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Games Entertainment

Patience, Grasshopper - On Long Load Times For Games 134

Posted by simoniker from the still-waiting dept.
Thanks to GamerDad for its editorial discussing the thorny, still present problem of long videogame loading times. Although the author points out "It used to be worse than it is now. I do count some of my blessings", he still argues: "I know that optimizing load times is probably low on the list of priorities when developing a game... [but] if you load the game so quickly that no one knows it's happening, or keep it streaming in chunks to not interrupt the flow of play, the player will be far more immersed in what's happening in your game and less likely to ever put it down until forced to do so." In conclusion, it's even suggested that a return to game cartridges might be a good thing: "You just can't beat that instantaneous gratification of playing games you just plug in, turn on and play. When the capacity is there for today's games, a return to carts would make me one happy gamer."
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Patience, Grasshopper - On Long Load Times For Games More

Patience, Grasshopper - On Long Load Times For Games

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  • Dungeon Siege (Score:2, Interesting)

    by jackbird ( 721605 )
    Dungeon Siege springs immediately to mind - this was obviously a design priority for them. However, it seems to have been made a priority over gameplay in that particular case.

    Perhaps mini-games while loading (that could even affect the main game), or loading as much as possible in the background while on the mission selection screen, for games which feature that sort of thing, would be solutions.

  • Cassette Load Times (Score:3, Interesting)

    by TechDock ( 558245 ) on Sunday April 11, 2004 @01:48PM (#8831295)
    That brought back memories. The author refers to waiting 15 to 20 minutes to load Temple of Apshai on the Atari. I know by experience it took the same time to load on the VIC-20. And then about when it was loaded the power would flicker and you'd be looking at the inital screen again...

    Surge supressors and UPS's, mankinds greatest achievements!

  • Um... no? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by SuperMo0 ( 730560 ) <supermo0@gmai[ ]om ['l.c' in gap]> on Sunday April 11, 2004 @01:50PM (#8831303)
    I realize that cartridges are better for loading times, but take a look at the N64, the most recent console cartridge system. It had a much smaller storage capacity than any of the other CD-based consoles that came out around the same time.

    Cartridges also cost a LOT more to make than a CD or DVD, which would create a problem for game prices. Either they'd have to raise the price of the console to defray the cost of keeping the cartridges at about the same price as a current CD/DVD/GCNdisc (whatever the hell that thing runs on), or they'd have to raise the average price of a game by $10-$20 to make the same amount of money. The average cart, IIRC, costs about $10 to make, while a CD/DVD costs a few cents.

    I realize that cartridges have faster load times, but from an economic standpoint, it's not likely that any game company is going to revert to them any time soon.
    • In the paragraph where he pined for the return of "cartridges" (not necessarily in their previous form, but some sort of solid state, non-optical media) he specifically mentioned that it needed to be cheap and high capacity. Personally, I'm in his camp. Maybe it's not feasible at the moment, but I would love to see that happen. Especially since a reduction in the number of moving parts would extend the life of consoles.

    • Re:Um... no? (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Deliveranc3 ( 629997 )
      If you think cost of manufacture would affect game cost to a noticable degree, you are out of your mind.

      • Re:Um... no? (Score:4, Informative)

        by Pluvius ( 734915 ) <pluvius3@gmai[ ]om ['l.c' in gap]> on Sunday April 11, 2004 @03:31PM (#8831938) Journal
        I guess I'm imagining the fact that new N64 games were always an average of $20 more expensive than new PSX games, then.

        Rob
        • On the other hand, Square was routinely charging 70 dollars for their latest SNES title. Secret of Mana was still 60 a year after it came out. When the 64 came around, you could reasonalby expect to shell out 50 dollars for a new game on the 64. I didn't pay a whole lot of attention to the psx side, but I seem to recall that being about the same.
          • When the 64 came around, you could reasonalby expect to shell out 50 dollars for a new game on the 64.

            When it came out, maybe. But not too long afterwards, when developers actually wanted carts with some capacity to them, the price ballooned up. As you pointed out, the exact same thing happened with the SNES, and I'm almost positive the Genesis and NES had that problem too. You don't have this problem with optical discs because they're so cheap and if you need more space, you don't have to make discs w
            • Ogre Battle ran me 50 bucks. That's the biggest cart on the system too. Donno about Resident Evil, though.

