Larian Studios Forums Beyond Divinity (English) Suggestions A DVD versus 4 Cds

My laptop is Toshiba's Satellite 5100-503, which came with a 40 GB HD.
I was not fast enough to grab the only one that came with a 60GB before another customer did and I was really in a hurry to buy a laptop while overseas for emergency communications that demanded buying one but I am finicky, fussy, picky and choosy as ever. <img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/biggrin.gif" alt="" />

However, <img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/div.gif" alt="" /> still demands a score of seconds to load the next world’s background.
You are making a technical mistake by imagining the diametrical opposite of the situation to be the case.
To scroll the background smoothly, the desktop virtual resolution must be redefined to hold ALL the background of that world. There is no possible compromise here.
When your hero walks or runs through the coordinate system of THAT background, the random character generator is given orders by the program to generate a set of foes related to your location on the map. Other rules involve your current level, status, experience points and if you were indoors or outdoors because indoors have a bit more special rules and possibly a preset number of characters to generate within an area.
In that way, by the time you advance in your direction of motion the characters have been already generated and you do not feel any jerky performance. The program shall only update the animation of the character within the visible window of the scene and shall only update a single coordinate per NPC within the battlefield outside the visible zone, which may be seen on the mini-map as a bright green or red dot while you are a blue five-pixels-cross.

Everything the program needs within a world MUST be in RAM.
This also includes the cross-worlds database of information that keeps up with the development of the character, the quests achieved and all the kills database which you may brows at will any time.
Even the conversations are in RAM.
But you may not even see the open-ground map while you are in a dungeon under that map as such is considered to be another world even though it is resident for fast swapping of maps by reassigning the origin pointer of that map.

I asked you to take my word for it but I can see that you are still struggling and arguing.
Believe me, RAM is the bottle neck of game performance within a world.
Data streaming from hard-disks or from DVDs makes no difference when the data-stream demands a transfer rate lower than both.
What you experience in <img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/div.gif" alt="" /> as a delay is nothing else than the huge background map loading time, AND the huge data that accompanies each world. Because you need to know about roofs that fade in and out and every single item that you can manipulate within that world such as doors, chests, hatches, wells, etcetera.
Those are called graphic overlays and they occupy the ancient and well known sprite space.

No game designer may gamble by keeping that data on a hard disk as quality tests shall disqualify the design instantly.

Therefore your argument for Hard Disks having a privilege over DVDs is point moot.
Does your favourite movie star look sexier than usual when you run a movie from hard disk rather than from the DVD? <img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/biggrin.gif" alt="" />

Swen announced that <img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/riftrunner.gif" alt="" /> shall have a random battlefield generator. This means that even a huge bitmap for the background is not going to be loaded but rather the elements from which the scene shall be randomly generated. This means that the world loading time is based on the sprite loading time plus those random generation elements. Let us say that it would take 3 seconds at worst cases.

Scene generation would be in the order of one or two seconds per battle field if it was bigger than your screen, which is most probable, and you have zooming in and out options too.
You may not zoom in on static-bitmap-data without having big solid funny squares filling your screen. <img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/biggrin.gif" alt="" />
If it can be recalculated on the fly then it can be generated on the fly too.


Now the issue becomes whether playing the game from a DVD directly is cheaper or not.
Read the list of merits please.
1- It saves wasted space on your hard disk for valuable data you wish to save.
2- It saves you the clumsy operation of swapping disks or the pop up window of please insert the second, third, and fourth CD.
3- You do not even need an installation procedure but rather a registration and configuration procedure done once, and every time you load your DVD inside the drive, automatically you are on and playing your game.

If you can trust Zandalor in the game you should be able to trust me on this.
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