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Patience, Grasshopper - On Long Load Times For Games
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."
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.
Surge supressors and UPS's, mankinds greatest achievements!
Dreamers, shapers, singers, makers... Elric, the Techno-Mage
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.
Have people here played Jak'n' Daxter (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.
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.
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).
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
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.
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.
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, start displaying a movie that's X minutes long. Force me to watch it, and while it's doing this, copy key map data or whatever other "assets" to the HDD for quick retrieval.
That may elimininate, or, at worst, minimize your loading times.
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.
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.
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 minutes, but it's not as bad, because it's not just a loading screen. FFXI has almost no loading times on my computer, ever. I'm amazed.
This sig is only here so people stop skipping the last lines of my posts.
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 of many of the PSX/PS2 games I've played.
To its credit, the only other GC game I've played, Mario Golf, had extremely fast load times. But then again, it's just a golf game.
Rob
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.
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 ______ Agenda
Too bad Nintendo spend 5 seconds to display their logo on their cartridge-using GBA, when they could have made it instant-on.
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).
My English teacher once told me that two positives don't make a negative. Two words for her: Yeah, right.
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 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.
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?
The new resident evil game can have parts loaded onto the hardrive or played off the disk depeneing on if one has a hardrive or not.
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.
"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.
"Derp de derp."
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.
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 the level of modern PC's. Surely there must be some skill that transfers between the two in architecture design
I have no sig yet I must scream.
Bloodrayne had a quick-save feature that would simply overwrite the current game without asking. In addition to that, it had a normal save feature that would confirm the save or allow you to create another save game. It did that at every save point.
Unless my memory is failing me, isn't it Namco's [1] [2] Ridge Racer (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 all, in most games we are presented with a boring and frustrating loading screen which simply presents the player with a loading progress bar. Instead of this, game developers could get the main game to load a small, light mini-game which could serve as an intermediate screen to avoid a sudden break from interactivity (for example, in a football game, one could imagine a Pong-like mini-game to avoid long pauses during the loading times which just bore the player, long loading times which are recurrent in the FIFA series which comes to mind). The subsequent problem is, such mini-games would be a good way to occupy the player in out-of-game loading screens, but what about in-game transitions? A good method which avoids in-game loading times -- and perhaps also laterally reduces out-of-game loading times -- is to load the upcoming in-game elements, such as maps and FMVs, during the more inactive in-game moments. This has several advantages, first of all being that the player does not notice a slowdown in play since the loading should take place when the game is more inactive. Then, the said elements already loaded into memory appear instantly and there is no break in in-game playing whatsoever. And I shall also develop what I have minimally said, about the out-of-game loading times being shorter since the loading is done in-game. I am not a game developer (being only 14 that would be a mean feat) so I do not know if this could be accomplished but perhaps the "inactivity loading" concept could be taken even further, with the in-game content being loaded while the player goes through the starting menus, or even when the introducing FMV is being played.
"Really, I'm not out to destroy Microsoft. That will just be a completely unintentional side effect" -- Linus Torval
I know that optimizing load times is probably low on the list of priorities when developing a game
This is wrong - for consoles.
Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo have something called certification requirements that all games must pass before they can be released on their platforms. Lots of stuff like "must say which button to press to make selections in the menu", "if you pull the controller out the game must pause", "if the disk is scratched, do this", etc. And one of the rules they also have contains a strict specification for the maximum load time.
It varies between manufacturer, but for Microsoft's Xbox, I do know that no game is permitted to have a load time longer than about 15 seconds (it was, I think, 20 seconds for the first generation of games, but they lowered it). And there are lots of tricks a developer can use to improve load times - from loading a "snapshot" ready-to-play memory image, to placing files in a packed archive in exactly the order that they are needed as the level loads (so there is no disk seeking).
Unfortunately PC games typically don't care about load times in the way that consoles do. There's no requirement for them to do anything, so the developers get lazy. For example: Battlefield 1942 and Unreal Tournament 2004 both have extortionate load times.
It's a deliberate, time-wasting delay loop. Coleco emulators either allow you to skip it or allow using a hacked BIOS without the loop. A big raspberry to Coleco for wasting literally hours of my life back then.
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.
Having a cart won't necessarily solve the problem. A cartridge solves the disc-loading end of the equation but several games also seem to need CPU-intensive unpacking/world-building time (I'm not sure what they're doing, it's just not disk based).