              On the other hand, its pretty easy for developers to see the disk space and wonder how to fill it. The answer thus far has been prerenders. Sometimes leading to sorry excuses for a "game," like Xenosaga. Hey, if people will pay 50 dollars for it, then more power to the artists behind it. But don't expect me to worship the unlimited gaming potential of optical media.
              • Ogre Battle ran me 50 bucks.

                I remember most new games being $60-70 at retail towards the end of the N64's life. It's pretty easy to assume that that was because of higher cart capacity, but perhaps I'm wrong.

                On the other hand, its pretty easy for developers to see the disk space and wonder how to fill it. The answer thus far has been prerenders. Sometimes leading to sorry excuses for a "game," like Xenosaga.

                Of course it is and does. But that's a human problem, not a technological one. If you had a
      • No, of course, a major manufacturer is just going to eat $10 in production costs per game. Sorry, but you are out of your mind.

        Keep in mind that a DVD will hold up to 9GB of data, think about how much a cart with 9GB of ROM would cost. I can promise you the price differential is a lot more than $10.

      • Actually, does anyone remember how much a Square game for the SNES cost? I remember when I pre-ordered my copy of FFVII for PSX and learned the rediculously low price of 40 dollars my jaw nearly hit the floor. Final Fantasy II and III (US) remained steady at their nearly 70 dollar price tag for the entirety they were available in stores.
    • It is a myth that cartridge capacity is smaller than CDs / DVDs, it's a financial matter. There are no physical limitations to cart size, Final Fantasy 7 could have been put on a single N64 cart. It's just that very few people would have been willing / able to pay for it.

    • Re:Um... no? (Score:2, Informative)

      by Luigi30 ( 656867 )
      For comparison, the average N64 cart was either 128 or 256Mbit. That was 1998-2001. The Neo-Geo could only address 330Mbit of cart space, but when SNK figured out how to bankswitch, cart sizes went up like crazy. The largest Neo-Geo cartridge was a whopping 807Mbit, nearly 3 times as big as the average N64 cart.

  • Jak and Daxter ? (Score:5, Informative)

    by noselasd ( 594905 ) on Sunday April 11, 2004 @01:52PM (#8831320)
    Have people here played Jak'n' Daxter [naughtydog.com] (or Jak II) on the PS2 ?
    It features an enormous world, with many levels. And no loading time
    between them. Roaming around the world, and among diffrent levels etc. is totally smooth.
    Developers got a thing or two to learn from it.

    • Re:Jak and Daxter ? (Score:4, Interesting)

      by acidrain ( 35064 ) on Sunday April 11, 2004 @04:18PM (#8832233)
      Here is the thing, games are often made in a huge rush. Now you can either add quick loading, or actually get enough gameplay into you game to not get horrid reviews. I can quote a manager at the game company I work for: "Nobody ever based their choice to buy a game on its load times." Is this true? From a marketing point of view he may be right. Of course the industry is evolving, and with the larger amounts of money being tossed around, things are looking up for load times.
      • I can quote a manager at the game company I work for: "Nobody ever based their choice to buy a game on its load times." Is this true?

        Well, I refuse to play Resident Evil till they fix the dumb door/loading scenes, and I returned Stuntman as 'faulty' because it was simply stupid waiting 90 seconds to attempt another 5 seconds of stunt.

        The worst thing you can do, is force the player to wait so long, they actually turn the TV on to watch something rather than stare at the load screen.

        ... well, apart from

      • Well, long load times can turn someones opinion of a great game to an OK game, an OK game to a bad game, and a mediocre game to a piece of crap.

        It's all part of the overall experience.

        Good gameplay, good graphics, good sound, good loading times.
        If you get all of them right, you have an excellent game, get any of them wrong, and you have anything from a merely OK game, to a waste of time and money.
    • Actually with Jak II I assumed that the "airlock" areas when entering/leaving the city were just cleverly disguised loading screens. While they didn't boot me out of the game itself, I can hardly call waiting for a huge door to cycle a "totally smooth" transition.

      Still, you're right that developers can learn a thing or two from them. Being able to still have control of my character while I wait is worlds better than being stuck staring at a loading screen.

  • Nintendo understands this (Score:4, Insightful)

    by wcbarksdale ( 621327 ) on Sunday April 11, 2004 @01:52PM (#8831322)
    Having low load times is something Nintendo is very good at (and was the main reason the 64 used cartridges). Playing a Gamecube game it's rare to see a load time of more than .5 seconds.

