)?
>>By the time CDs get to quad or higher, at affordable prices, they will
>>be fast enough to compete relatively well with hard drives, especially if
>>a data buffer like SMARTDRV for CD-ROMs comes out.

>	Yeah right - and send most HD manufacturers into bankruptsy? ;-)

Unlikely.  Hard drives are still faster than CD-ROMs and will be until
around 8-10x speed comes out.  In any case, hard drives offer reasonably
fast access to LARGE quantities of data (when's the last time you saw a
3Gb CD-ROM?), and offer "permanent" access to this information.  If you
don't have a hard drive, what are you gonna load your OS from every time
you want to copy or format?  We'll be back to the IBM/PC days, with 2 disk
drives, 1 for the OS and 1 for whatever you're working on.  Remember, your
hard drive is a read/write storage medium.  CD-ROMs are read only.  Check
the price of a 500Mb hard drive, compared to a 4x speed read/write CD and
the price of writable CDs.  Which would you rather buy as C: ?  Until the
speed and price of flopticals greatly improves, plan to see hard drives still
on the market.  And after that, still plan to see SCSI-2 multi-Gb drives on
the market.

>						- Falcon

					Michael Lewchuk
					lew...@cs.UAlberta.CA