Square Enix have gone on record and informed us that next-gen games may be too big for a single Blu-ray. Luminous engine allows assets from a CGI video to be carried directly over a real-time demo.
What is the Luminous engine you may ask? Remember that impressive next-gen Final Fantasy tech demo (Below) that Square Enix showed off back at this year E3? Well this is running on the Luminous Engine.
It seems that Square Enix’s Luminous Engine, allowed for assets from a CGI video to be carried directly over to the real-time demo.
Because of that -Yoshihisa Hashimoto, chief technical officer at Square Enix- said that, even with a massive 50GB capacity, Sony’s Blu-ray format could be an issue…
Here is the full statement from Yoshihisa Hashimoto
“That’s what we’re expecting to do,” he said. “For the backgrounds used in this - the mountains, the houses - we are using exactly the same assets as are used in the Visual Works CG version.”
“Of course, it’s too massive of a data to use in a game as-is, but I think the look and feel will probably remain. If we had time, we could’ve compressed the data even smaller. We didn’t have time to do that, so we just used the same master data - but it can definitely be reduced.”
When asked if storage space could be an issue with Blu-ray discs (which currently store 50GBs of data), Hashimoto replied, “Yeah, that could be a challenge. There’s a possibility that just one Blu-ray may not be sufficient.
“We have to really consider the mechanism of compressing the data carefully,” he said.