    • Another advantage of Nintendo's (odd) format (Score:5, Insightful)

      by cgenman ( 325138 ) on Sunday April 11, 2004 @02:56PM (#8831714) Homepage
      The little disks Nintendo uses for their games spin faster and have lower seek times than a comparable full-sized DVD. Sometimes it's good to be small.

      • The game I was most impressed with was Eternal Darkness. It may have poor graphics compared to the GC's potential, but there were no discernable load times at all. They were probably covered up by the sometimes annoyingly long cutscenes, but it's better than a loading screen. Come to think of it, that would have made a good insanity effect.

        Wind Waker and Metroid Prime also did well - they load each area individually (in MP when you shoot a door, in WW when you go through one), but in most cases the load ti

    • Re:Nintendo understands this (but not for the GBA) (Score:4, Insightful)

      by soramimicake ( 593421 ) on Sunday April 11, 2004 @02:56PM (#8831717)
      Too bad Nintendo spend 5 seconds to display their logo on their cartridge-using GBA, when they could have made it instant-on.

      • Re:Nintendo understands this (but not for the GBA) (Score:5, Interesting)

        by NanoGator ( 522640 ) on Sunday April 11, 2004 @04:18PM (#8832235) Homepage Journal
        "Too bad Nintendo spend 5 seconds to display their logo on their cartridge-using GBA, when they could have made it instant-on."

        There really aren't any systems that don't do that these days. I read somewhere that they throw the logo up there as a way of 'proving' that the game was licensed to be manufactured by Nintendo (or Sega, or Sony, you get the idea...) legitimately. If you made a knock-off unlicensed cartridge, and that logo appeared, you were commiting a copyright violation and could be nailed.

        I might have the particulars a little messed up, clarification would be appreciated. I guess the point I'm getting at is that the logo is there for a specific reason, it's not a Nintendo/Sony/Sega/Microsoft commercial.
        • True. The Dreamcast won't load a cartridge unless a bit-for-bit copy of the logo screen stored in ROM is the first thing on the CD. Some of the indie DC games/emulators have a screen after the first screen saying that the first screen was lying.
          • When programming a Gameboy, the first thing you have to make it load is the data for the Nintendo logo. If it doesn't match the checksum stored in the ROM, it'll refuse to boot, giving the Black Box O' Doom or the Scrambled Logo O' Doom.
            • I never knew it was for copyright protection. The way I always reasoned it out was as follows: Remember the old days of the NES, when you would put a cartridge in and it might work, but it might not? And you had to jiggle the cartridge or blow on it? Nintendo saw this bug and put the "Nintendo" logo in the Game Boy's boot sequence in order to provide a checksum for the cartridge data. The SNES and N64 probably had similar setups (which were invisible to the user), but with the advent of disc-based cons
        • Yeah, Sega added their licsened by Sega (etc) screen to the Genesis 2(maybe 3?) so they could get counterfitters in asia on trademark infringement since copyright infringement cases weren't going too well.

          In Sega v. Accolade (or vice versa) in the US, it was ruled that displaying the text banner solely for the purpose of interoperability was ok. It might still be grounds for trademark infringement lawsuits in other countries though.

        • It's there because it's verifying the cartridge. If you've ever used a classic gameboy, very often the little Nintendo logo at the botton would be messed up in some way or another. That logo is read from the cart, and it's to make sure that you inserted it correctly. Remember blowing the dust out? That's why it's there. It's like a little power on self check for the GB.

          No conspiracy here.
    • The GameCube version of True Crime: Streets of LA has annoyingly long load times. What's worse is that there's a long load to watch the intro movie, then another long load to start the mission. You also cannot choose to skip the intro movie if you've already seen it.

  • Provide something during the wait.... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by AtariAmarok ( 451306 ) on Sunday April 11, 2004 @01:53PM (#8831327)
    Why not provide something during the wait, like Solitair, or some sort of space invaders game (remembering that it took just a few K on the old Atari 2600...should be quick to load, or easy to embed in ROM).

  • Good idea. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by SuperMo0 ( 730560 ) <supermo0@gmai[ ]om ['l.c' in gap]> on Sunday April 11, 2004 @01:54PM (#8831339)
    Hide it behind a short (as short as possible) cinema like Metroid Prime does when you ride an elevator.

    Like Ratchet and Clank, when you're going in between planets. You get to see your ship fly around in space. Even in DBZ Budokai 2, you get to twirl your analog sticks around to make the little loading icon move. As long as you're DOING SOMETHING during the loading screen, it makes it a lot less painful.

