How do multiple discs work? With FFVII, for example, you have

>>2897068

>So both discs have to hold all that data, don't they? So what's the extra room for? Cutscenes?

you just answered your own question

>>2897068
Yes, cutscenes is what takes the most space. Without all those hours of cutscenes, FF7 would probably hold onto a single disc.

>>2897084
No probably about it. It does.

>>2897084
This, yeah. Why do you think discs with a lot of cutscenes are so short? In FFIX disc 1 was the shortest I believe, because it had so many cutscenes.

Graphical quality didn't have much to do with it, either. Vagrant Story was a beautiful game but only took up 66MB (one disc is ~500-700MB) because you didn't have any cutscenes (or at least they were rendered using the in-game models).

I guess video compression used to be pretty horrible. Final Fantasy games never had extremely lengthy cutscenes, it's usually, say, ten minutes per disc. According to Youtube all the cutscenes on FFIX's 4 discs take up only 35 minutes but occupy like 1.5GB of disc space.

>>2897114
>Vagrant Story was a beautiful game but only took up 66MB

Is that not including the little bits of FMV it has? That could fit on an N64 cartridge as it is if you shaved off only 2MB.

>>2897068
>Cutscenes?

Yep. In fact if you swap discs while on the world map and trigger a cutscene that's supposed to play on another one you can get some pretty interesting results.

>>2897132
Such as?

FMVs (cinematics) took up a lot of data. They could average 50 - 200 MB each. The encoding methods are similar to videos you probably store on your computer.

The graphics data, textures, maps, models, and even the soundtrack (assuming it was in the console's native format) were all just a few megabytes combined.

For comparison, N64 games didn't have FMV sequences, relying only on scripts that rendered cutscenes using in-game models. An N64 ROM might average 4 - 32 MB in size, and some of these games have a similar amount of assets as games like FF7.

>>2897119

Vagrant Story had only two FMVs. The intro is relatively short, and the ending sequence was just a collage of artwork. So the entire game - FMVs included - could be compressed to under 100 MB.

>>2898374
>even the soundtrack (assuming it was in the console's native format) were all just a few megabytes combined.

The soundtrack to the FF7 consists of midi files which are a few KB each.

>>2898396
MIDI for the PC version, PS1 version is more like tracker music so the samples take up space too. But FF7 uses low quality samples (FF8 and FF9 are much better), so the whole soundtrack is only about 1MB.

So RE2 fitting on a 64MB N64 cart wasn't so far-fetched after all.

Amazing how big a deal silly FMVs were back in the day.

>>2897068
>So what's the extra room for?
FMVs. In FF7 the entire game is on each disc, with the exception of the FMVs. I suspect all the PS FF games are like this.

>>2898374
The one advantage of N64 is that it isn't fixed to any particular encoding algorithm like the PS1 is, so could port newer methods to the console or roll your own.

A lot of people are saying 'cutscenes are big', they obviously must be referring primarily to FMVs but just to clarify this: in-game (unvoiced) cutscenes take up next to no space. They're just scripted events.

>>2898362
Aeris not dying.

>>2897068
The game data portion of the discs is trivial. Most of the space is used by CGI cutscenes, voiceovers, and stuff like that.

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>>2898685
Not just FMVs, but background images too.
I mean there's no reason for disc 1 to have Northern Crater backgrounds, right?

In Legend of Dragoon was legitimately too big for a single disc. Because you have to swap discs everytime you backtrack.

>>2897068
>How do multiple discs work?
>How underage am I?

>>2898374
>The encoding methods are similar to videos you probably store on your computer.

PS1 discs used MJPEG video encoding.
Modern encodings can be way superior in quality while using a lower bitrate, but of course they need much higher processing power in return to decode.

Even back in the mid 90s, MPEG was significantly better than MJPEG, but it was also much more expensive to implement, so they went with the cheaper solution (that was already the best in a console).

>>2898405
>MIDI for the PC version, PS1 version is more like tracker music so the samples take up space too.

PS1 version was like that too, a midi like instrument sheet, plus samples. But on a PC, not all soundcards allowed for changing the midi samples - the ones that allowed, sounded as good as the PS1 version.

And the N64 also used sound like that since it was more efficient space-wise than just storing pre-recorded audio.

What game requires the most discs?

The most I've seen was Phantasmagoria's 7 discs.

>>2897068
Cutscenes, text, enemy and boss models, scripts to run story events, etc.

The cutscenes took up the most space, but you can name a lot of things that would be exclusive to one disc or the other.

>>2901035
>The most I've seen was Phantasmagoria's 7 discs.

Phantasmagoria on the Saturn was 8 discs.

Blue Dragon on x360 was 3 DVDs.

Modern AAA games tend to be 20-50gb (probably due to HD cutscenes).

>>2901042
Lost Odyssey on the 360 was 4 DVDs, if I recall correctly.

