PS2 Limitations...

[rog]

Sony requiring a HD-update wouldn't be a problem. Need I remind you that most PC players are already playing the game in more than 1280x720? The PS3's main core is 3.2 GHz, I think it'd do just fine.

Yes, but SE would actually have to update everything. That's a rather large amount of work required.

[sandman]

Get rid of PS2 please.

[Volkai]

The trouble here is the amount of work that would be required to mitigate or neutralize the impact of 'PS2 Limitations'.

Basically we would need a new FFXI Install for PS2 to get past the existing limitation of how much PS2 HDD space is assigned to FFXI, and it would have to be universally adopted by all PS2 players. For this to happen, SE would likely have to send the new install data out to all PS2 players for free, because they would have to discontinue updates to the existing PS2 install data. If they charged money for this new install data, there would be an uproar. If they didn't send it to most or all current PS2 players, there would be an uproar. And by 'uproar' I mean 'lost subscriptions'.

In short, currently it's a money losing, bad press gaining proposition no matter how you look at it.

The only way SE could do this without losing money is if they make a new install disc and sell it, and to get away with that, the PS2-playing population would likely have to be a small enough percentage as to not justify the cost of making that new install disc.

Sony requiring a HD-update wouldn't be a problem. Need I remind you that most PC players are already playing the game in more than 1280x720? The PS3's main core is 3.2 GHz, I think it'd do just fine.

The problem with this is the amount of work -- and more to the point, the number of hours of billable labor -- that it would require to convert all of FFXI to HD. It's prohibitively expensive.

Get rid of PS2 please.

SE isn't going to do that either, because a sizeable enough portion of the existing player base still plays on PS2. This is more the case in Japan than the US (and it was never released on PS2 in the EU) but that doesn't change the fact that overall it's still the case.

[Mirage]

Yes, but SE would actually have to update everything. That's a rather large amount of work required.

I'm pretty sure they would be allowed to get by with just a resolution bump. I don't think most PS2->PS3-HD games have reworked textures. That would take half a forever and not be financially viable for most of the ports we've seen on the PS3, I think.

Now I'm no programmer, but I don't think it would be all that much work to tweak the game engine a bit to not rely on the extreme memory bandwidth of the PS2 (among a few other things), and re-compile it for the PS3.

[bungiefan]

I'm on PS2, and a PS3 is expensive at the moment. Also, removal of features by Sony, and the revelation from the people who have decrypted the firmware that the system monitors everything I do on it and sends it to Sony even if I'm not logged into PS2, upset me. SCEA has stated in the class action suit that we shouldn't expect their products to last past their warranty for any function. I'm not willing to buy a product like that from a company that behaves like that.

I've learned that I may even be sued by them for reading web sites and viewing videos I was linked to from news sites about the hacking of the PS3, and I don't even own a PS3 to have participated in any DMCA violation or copyright infringement.

I'd rather play on a console than a PC for important events, because my console doesn't get viruses or have driver conflicts that cause it to crash, and doesn't demand hardware upgrades, support software, or system software updates every week. Of course, the newer consoles are trying to force firmware updates on us, and are running monitoring to report back to their creators what is attached and running on them. I may just stick to my backlog of older consoles and games I haven't beaten yet if they want to spy on me with the newer systems.

Any clue how close we are to the limit on the max partition size on the ps2? I know they freed up the amount we can store by adjusting the update system but I thought we were really close to the limits on that as well.

After the last Abyssea expansion and ripping all the files from my PS2 FFXI install partition (to be able to copy them to friends' PS2s that got the update error and don't read discs anymore), I had a folder using 4.2 GB out of the 8 GB the partition has reserved. We're only using half the partition, and the partition uses about 23% of the total drive space available after HDD Utility Disc sets up system partitions (including a 128 MB one for game saves). PSBBN adds about 2 GB of hard drive usage in Japan for that interface, making it more like 26% or so that FFXI reserves of usable drive space. Undeleted update files from previous updates could take near to 2 GB of the partition, and uLaunchELF was the only way to manually delete them before the new update process in the last patch, which couldn't officially be run since it is homebrew, and thus SE wouldn't endorse or even mention it.