  • disadvantages of cartridges (Score:3, Informative)

    by The Moving Shadow ( 603653 ) on Sunday April 11, 2004 @01:56PM (#8831354)
    We are so spoilt with all the multi-gigabyte data that fits on modern media like DVD's. If we would go back to cartridge based games we would have to sacrifice all that FMV goodness and the orchestrated multi-track soundtracks that are able to fit on a DVD. Producing a cartridge is a lot more expensive that producing a DVD. You will have to manufacture large quantities of ROM chips to imprint with the game information to equal the storage capacity of a DVD. I don't think people are willing to pay that much more for a cartridge based game.

    What i do like about the cartridge is the fact that they will stand the test of time much better than our slowly corroding DVD and CD media. I think all my old Atari 2600 carts will still boot. Something i can't say about some of my older Sierra cd-rom games on my PC.
    • What i do like about the cartridge is the fact that they will stand the test of time much better than our slowly corroding DVD and CD media. I think all my old Atari 2600 carts will still boot.

      I thought so too. But recently I dug out my Mario 64 for the Nintendo 64, which I'd bought when it came out, but somehow never got around to playing it much. Now when I try to play it, the game always freezes up sometime during the first level. I had the cartridge stored in a nice enough place, not too hot/cold/h
    • I'd prefer a loss of much of the FMV in modern games. They tend to break the feel of the game by being too different from the rest of the game.

      Besides, I prefer gameplay in my games ;)
    • FMV? Who uses FMVs these days? Developers are starting to use cinemas using the in-game graphics engine en masse, now. From what I understand, this uses a _lot_ less space, which makes sense. In the PSX days, FMVs were useful because the games themselves were low-res and low-polly. That's not true anymore; quite the opposite. Since there is no compressed video involved, and all the modeling is the same as it is when you're playing, it looks better, too. A good example of this technique is Metroid Pri
      • Starting to use the in-game engine? My, the more things change, the more they stay the same...

        It wasn't but about 1 1/2 generations ago that pretty much EVERYONE used the in-game engine. Try Goldeneye, if you want an example from the N64... and the vast majority of earlier games, as well.

    • Re:disadvantages of cartridges (Score:4, Interesting)

      by einTier ( 33752 ) * on Sunday April 11, 2004 @04:34PM (#8832333)
      What i do like about the cartridge is the fact that they will stand the test of time much better than our slowly corroding DVD and CD media. I think all my old Atari 2600 carts will still boot. Something i can't say about some of my older Sierra cd-rom games on my PC.

      Careful about that. I'm sure that we all have "fond" memories of hard to load carts from the 2600, and most notably, from the NES. I recently ressurected my old ColecoVision with VCS adapter, and though carts seem to be fairly durable, oxidation does happen on the contacts, and some games won't load at all. Carts are durable, sure, but don't believe for a minute they are indestructible.

      Also, I think a lot of people have forgotten how genuninely bad load times used to be. I can remember playing the same game for hours on end on the C-64 not because I loved it, but because to boot up a new game would simply take too long. I remember having a fast load cartridge to help with the loading times was viewed as a nessesscity. I think the damn EA cube, pyramid, sphere logo is forever burned into my brain. Even on cart based systems (ColecoVision), you still often had to wait 10-15 seconds just to play the game.

  • HDD-based storage? (Score:1, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Well, why not move to an HDD-based system? Anyone ever used a modded XBOX? We switched out the HDD in ours for a new 80 gig drive, Installed XECUTOR2 on it, and a new dashboard to get some extra features.

    Games load blazingly fast. It's actually frustrating sometimes, like with sports games where the controller config is shown during the "loading" screen. For us, the loading screen blinks on for about 5 seconds at a maximum.

    HDD storage makes a bit more sense. I'd like to see a game do this:

    On initial load

  • Nintendo's strength (Score:5, Informative)

    by DarkDust ( 239124 ) * <marc@darkdust.net> on Sunday April 11, 2004 @02:08PM (#8831414) Homepage

    Loading times always were Nintendo's advantage: in the elder days of NES and SNES, were all other console makers used modules as well this they were doing as well as all others, but later on this changed.

    I remember when the N64 came out that a lot of discussion went on as to why Nintendo held on to modules, instead of using discs like the Dreamcast and Playstation did which can hold MUCH more data than ROMs for a way smaller production costs.

