New Xbox One Tech Can Save Hard Drive Space and Cut Download Times

[Megalith]

Microsoft is planning a new system called Intelligent Delivery that aims to save hard drive space and reduce download times by allowing users to only download the assets they'll actually need, as opposed to the complete game package: the concept involves splitting game content into “chunks” of data and then adding tags to them. It makes a lot of sense for those sticking with the lesser-powered Xbox One, who have no need for big 4K texture packs.

Multiple tags can be attached to a chunk, and they can be device-specific or language-specific, for example. In the case of the latter, this means that game audio or cutscenes in non-relevant languages don't need to be downloaded - Intelligent Delivery could, in theory, install just the assets applicable to your region, with other languages an optional 'on demand' download, accessible via the Xbox One dash.

 

[Shmee]

Looks pretty sweet!

 

[Brian_B]

Seems like this type of tech has been around for awhile. I can remember ArenaNet using it on GuildWars back in '05 and it being a fairly big deal then.

Glad to see it's coming to consoles though. Not everyone has superfast internet access, and games, console games in particular, are becoming very large.

 

[Spidey329]

I can imagine they could go deeper if the dev wanted by tagging later game assets. If the player is on level 2, you don't need level 10 assets (cutscenes, levels, models, textures that are scene specific) just yet. A tool could be created to handle that type of tagging.

By properly tagging a title, games could stream the necessities + early assets in so that the player can begin playing sooner while the rest downloads in the background as they progress.

 

[Azrak]

Uh, yeah. 1988 called. It wants its technology back. The same technology that allowed games to only load the diskettes and files containing the actual sound, graphics and language data that you were actually going to be using while playing the game. Only read English, and only VGA graphics with a Roland LAPC-1? Then don't load the Russian/French/Spanish/Japenese/Chinese translations and CGA/EGA graphic files and AdLib/SoundBlaster/GravisUltaSound data onto my awesome 40MB hard drive!

 

[Kranium]

Hah weird I was just talking to my coworker about the need for this last week. Like if my Xbox is set to stereo PCM, then I don't need the Dolby Atmos™ 15.2 soundtrack in 6 languages downloaded to my console in a 900GB patch.

 

[HoffY]

What is this we have here? A marketing opportunity to write the latest buzz word "Cloud" a million times and they didn't take it up? Must be dreaming!

 

[jeremyshaw]

Hah weird I was just talking to my coworker about the need for this last week. Like if my Xbox is set to stereo PCM, then I don't need the Dolby Atmos™ 15.2 soundtrack in 6 languages downloaded to my console in a 900GB patch.

Yeah, audio files take up a surprisingly large part of the overall size. Multichannel audio without any real HW audio codecs remaining, combined with hysterically anemic console GPUs mean game engines don't even bother trying to save space when it comes to audio. Too much of a performance hit to have the game engine calculate sound effects on the fly when a bluray disc or the poor sap's HDD can just take the extra gigabytes of duplicate audio with each and every possible effect variant already baked in. Some games even lump all of the regional language audio files in with every install.