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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.
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.
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.
Only if you make it optional. A big part of the consoles' popularity is that you can just pop in a game and play; having to install a console game would be a bit too PC-like for a lot of console gamers.
Rob
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.
The hard drive could be made optional, and act as a cache for whatever game you insert - no need for installation of uninstallation. You have to sit through the loading screen once, but it gets a lot shorter later on.
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?
"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.
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 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
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."
"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.
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