    Surely one reason for using modules were the almost non-existent load times, another was better copy protection. (Also, modules allow to extend the hardware of the main console, late SNES games sometimes feature coprocessors that were faster than the main processor... you can't do that with a disc).

    Then with the GameCube Nintendo had to use discs as well, simply because of the way bigger capacity. But they did it good, IMHO: they are using their own propietary disc format which makes copying way harder than Sony's discs. And when you're playing games like Zelda: The Wild Wanker ;-) you'll also notice they managed to keep load times quite low compared to the Playstation 1/2. I was really impressed.

    But not only the hardware is important here, good programming is well: I played Puzzle Bobble: Bust-A-Move yesterday (PS2) and was really annoyed how long this simple game loads. The way more complex Final Fantasy X and X-2 loads quite fast.

    • Re:Nintendo's strength (Score:4, Informative)

      by inio ( 26835 ) on Sunday April 11, 2004 @05:09PM (#8832559) Homepage
      One of the keys to the fast load times on the Cube is the small disk. It's reduced data area significantly reduces the average seek time required to get from one point on the disk to another. The other is, as you mentioned, a lot of innovation and engineering going into predictive loading and similar techniques.

      • One of the keys to the fast load times on the Cube is the small disk. It's reduced data area significantly reduces the average seek time required to get from one point on the disk to another. The other is, as you mentioned, a lot of innovation and engineering going into predictive loading and similar techniques.

        Yes... clever alignment of data comes to mind. I had to think of The Story of Mel [astrian.net] in the Jargon Files, where they describe a very clever alignment of code on ancient drum-memory.

  • I think its a mistake to say that optimizing loading times aren't very high on the list when developing a game. I think they are very conscious of how bad they can hurt the gameplaying experience. I remember seeing videos of Microsoft employees talking about the Xbox before it came out, and one of the things they repeatedly emphasized was short loading times.
  • How about long console load times? When i turned on a playstation i have to sit and watch a sony playstation graphicfor an annoyingly noticable amount of time, as well as on the playstation 2. Why do they need an ad on a playstation for a playstation? Why can't the console just boot the damn game? I have to wait for the game to load, repeatedly, at least sony's next system should not make me wait before I have to wait some more.
    • The company logos at console startup are there partially to keep you aware of the brand (altho you know what system you're playing, the other people in the room may not), but also to hide the loading time for game startup code.
      • And to enforce license fees on developers. The console requires cartridges to display the logo, so that they can go after unlicensed developers on copyright grounds. I believe this started after a series of lawsuits around 3rd-party development for the Atari 2600 and NES.
        • The logo is there in search of trademark suits, not copyright, and was originally added to facilitate suits against bootlegers in some asian countries where copyright suits were not successful. However in the US, Sega v. Accolade was ruled in favor of Accolade, and gives precedent to it being ok to display unlicensed trademarked logos and untrue statements regarding licensing in order to get your game to boot.

          I don't know about the status of bypassing the 'license enforcement' in other countries however.
      • Also, somebody up there mentioned copy protection. If it's a pirated copy and it doesn't show the logo, you can tell it's a pirate. If it does show the logo, there's a copyright lawsuit. Something like that anyway, see above.
  • Anyone ever play Xenogears? It's loading times were rather high, but it hid them using a cool zoom-in effect, so they weren't too noticable. Star Wars Galaxies has some of the worst load times I have ever seen, and that's one of the reasons I don't play anymore. 5 minutes on the initial load, 2-3 minutes when changing planets. Sure, I not travelling between planets that often, but when I do, it's quite annoying. Especially if I can't fly directly and miss the transfer shuttle. Then I have to wait 8-10 more
  • For a console that's supposed to have fast load times, Metroid Prime sure does take a long time to load levels. Having to sit through the transport scenes can really take you out of the game, especially since you sometimes have to take a few transports in a row to get somewhere. And sometimes you have to stand by a door for a few seconds before it opens due to load times. Not good when you've got Beam Troopers or something trying to kill you. All in all, I'd say the load times in MP are as bad as those
    • The elevator scenes are largely there for effect. Every Metroid game has them, despite the fact that all the others are on cartridges.

      The doors not opening doesn't happen often. The door to the artifact temple takes a long time to open, but you're standing in an empty room so its not a big deal. The only other noticable time doors won't open right away is when you're in a connecting hallway and rush thru it really quickly (usually morph into a ball and use the boost repeatedly). The hallways exist to slow
      • The elevator scenes are largely there for effect.