I've seen several other posts mentioning modern games without load times - add Prince of Persia to the list. I was just playing this on the gamecube 5 minutes ago. It has no load times for levels, ever. Why would anyone want to return to expensive solid-state cartridges when we can already eliminate load times on CDs or DVDs that cost a small fraction?
If you want a cartridge-based console feel free to go buy a the horrible failure that was Nintendo64, and the 6 or 7 games made for that system.
I definately hear you on the saving menus.
Take Nightfire: You have profiles, each one has (IIRC) a single save space. If you unlock something (or beat your previous high score), you get a chance to save, but that's it. When you get the chance to save, it asks if you want to save. Default is yes. Then it says it will overwrite, do you stil want to? Default is no, and it's way too easy to select. You end up not saving, and have to beat another record before you can.
In Everything or Nothing, you can save at any point in the select level menu, but there are so many submenus to go through. Do you want to save, select memory card slot, select save file, choose name, this will overwrite. And the overwrite again has a default of no, so you have to do it AGAIN. Unintuitive or what?
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.
paul reinheimer
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.
Need a Catering Connection
But when Final Fantasy Origins came out it was a different story. They made more improvements this time around including better graphics. The load times were still there, but it wasnt too bad
Basically, in the case of re-releases of old games, there is a trade off. You have to put up with load times, but at the same time you get a more reliable medium (memory card) to save your games on. I played FFIV for the playstation because i had lost my saved game too many times on the cartridge.
"Damn TV, you've ruined my imagination, just like you've ruined my ability to -- to, um...uh...oh well."
As some people have mentioned corrosion on cartridge contacts, here is something I have read on a gaming mag a loooong time ago:
Soak a cotton swab on isopropyl alcohol (not ethyl!), rub the contacts, and dry them with a soft cloth. This is also good for cleaning the console's contacts and your controllers' boards.
DISCLAIMER: I know no shit about chemestry, I just read that somewhere. But it has worked well for me.
Circumcision is child abuse.
"Damn TV, you've ruined my imagination, just like you've ruined my ability to -- to, um...uh...oh well."
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.
503 Sig Unavailable
The Signature could not be accessed. Please try again later or contact the administrator
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 games, especially RPGs or anything that tries to present a seamless world, it should be a requirement. I love Knights of the Old Republic for Xbox, but on some levels the load times are almost unbearable. I can understand loading between planets, but I think that once you are on a planet they should have eliminated loading as much as possible. I think that this feature should definetly be considered for all games.
SIGFAULT
In most games, there is a quick load /quick save feature. For some reason, F4 and F5 seem to be common default keys for this. Anyways, I always use the feature, and save normally only occasionally, in case I want to start a level over, for example.
--
"Insert witty quote here."
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 patience. In one of the final battles with the souped-up Kai, I would load, fight for 5 seonds, get killed, load for 30 seconds, fight for 5 seconds , load... etc. I finally didn't even finish the game... it wasn't fun any more. Plus it didn't help that my character moved like a slug on downers and was trying to outrun BLACK HOLES, but that's another complaint. Maybe when I get a system with enough RAM to hold the entire game in memory (next decade) I'll try again.
So my advice would be: let people skip whatever non-essential bits they want, BEFORE you load them. And find a way to make "quick-load" on the current map significantly faster than archive-load of some other map.
Then how on earth was Morrowind for X-Box ever published? I timed the load times on the original, not GoTY, version... well into several minutes, and that was every time one loaded a save game, no matter how little had changed.
I returned my copy, I upgraded my pc, I bought the pc version of morrowind, only to find out that without long load times, the game was far too easy. Stealing had few consequences. Oh well.
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?
Speaking as a developer who's recently coded up this sort of thing for a console game, it's done that way because someone, in one of the console owning companies, decided that nothing irreversible should be done without confirmation. It probably sounds good in a meeting, then it gets written up in a somewhat ambiguous standards document. Because the wording is a bit ambiguous, when developing that part of the game, you have to err on the side of caution, and make it really confirm *everything*. Failing the Sony/MS/Nintendo submission process will set back your entire release schedule by a month or more, and cost you sales and money, so you really have to get it right first time. That means, you go overboard, just in case the person in charge of reviewing your game for submission happens to be particularly anal. (And I've heard of some games getting rejected for incredibly stupid reasons that no sane game player would consider a problem for a second.)