[rog]

I've learned that I may even be sued by them for reading web sites and viewing videos I was linked to from news sites abou

Nah, they can't do anything. It was just a scare tactic to get people who don't know any better to stay away.

However i do agree with your first paragraph. Some of the things they've done lately is rather disappointing, to say the least.

[CrystalWeapon]

Now I'm no programmer, but I don't think it would be all that much work to tweak the game engine a bit to not rely on the extreme memory bandwidth of the PS2 (among a few other things), and re-compile it for the PS3.

The game would save gigs in memory if they just reworked the graphics engine. Any dat editor would know that this game runs it's 3d models and textures into the same dat file and that gear of the same type but different texure both have their own seperate dat file with their own seperate 3d model and rigging information. For example the nation aketons. I could go in and edit the way the bastok aketon looks without affecting the sandorian model dispite them both sharing the same shape. From a storage standpoint this is horribly inefficient and causes alot of duplicate data. It would be alot better to have a set of models rigged to the character skeletons saved seperately and then save all the textures on their own.

Someone explained it to me a long time ago though that the reason they don't change it is because of how the ps2 needs to run the game, how true that is I'm not sure of, but I'm sure there are alot of tweeks that could be done that could free up space if not anything else to let it continue to run on the ps2 with new content.

[bungiefan]

The game would save gigs in memory...

That's how it works for the DirectX data for the PC DATs. The PS2 DATs were only released in PC-accessible format about a year ago, and are different in data structure. Nobody has analyzed them and posted results in English that I can find, other than to say they don't follow the PC data structure.

Many ROM folders have fewer DATs in them on PS2, and some of the folders have more. The game is only about half the size on PS2 compared to PC.

Now that they are running into limitations of the console in so many places, many of the original PS2 version programmers are not around that wrote the code and understand it. Rewriting the game with fixes to the limitations would be similar to rewriting it to port it to a new platform, and that's a huge investment for such old software, plus it leaves lots of room for something to break during the update (what updates don't already break something and need maintenance afterwards?).

The biggest limitation of PS2 is RAM, followed by processing power, followed by the size of the hard drive and limitations of the hard drive file system. If the PS2 HDD software and game were rereleased on disc without the requirement of the Sony HDD firmware to detect the drive, we could use a bigger hard drive, and have multiple partitions for the game to bypass the filesystem limitations. PS3 doesn't use custom drive firmware, but PS2 did, even though you could use a hard drive without it as long as you used software like Linux that didn't scan the firmware.

Nah, they can't do anything. It was just a scare tactic to get people who don't know any better to stay away.

However i do agree with your first paragraph. Some of the things they've done lately is rather disappointing, to say the least.

The California court just granted them subpoenas to find out the IP addresses/account names and information of anyone who accessed GeoHot's web site and YouTube videos, which would include mine since Ars Technica linked to them and I followed their links.

[Sureal]

Yep you're right but SE tried to upgrade FFXI with FFXIV, maybe they failing atm, but i think they are more willing to mend FFXIV errors, than to drop all ps2 players, i still use a ps2 console, as well as a PC one, but i find more comfort on playing on ps2, graphics are awful, but i got used to ps2 controller, lol, i would'nt be dissapointeed if SE decides to drop ps2 if they are going to get many better issues.

i use ps2 style controller on pc

[oliveira]

Adding to what Bungiefan has stated, the only and sole *real* limiting problem with the PS2 currently are the ammount of RAM it has for workspace (32 megabytes) which is the only real "limitation" atm.

What does that mean ? It means that given an certain amount of existing gear combination variations there's a limit on how many textures they can load at a given time, meaning they can't do much even if it means reusing existing gear wireframes to do re-texturing. It's really the worst problem with FFXI and the PS2 at the moment. The hard drive partition could be expanded up to the maximum free space the drive has.

The ceiling limit is 137 gigabytes on their (SONY's) HDD driver. But to expand the FFXI partition they would need to negotiate with SCEI due to the partition size being part of the DNAS protection thing. Any changes to the HDD partition sizes would need SCEI/SCEA approval. But it's indeed possible.