        I'm not sure I believe that. If they were there mostly for effect, then I'd be able to skip them after the loading is finished. Also, the elevator scenes in the other Metroid games don't take nearly as long.

        The doors not opening doesn't happen often.

        Does for me, and I don't rush around all that much. I don't think it's a problem with my GC; it's brand new.

        Rob
        • It doesn't happen often for me, and when I know it's coming up, I try to shoot the door from a distance, especially if there are enemies in the room. Or you can just kill them first.
    • Metroid Prime did it right. Yes, it has loading times, but they're all hidden in those sequences. Like the elevator sequence, and when doors don't open right away. You wouldn't like it if the game would halt the gameplay and present a large "LOADING - PLEASE WAIT" box all over the screen, would you?
      • My point is that the Metroid Prime load times are more-or-less the same as the load times in PS2 games. The fact that the load screen isn't "Loading Please Wait" is irrelevant. And I would much rather get a "Loading" message when the doors won't open, as that would mean that I wouldn't be shot at as much waiting for the damn thing to open.

        Rob
        • My point is that the Metroid Prime load times are more-or-less the same as the load times in PS2 games.

          Wth are you talking about? Load times in Metroid Prime are more-or-less the same as PS2 load times? Try playing RPGs on the PS2 and count how much time you waste waiting for the game to load every random battle. I don't know where you get the idea that Metroid Prime has long load times. The longest ones are arguably the elevator scenes, and thats largely to maintain the series's tradition of waiting the

          • Try playing RPGs on the PS2 and count how much time you waste waiting for the game to load every random battle.

            RPGs are supposed to be slow-paced, and since the battle screen is usually separate from the exploration screen in console RPGs, it takes a few seconds to adjust anyway. Give me an example of a game that's actually like Metroid Prime.

            I don't know where you get the idea that Metroid Prime has long load times.

            Actually, the idea is that PS2 load times tend to be exaggerated. Beyond the getting
  • What are we going to do about bathroom and stretch breaks? Those load screens keep those regularly scheduled. Perhaps we should keep them for ergonomics' sake.

  • Halo for PC; Half-Life; Other games & distract (Score:4, Interesting)

    by rufo ( 126104 ) <`rufo' `at' `rufosanchez.com'> on Sunday April 11, 2004 @03:14PM (#8831823)
    I don't know about anyone else, but Halo for PC is absolutely stunning in the load-times department. It's a cutting edge game, yet it takes no longer then two or three seconds to load any level in the game, even on my 1.1Ghz/384MB Athlon. If you've ever played Halo for Xbox, it takes way longer then that - probably 15 to 20 seconds of boring load screen. There are brief "loading" messages during the game, but no longer then Half-Life's load times.

    Speaking of Half-Life, it was probably one of the first games that I saw to handle loading in an intelligent manner - everything's broken up into small chunks, so as you wander around you only see the loading message faintly for three or four seconds on a really slow computer, and on anything relatively modern half the time the game barely hitches. I hope Half-Life 2 has a similar system, or perhaps a method of streaming data as you wander around so there are no load times (although there hasn't been an FPS game that I'm aware of sporting zero load times, so maybe that's just not feasible yet).

    One last example here: Nintendo games are the epitome of zero-load. I can't think of a single first/second party title I own for my Gamecube that has noticeable load times. (I have a small exception here for Metroid Prime - while *really* not that bad, I do find the small hallways you run through to be slown down while the next room loads kind of annoying, especially once you get an ability to cross the room faster and you wind up sitting there waiting for the door to the next area to open). From my understanding this is due to the proprietary disc format that Nintendo has selected; one of the advantages to a smaller disc is that you can spin it faster before the forces at work tear the disc apart, which means you can load more faster. Many of the third-party titles I've played are obnoxious in loading, however, and really makes me think that too many people don't give enough thought to load times or how best to optimize a given title for the platform it runs on.

