I understand how disks work with thing like movies, but how can a disk game memorize new information like a characters position in an rpg like zelda?
As far as I know, consoles do not burn information to the disks and memorising the information on a server is impossible for offline games so how do they do it?
In: Technology
Consoles need to have some writable memory to save data. This memory used to have a very small capacity on flash card or battery backed CMOS RAM, and game worlds were mostly randomly filled with items and characters instead of being recalled from their previous positions. Today gaming consoles have ample internal memory on a hard disk or flash module, and are similar to personal computers. They can save entire games on the internal disk. But console games and PC ports still often follow the style of randomly populating everything.
The level data on an optical disc is arranged to be retrieved in a linear fashion in one or a few chunks because discs have poor random access performance. They may duplicate textures and models that belong to the current level.
Such video games would be restricted to keeping a save file locally on the console itself, perhaps on some kind of removable media such as a memory card. While much smaller in storage capacity than the game disks themselves the memory cards can be written to and erased on demand, allowing game states to be saved and transferred between consoles as needed.
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