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).
There's standards on this stuff too, mostly based on the idea that everything has to be 'accessible' to the non-gamer, while still fulfilling legal requirements on acknowledging the owners of the IP related to the game.
There's certainly a lot of room for improvement in all this area of games, I have a few ideas for how to do things differently on my next project. But resources on developing a game are limited. Early in the project, we have to decide if it's worth dropping that extra creature or graphical effect to free up the programmer time to make the loading system more transparent. Sometimes we make the wrong choice.
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 consoles the booting screen existed both to allow access to memory card functions and to cover up the game's initial loading. With the GBA, it's there both for compatibility and also to allow access to the network-boot capability.
"Why Subscribe?" Good question...
The VIC-20..... a Cassette Drive..... thirty minutes to load a "Scott Adams" ALL TEXT Adventure game!!!!! Every time I get impatient waiting on a new game to load a new area or level I flick my memory back to the VIC-20 and praise the gaming gods for how lucky I am!
Jay Dale "If you're not living on the edge then you're taking up too much space!"
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.
- Sherman
It gives me a break to hit the bathroom or grab something to eat or put a load of laundry in.
Yeah, but that's only any good if you're playing on a computer. On a console (where increasing amounts of my gaming time are being spent), there never is any quicksave.
:-)
But yes, on the PC, the quicksave is the way to go.
My English teacher once told me that two positives don't make a negative. Two words for her: Yeah, right.
someone, in one of the console owning companies, decided that nothing irreversible should be done without confirmation.
:-)
You know, after I wrote that post I kind of thought about it... I was thinking "It's probably somebody in management's fault." I figured it was more the publisher (EA or Eidos or whomever), but Sony/MS/Nintendo makes an equal amount of sense.
Early in the project, we have to decide if it's worth dropping that extra creature or graphical effect to free up the programmer time to make the loading system more transparent. Sometimes we make the wrong choice.
Hey, if I have the choice between a game with long load times that's awesome versus a game with short load times that sucks, I'll take the long-load game, no questions asked. You developers don't always make the wrong decision.
My English teacher once told me that two positives don't make a negative. Two words for her: Yeah, right.
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, unfortunately they're eventually going to have to start paying for it. And if a proprietary locked down console with DRM costs you the same as an open architecture PC that you can web-browse, install linux on without modding or hacking, and customise to your hearts content, which will you buy?
I am government man, come from the government. The government has sent me. -- G.I.R.
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.
:-). But that's not the point. The point is that more then a few console games don't have onerous load times despite the limitations inherent - take any first-party Gamecube title, for instance, as well as any number of other games for the other platforms. Now I realize this isn't possible for all games all the time, but it certainly seems like it might be doable for more then the handful of games where people have the time to implement it.
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
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, unfortunately they're eventually going to have to start paying for it. And if a proprietary locked down console with DRM costs you the same as an open architecture PC that you can web-browse, install linux on without modding or hacking, and customise to your hearts content, which will you buy?
I dare you to find me a $150 PC that will run games as well as an Xbox can. Heck, I dare you to find me a $99 piece of hardware that will run games as well as a Gamecube can. It can't be done. These "crippled" consoles run rings around PCs costing hundreds of dollars more, because a) the manufacturers are willing to make very little, no, or negative amounts of money on them and b) they've been designed from the ground up to be good at one and only one thing: playing games. Most consoles bear very little resemblance to a computer architecturally, a fact that has stymied emulator writers the world over. A computer has to be good at everything, but a game console just has to play games at lower resolutions really fast. And they do.
As far as which one I'll buy - it depends on what I want. If I want to play games, I'll buy a console. If I want a cheap computer, I'll buy a cheap computer. If I want to play games on my computer, I buy a more expensive computer. Not that there's anything wrong with computer gaming, I'm a big computer gamer and will probably spend a large chunk of cash upgrading my computer this year. But there's no way you can beat the consoles for game-playing buck.
My English teacher once told me that two positives don't make a negative. Two words for her: Yeah, right.
Yes they do. A SNES that sees the cartridge is messed up or copied will give you a black screen. An N64 will give you a yellowish screen.
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