    Lastly, I think we need to think about other aspects of the game that are annoying - for example, saving. Usually a manual thing, and in some games horribly obnoxious to do, requiring much digging through menus and confirming overwriting of our previous saved game. Hello?!? Most of the time, yes, I want to overwrite the previous saved game. Is the problem avoiding overwriting your kid brother's saved game? Fine, then let me create as many profiles/saved game files as I want and have three save files inside of that - easy. If the problem is you want people to think before they erase saved games they want to archive, then perhaps there should be two or three "archive" points and one quicksave point where it doesn't confirm (along with the ability to archive the quicksave point of course.) I think alternate styles of saving beyond the standard "checkpoint" would also be a good thing (the ability in PoP to rewind time, while not exactly saving, is a good example of this). What about the corporate logos at the beginning of the game that can't be skipped? While I realize that there's almost no chance that they'll go away, what ifthe game instantly loaded your previous saved game and showed you the logos when you enter the game? (This would also mean missing out on neato main menus and title music, so maybe this wouldn't go far).
    • Well that's the point exactly. The PC doesn't have big load times (apart from BF:vietnam and some other really new games). When you consider just how much detail it's loading, however, you can understand. Consoles are very very weak in power, so when you make them do real I/O work of course they're going to pale in comparison.

      I've managed to cut down the load times with my new SATA RAID0 stripe to seconds, because I had that choice. But if console gamers want the same performance as a real computer, un
      • Well that's the point exactly. The PC doesn't have big load times (apart from BF:vietnam and some other really new games). When you consider just how much detail it's loading, however, you can understand. Consoles are very very weak in power, so when you make them do real I/O work of course they're going to pale in comparison.

        Yes, of course a PC will be faster - it has a hard drive for chrissakes, that's already about ten times faster then anything most consoles have :-). But that's not the point. The poi

  • Dungeon Siege (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Paolomania ( 160098 ) on Sunday April 11, 2004 @03:45PM (#8832025) Homepage
    I realize that many here a loathe to give a nod to a Microsoft published product that only runs on DirectX, but Dungeon Siege by Gas Powered Games is remarkable for its constant streaming of a huge 3D RPG environment from starting the game with a hoe to the final boss showdown with no loading screens. They used some tricks as described in this whitepaper [drizzle.com] to achieve the effect. Although they had to linearize the content to a large degree, the idea of traversing a tree structure of content, constantly streaming in upcoming nodes is one that more developers could adhere to in creating continuous worlds.

  • GameCube load times (Score:2, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I have heard that the official GC devkit uses a media that behaves like GC discs which makes load time bottlenecks blatantly obvious to developers. Any truth to this?
    • Ooh, I like this. Dunno if there's any truth to it, but I love the idea of making the developers wallow in their own filth. ;-) (I get pissed off just waiting for *shudder* my 1meg VBA/Excel project to save; takes about 6 seconds. I hate VBA/Excel, but it does get some bills paid...)
  • Someone pipe and remind me what game this was, but there was one generic motorbike game about a year ago that let you play pong during the loading? It was like Burnout for motorcyles I think. Now that's a great idea.
  • I think developers, especially on the PC can learn a lot from their console bretheren.

    SSX3 streams in the ski slopes as it goes on the most part, it is possible to ski for a full 45 minutes, from the top of the highest peak all the way to the bottom of the beginner peak. No load waits inbetween. (There are small loads when restarting events, or doing anything that involves a sudden jump of location rather than ski-ing form point to point)

    I dont know how much memory a PS2 has, but it can be nowhere near th

  • Loading (Score:2, Redundant)

    by Vexware ( 720793 )

    Unless my memory is failing me, isn't it Namco's [1] [namco.com] [2] [wikipedia.org] Ridge Racer [mobygames.com] (or it's sequent title Revolution) which boasts a game of Galaxian while the game loads? And as a little bonus, killing all the invaders before the timer runs out gives the player a choice of nine cars, instead of four, when comes the vehicule selection. Ah, the old times -- you couldn't even save your game, I think. That was truely an arcade game.

    I think that what was a pretty good idea back then could even be welcome nowadays; after a

    • It's Ridge Racer, and you could save those extra cars (along with the super-secret black car) to memory card. Being a firstgen PSX title, though, they hadn't yet come up with an autosave function.

      The funny thing about the Galaxians game was that it just BARELY gave you enough time to kill the group before they escaped. More than once I've seen someone reset the PSX to give it another shot rather than just start with the default cars, which is probably the most amusing perversion of loadtime I've ever seen.

  • Memory mapping (Score:5, Informative)

    by Earlybird ( 56426 ) <slashdot @ p u r e f i c t ion.net> on Sunday April 11, 2004 @05:46PM (#8832787) Homepage
    Back in 1997, I worked on a commercial game, and we struggling with the problem of level load time.

