Quote
The Executable code MUST be in RAM.
The graphical background on which you shall be able to zoom in/ out MUST be in RAM, what difference does it make to load it from the DVD or the Hard Disk except wasted media and redundancy?
The DVD shall be native to play sound tracks and movie clips at highest quality per data-memory-media cost.
You never run code from a hard disk or a cd directly, so the issue here is data streaming not running code. Streaming the audio music track data from DVD to sound card directly saves CPU time by the advanced architectures available today.
Streaming the video movie clip directly to the graphics card too would be fantastic when it is compressed, for example by MPEG3 or whatever is compatible.
Metal Gear was never at the same rank of <img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/div.gif" alt="" /> to make a comparison and in my opinion it would never sell good even if they printed it on a gold dish.
I think that <img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/riftrunner.gif" alt="" /> and the following Divinity II may be the best reason to push the market to upgrade.
Cheers.


But who has 2.7Gb of RAM in their machine? (Keep quite, I know you're out there waiting to gloat!)

Sure you must load the executable and any commonly used media into RAM, but many game leave it at that. They only load the sounds and animations of those characters currently in use, which may mean the player and Orcs, or player and townsfolk. With increasing resolutions, you can load less characters into RAM as before and so games only remember the most immediately essential characters at any one time. My DVD drive can take a whole three or four seconds to respond to a load command, and that's assuming the data is sequential. I would hate to have that everytime I shifted between the wilderness and villages.

Also, conversations are clasically only played from disc in these cases. Again with the four second delay just to say "Hi" to a merchant. RiftRunner is going to have full speech (Which is going to be good, but very quickly annoying. Remember Deckard Cane in Diablo I?) and hence a lot of loading of sound files.

To my (limited) knowledge, Metal Gear Solid is the best selling game ever on PlayStation, and most certainly one of the most critically acclaimed. It doesnt mean you or I like it, but it was a very popular game. I'm surprised people didn't upgrade their machines. I remember getting more memory just for The Sims and a better video card just for StarTopia, and then finding I needed a whole new machine to supply data to the graphics card fast enough.