>>2897114
Music is a real hitter as well. Shining Force CD uses simple graphics and has no voice acting, but the music is completely uncompressed, resulting in an ISO of 500MB.

>>2901039
All of those things you just listed are on every disc in FF7.

My disc 1 for FF7 was pretty scratched up and would halt in battles on the world map, so I'd just swap the disc out for disc 2. It would work just fine, but the cutscenes would be all wrong. So when it's meant to play the 10th cutscene of disc 1 it would actually play one from disc 2.

>>2901291
>disc
Doesn't the SEGA CD use redbook for soundtrack audio though? It's just playing a CD while the game is loaded in RAM. That's a little different from streaming uncompressed audio since it would be a multi session data / audio CD. Would still result in a large ISO for sure.

>>2901360
To reply to myself, no idea how that weird greentext got there. Sorry.

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Was there another multi-disc game on PS1 with as many discs as Koudelka? And is it entirely FMV bloating or do certain parts of the game only exist on certain discs?

>>2902931
FF8, duh.

>>2901342
I stand corrected then.

>>2901360
>That's a little different from streaming uncompressed audio since it would be a multi session data / audio CD.

It doesn't really differ, other than putting less strain on the drive (cd audio is played back at 1x rate), using less space, but also being incapable of looping (no byte-level addressing, no audio buffer in early consoles, etc).

>>2902938
And FF9.

>>2902949
SD Gundam G Generation F with F.I.F.

>>2897082
It's not just cut scenes. It's all the audio tracks to specific moments of the game as well as all the dialogue.

And not every area is available on the following discs; like for example the part of the Midgar sewer Cloud, Tifa, and Aeris get dumped into after Don Corneo's palace. You won't find that on disc 2 or 3.

>>2902931
Legend of Dragoon
Fear Effect 1 and 2

>>2902931
Tokimeki Memorial 2 came on 5 discs

4-disc PS1 games:
FF8
FF9
Legend of Dragoon
Fear Effect 1 and 2

>>2902968
You can swap out the discs in the middle of the game and everything (dialogue, music, locations) will load just fine. Only the FMVs mess up.

>>2902975
I think I read that the only non-FMV part of the game that is disc-specific is Sephiroth's supernova attack.

>>2902931
Fear Effects 1 and 2 can be the worst contenders for this, because they're both 4 discs, and the game can be finished in less than 3 hours.

>>2897068
I heard the ps1 FFs, got a hack to cut them down to 1dvd for ps2/emulation.

Bullshit I guess right?

>>2901042
>Modern AAA games tend to be 20-50gb (probably due to HD cutscenes).
They're 20-50gb because of lazy developers not putting time and effort into compressing their shit. Thanks bluray for making developers lazy!

>>2902976
Technically that IS an FMV.

>>2902931
The X-Files game for PS1 had four discs as well.Game had a SHITLOAD of FMV. Pretty much like watching a movie.

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>>2901029
absolutely everything I was gonna say. this is basically /thread. thanks!

>>2901006
No reason indeed. They are there though. I don't know about the sequels but as far as I know FF7 data is completly redundant, you can swap disks and everything continues to load.

>>2903092
...No, it is not. Where did you get that bollocks from?

>>2901034
That's usually called tracker music, as >>2901034 said.
MIDI is a specific interface and standard file format. Tracker music is samples + sequence data to play back these samples. MIDI music is composed using a sequencer as well. Basically, tracker music is more generic, MIDI is a subset, using one specific encoding, and not providing any samples, relying instead on standardized samples in MIDI hardware or synthesis

>>2898692
OP has been posted in the context of Final Fantasy VII. Its cutscenes are FMV.

>>2903051
bluray has abysmal seek times. It's a pretty bad system for games. Dynamically loading open world data, like textures or models, is a nightmare. What is trivial for bluray is streaming. Audio, video, sequential reads with high throughput. That's why modern games require installs, and early PS3 games were either small, or heavy on cutscenes (you can stream the audio for those). In that regard, bluray makes devs anything but lazy. Where does asset compression fit in on this? You do want to compress them quite well, actually, to fit as much of them in RAM as you can, to avoid dynamic loading, due to the mentioned seek times. Storage is not the weakest link with bluray, speedy retrieval is.

Am I the only one that misses this gimmick?
There was something very satisfying about reaching the disk changing point after several hours, putting the old disk back and inserting the shiny new one in. Not only did it give you an approximate idea of how close you were to finishing the game, but RPGs at least always did the disk change around a particularly high point in the story, which made it all the more satisfying when you finished a disc, it felt as in reaching the next season in a long running show.

>>2904385

I loved it too anon. ;-;

>>2904360
>Its cutscenes are FMV
A few of them are. The game is also filled to the brim with non-FMV cutscenes. It is important to differenciate otherwise some people are going to get it into their head that all these jumping polygons somehow take up a lot of disc space.

>>2904393
people call these cutscenes?

>>2904393
>otherwise some people are going to get it into their head that all these jumping polygons somehow take up a lot of disc space
People already think that. That train has left the station long ago.