    This was back when Pentiums and Windows 98 were the norm, so that was our target. We were mostly loading 2D graphics and sound effects. Enough that it could take anything from 20 to 60 seconds to load the next level -- quite unacceptable.

    We did two things to improve loading time. The first was to reduce the perceived loading time -- instead of just a static picture, we changed the screen to be a rendered animation of the main character walking towards the next level. The animation frames were driven by the internal loading progress, so he walked rather haltingly, but it was effective.

    The second was to use memory-mapped files. We put each level's files into a single, uncompressed, indexed file (a simple idea used, at the time, by Id's games) -- each a hundred megs or so -- and I then modified the code to map the level file into memory, and let each object (sound effect, animation frame, etc.) merely set its internal pointer to somewhere within the mapped region. In short: We handed the entire task of loading to the operating system. The load time was now near-instantaneous.

    What really surprised me was how little impact this had on overall performance -- we had hundreds of animation objects on screen and lots of layered sound effects, and the frame rate hardly budged. For the first second or two, as each object access triggered a page fault, the frame rate would crawl a little, but we quickly solved that by pre-loading the largest and most commonly used objects.

    The speed of memory mapping was particularly surprising considering it was Windows 98, not particularly well known for its sturdy virtual memory manager.

    I'm sure memory mapping is a popular technology among game developers. More recent 3D games probably have their own, specialized VM systems. Far Cry, in particular, is impressive in the way it leads the player through huge (by current standards) landscapes, with no perceptible loading pauses.

  • I wonder (Score:3, Interesting)

    by PktLoss ( 647983 ) on Sunday April 11, 2004 @06:30PM (#8833150) Homepage Journal
    I have always wondered why there isnt some sort of a dual format, Cart & Mini CD.

    Most of the system cartridges we have seen are more than large enough to house a minidisc. Why take the best of both worlds, critical game data could be held on the cartridge (or even like, the first bit of every level), with the remainder on the disc.
    • There was a Saturn game that came on CD and cart, though I think that was because they ran out of RAM, rather than to decrease load times. Anyone know the game I'm thinking of? As a collector, I love innovative hardware stuff like this. As a gamer, the answer looks like a hard drive in every console.
      • Found it, actually them: King of Fighters '95 and Ultraman. I can't find a decent discussion as to why the ROM cart was used -- whether it was just a limitation of RAM (in which case you'd think they'd use the RAM exansion cart standard) or indeed to decrease load times (which it appeared to do somewhat, based on the poor review KoF '96 got).
  • I thought that it was really cool when Final Fantasy Anthology [gamespot.com] came out for the Playstation. I played FFV for hours and hours, having a blast with the job system. But when it came to FFVI, I didn't play it as much. I knew that there were some new cutscenes and all that, but i just couldn't handle the load time when I knew how fast the cartridge loaded in comparison.

    But when Final Fantasy Origins [gamespot.com] came out it was a different story. They made more improvements this time around including better graphics. Th
  • I had a group of stoner friends that thought that it was amusing every time they played games and they saw the screen that said "Now Loading".....

  • Xbox (Score:2)

    by dfj225 ( 587560 )
    One of the reasons that I like the Xbox, is because it makes it easy for the developer to eliminate load times by streaming data from the hard drive into memory. Since the hard drive can swap data from memory much faster than a CD or DVD drive, it becomes much easier to do this. However, there are still very few games that I can thing of that (noticeably) apply this trick. I know that it is certainly very possible, as I have seen it done on a PS2 without access to a hard drive. I think that for some gam
  • That would have to get my vote for Slowest Loading Ever, but bear in mind the cassette-loading stuff is before my time. The worst part was that it spent 30 seconds each for the silly, non-skippable cutscenes, even those which just show a ship cruising towards a planet. And this is with a relatively new system, 512MB ram, 7200rpm hard drive, ATA100, etc. (and yes, DMA was on).

    I actually enjoyed the game (please don't shoot me), but having to go through that everytime I "quick-loaded" finally wore out my p
    • Hah! You never played System Shock 2. I could go away and get a cup of tea in the time it took for a "quickload".

      I remember the first time I crossed the bridge in GTA3 and it paused for about half a moment and then got on with the next bit of the game. That was cool. After that it started getting on my nerves when games had to load the next level, reaching it's peak with Deus Ex IW's insanity where the levels are about 3 feet across and loading times are 30-40 seconds. At least the levels in SS2 took you a
  • It gives me a break to hit the bathroom or grab something to eat or put a load of laundry in.

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