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Why Do Games Still Have Levels?
a.d.venturer writes "Elite, the Metroid series, Dungeon Siege, God of War I and II, Half-Life (but not Half-Life 2), Shadow of the Colossus, the Grand Theft Auto series; some of the best games ever (and Dungeon Siege) have done away with the level mechanic and created uninterrupted game spaces devoid of loading screens and artificial breaks between periods of play. Much like cut scenes, level loads are anathema to enjoyment of game play, and a throwback to the era of the Vic-20 and Commodore 64 - when games were stored on cassette tapes, and memory was measured in kilobytes. So in this era of multi-megabyte and gigabyte memory and fast access storage devices why do we continue to have games that are dominated by the level structure, be they commercial (Portal), independent (Darwinia) and amateur (Angband)? Why do games still have levels?"
You are correct... Both have 'levels' but they are seamless (when you go from level-to-level all you see is a white semi-transparent text saying the title of the 'level' you are on.)
Although there are 'loading' screens, but that is just because the game is programed that way.
Portal is similar, but much more distinct in the way of 'levels.' But that works into the gameplay quite a bit because each 'level' is a new test. Once you get into the behind-the-scenes area there is no real 'level' change. Just loading screens, which you have with all Valve single player games.
-nick
I have to point out that Half-Life has levels just like HL 2. It just depends on how modern a system you play it on. Since HL has such small levels/textures compared with a modern system the load time is minuscule.
I remember waiting a minute or two to load levels on my old 166 MHz system with a Voodoo 1, and 32mb RAM back in the day.
Not quite, in hl1 you literally walked across black mesa, you experience ever bloody foot.
In HL2 you did have a few, fade to black then a few hours later, moments.
You mad
Is that the origin of the word "level" for designating this concept? And pleeeeeease, don't forget, Wolfenstein 3D came before Doom, and it had "levels" (if I remember correctly, it was a building and each "level" was a different floor).
This just isn't a problem. RAM is plentiful, and you can stream from disk as needed. World of Warcraft is a good example of this. You can fly from one end of a continent to another and there's never a pause for a level switch, the game grabs the data as it is needed (it only does a loading thing if you teleport). In a lot of games this is feasible. You just set up your engine so it loads data as it is needed or may be needed, and discard it as it is not. You move away from the idea of having to have every texture, object, etc in a given "level" loaded. Rather only things that are around the player are loaded. If you system is good for making sure that enough is loaded so that wherever the player goes the data is ready, it is quite workable.
RTFA
Half-Life has a continuous space which loads as you move throughout it. Half-Life 2 has loading screens that sit between each map - forcing you out of the game experience. Sure, both games have the same underlying map mechanism. But Half-Life 2 interrupts your game play to load the next stage. That's why I make a distinction in this instance. Of course, both games are on the same side of a lot of the other arguments I give for the existence of levels.
Memory management doesn't have to be aided by the introduction of levels. But it sure helps. There are plenty of opportunities to manage memory. Take newer Zelda games for instance. There are buildings, rooms, caves and dungeons. These, from a programming point of view (and memory managing point of view) are similar to levels, but they are not levels from the player's perspective.
BTW, I was impressed by Katamari Damacy. This game does have levels, but each level is a big world. You start off tiny. Objects in your world consists of pins and needles. Furniture are obstacles and you are in a house on a planet. As you get larger, furniture becomes objects. Growing even still, the house you were in becomes an object and the landscape becomes the obstacle. Transitioning from these states (getting bigger) is similar to loading a new level. The difference is, you are loading a new version of the same level. This happens right under your feet. There is still a "loading" time. The game tries to keep the player engaged at this point by spitting witty text onto the screen in the spirit of the game as a whole.
And because not every potential platform has the same specifications. Take the PS3 and the 360 for example. PS3 256mb main / 256mb video -- 360 512mb unified. PS3, constant linear velocity drive reading at something like 5mb/sec -- 360 constant angular velocity drive at like 24x. Throw PC into that mix and you have an infinite number of combinations. It's just very hard to do, not to say that it cant be done, but it's just really hard.
What's a sig? Pete Brubaker
HL1 definitly had levels. If you use the noclip cheat you could easily see the game was divided into maps and had load trigger points. In fact, HL1 displayed "Loading" in the same way HL2 does it.
I just played hl2 recently, There was only one fade to black moment in all of hl2 when you teleport out out of the prison back to the lab, and you find out that it actually took you a week to get there.
If you count halflife, hl2, ep1 and ep2 as one game, there are 6, one at the end of each game, where you get take out of time and space, or knocked unconscious, the teleport in hl2, and the when you get knocked unconscious in halflife and put in the trash compactor.
Even including these, from the time you get on the train at the start the game is a complete presentation of Gordon Freeman's life, with no gaps where he goes off and does something without you.
No, the loading mechanisms in HL1 and HL2 are identical. The game consists of a series of levels. In the cross-over point between levels, you have a couple of identical-looking corridors, and you stay in the same relative position.
Now, on a modern PC, the load times in Half Life are so short that you won't notice them - you'll get a really fast blip of text saying "now loading", and that's about it. But when Half Life was new, there was a good 20 seconds of wait time between levels.
Also, Portal's elevators are rarely actual loading screens. The first 18 test chambers take place on something like 6 separate levels, but there's still an elevator ride between each one. You're confusing a pause in the game with a loading screen.
While we're at it, it was rare for a C64 game to have in-game loading. The vast majority of C64 games ran on tapes, so didn't have access to the tape after it had finished loading. The entire game had to fit in that 64Kb of RAM (possibly less, depending on how the game set up the RAM).
I'm fairly certain the technical reasoning behind it is that the game needs time to load textures, sounds, graphics, and all the other goodies that make the next level different than the last one. Since new data is coming in, it has to GO somewhere, and if you want to still be able to interact where you are instead of waiting, that means the game engine has to still be running. It's not easy to keep the gaming engine running when you are pulling the data out from under it to make room for the new data.
I suppose you could clump things a bit more so that you only removed say, 80% of the stuff and pulled in the new things, but that would get messy making sure that texture IDs did not overlap between sections etc. In most games like that though, there are significant differences in the textures, the encounters, and the sound fx/music, so there's probably not a lot they could reuse between two levels. OK, early halo probably a bad example here. Not much to load between levels there. But I digress.
I am very surprised no one has brought up the idea of things like WOW. When you are changing from server to server sure there's a bit of a load, but the entire contents of a single server can hardly be considered a level, it's most likely many dozens of areas. WOW and other mmorpgs load things in the background in preparation for your crossing into a new area, and can do this on the fly in most cases while you are still interacting with the last of that part of the area you are leaving.
These demonstrate two very different engine data models.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
Not quite, in hl1 you literally walked across black mesa, you experience ever bloody foot.
In HL2 you did have a few, fade to black then a few hours later, moments.
Yeah 'cuz in HL1 the military special forces don't ambush you after you fight a bunch of ninja guys, knock you out, carry you away and you wake up in a trash compactor some time later weaponless... Oh, wait...
Education is a better safeguard of liberty than a standing army.
Edward Everett (1794 - 1865)
If you do a hyperjump between galaxies that surely counts as a "level" to me. You cannot simply go back to the previous planet, if you do that you will have to fight all the pirates all over again since that level is loaded again....