>>2904349

This. I used this trick to get to areas I knew were fucked thanks to scratches. It actually helped me in IX as well to load up Lindblum for the first time because disk 1 wasn't able to after the FMV finished

>>2898374
>>2901029
>>2904343
Also, the video on the PS1 could only be played up to... 15fps.

>>2904432
Opening and closing the disk tray in FF9 skips cut scenes.

>>2904385
i feel the same way

>>2904385
>>2904760
You can emulate the same thing with simple chapters or episodic games. Devs just don't want to

>>2904762
>I'm a youngfag who doesn't understand
The novelty isn't in the break, but the intuitive sense that the game is just too epic to fit on one disc. Aligning with the story is just icing on the cake.

>>2904823
>intuitive sense that the game is just too epic to fit on one disc
Never had that. Multi disc games pissed me off, because they just showed the devs were cramming non-game elements (audio sequences, fmvs) on there or not being frugal with data. It's what you call a "cinematic experience" nowadays. It was a dark time when games were light on content (little more than the old moving characters around on screen, or just plain stringing fmv sequences together) because shit-for-brains devs didn't know what to do with all the space on CDs. Hell, CDs were a bad idea, because seeking time is death for interactivity. Most of the available space was utterly useless, as you could only stream it at a certain speed. So most CD games had a small memory footprint for actual interactivity, and padded it with the fad of the month, fmvs and cdda.
There were many games with a much smaller footprint that were much more "epic" in their story and presentation, and actually good games, that didn't have to reply on crappy videos and prerendering to get their point across.

Oh, and go fuck your dumbass assuming self with a rusty rake, shitstain.

>>2904823
Intuitive sense of value with having that 3-disc or 4-disc game instill the belief that you're getting a lot more for your $50 than you are with a single-disc game

>>2904830
wrong again, shitstain. DOS and Windows. I didn't bother with shoeboxes. Doesn't change that the PS fucked up development of gaming, and it's still ongoing. Subsequent platform releases cemented the error even further (DVD, UMD and BD). We get linear dumbed down actiony cinematic shit, because it's practically the only thing that works on discs, we get HDD installs, even on shoeboxes, because it's the only way to reclaim some of the access time. Go look at the corridor shooters, the room - corridor - room arena progressions. Shit's fucked, and you're too dumb to even get it.

>>2904831
I can spend a decade programming the most convoluted self modifying procedurally generated marvel of programming architecture and virtuality, and it would be barely 1MB of binary. Or I could spend a day recording the blue "no channel" signal from my TV uncompressed, and it would be 1TB. Size is meaningless, as far as amount of "content" (bad word for games, really) or its quality is concerned.

>>2904834
But you actually did get more game

Regular action and platformer games were typically around 8 hours each while the average RPG was 50+ hours with a hell of a lot more in it

>>2904840
you can get 100+ hours out of a NES RPG that's barely a couple hundred kB in size, you get literally thousands of hours of half a CD full of Arena/Daggerfall. Stretching RPG mechanics over time is trivial. As established in this thread, the actual game, the engine, its visuals, occupies very little space. The largest faction of the data on the disc is audio work and cutscenes. We're talking about a full hour of uncompressed audio, a few more hours of compressed audio, or minutes of fmv. That's not even a blip on the hours of game that you mentioned.

Platformers are usually shorter, because their mechanics are much harder to stretch. The levels need to be crafted and playtested. That puts a limit on the length and complexity of these games. Compare that with RPGs, where you have the timeconsuming work of initial balance and value tweaking, but then can just chain encounters as you see fit.
It's why even today you have platformers just a few hours, although the discs hold much more data. It's why even today modern action corridor shooters are only a handful of hours. It's why modern RPGs, even ones that use considerably less space than, say, Portal, can be dozens or hundreds of hours long, if the developers want.

>>2901042
L.A. Noire took up an obscene number of discs for a modern game, because every "frame" of facial animation was a separate model.

>>2902931
I think D had as many discs along with being under two hours long to actually play through.

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>>2904832
>the PS fucked up development of gaming

>>2904948

weeb trash detected

don't you have cutscenes to watch?

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>>2904956

>>2904846
>you can get 100+ hours out of a NES RPG that's barely a couple hundred kB in size, you get literally thousands of hours of half a CD full of Arena/Daggerfall.
i can also spend a million hours staring at my carpet, that doesn't make it fun or remotely entertaining you dunce

>>2905014
If you're too unfamiliar with NES RPGs, take a game like Pokémon. People spent hundreds of hours in it, highly entertained. The game is a 1MB ROM. Not all of it is game data. The thing to take away from this is simply that playing time is not a function of data.

>>2898362
Well in my case it was the only way to beat the game, my disc 2 was scratched and would freeze at cutscenes but I could swap in disc one or 3 and play to the next save point, save and then swap back. It will get glitchy and corrupt your save if you play too far I think