Loading Screen!!!

[peace4myheart]

Does anyone in here know if we can ever get rid of the loading screen in console games??? I don't ever remember having a loading screen in games before the 32-bit era. I am assuming the loading screens occur because of two reasons. Either the games are too complex (polygons and stuffs instead of sprites) or the technology is too limited (spinning drive can only go so fast) or both. With the PS3 and XBOX360 having so much horsepower (yeah, I know, it's not a car), why can't they eliminate those damn loading screen. Would a disc-less system help, i.e. HDD operated games? It would probably reduce the loading time, but not eliminate it completely.

[lordofduct]

it's all in the disc drive... it don't matter the horse power, our CD-Roms and DVD-roms haven't gone up in power that much for a long time. And with modern games loading up so much data into memory it all just takes some time.

Then some stuff is also compressed to conserve even more space, this stuff has to be decompressed.

Then there is also the concern of actually building the scene which could take some time as well depending on the complexity.



Loading off a harddrive reduces this a lot because there isn't that influential bottle neck that is the disc drive getting in the way, but there is still noticeable load time. And hard drives aren't that fast either in comparison to the rest of the machine. Consider this, a hard drive can push anywheres from 44MBs/second to 120MBs/second on average depending where on the disc you are accessing(a 7200 RPM drive used for example), the processor of a Pentium machine with a front side bus of say 1066mhz can push over 4 gigabytes of binary machine code through it's bus per second. A big difference there!

It isn't like the early days when a cartridge was put in the machine which basically had a straight bus to the main board. The cartridge slot was usually clocked at a pretty comparable speed to the rest of the machine allowing for what could appear to be seamless loading. Some games though had longer load screens for decompression (think Donkey Kong Kountry). We probably won't be seeing high speed solid state memory as storage media for our video games for a LONG time, so get used to it now. Or ever that is, discs are just cheap, they cost less then a penny to produce and can withstand a lot of abuse. Yeah you can crack a disc, but dropping it, magnets, sands of time, weight, everything about them make them really useful. As long as you don't smash your disc it can last for 50+ years. A hard drive or cartridge barely makes it 20 (pull out old NES and Atari carts, they are dieing fast).

The stuff is just expensive... to get a DVD worth of memory in silicon, well... we'd probably be paying more for the games then we do for a PS3 itself.

[Mozgus]

Its the main reason I insisted on going the HDD route with my PS2. A lot of games on this system aren't worth your time because the load screens are eternal and abundant.
If Dreamcast and PS1 could do this, I'd never leave the house.

[executioner]

there is also good use of hardware limitations for game loading taking an example of Shadow of the Colossus which has no loading whatsoever. Other times you get mission briefings, stuff to read and maybe dialogue when loading that should be a must.

[marurun]

Eliminating loading by streaming data is a complex programming task because you have to constantly evaluate what you need.

And if you look back a ways, lots of SNES games actually had loading time. The main reason was that the SNES couldn't access the cartridge while the CPU was polling for data, so the CPU had to be halted, data pulled from cart to RAM, and then the CPU could operate on the data in RAM. Bizarre limitation and I don't know why it's there.

[Pullmyfinger]

Loading times are bad but necessary, of course they can be optimized and what not but only to a certain degree, what annoys me is having all those logo and copyright screens every time you boot the game, I know that whoever licenses a movie or a tv show will usually require its logo to be displayed for a certain amount of time, that's cool and all, but I wish it could be skipped after the first time, or the first "n" times at least.

[ott0bot]

Also they work as advertisements for the people who made the game. And sometimes, like in Okami, they have little mini-games. Or they put up a nice still of some concept art. I prefer any of those to just plain LOADING..... or the annoying little bars.

[Mozgus]

Also they work as advertisements for the people who made the game. And sometimes, like in Okami, they have little mini-games. Or they put up a nice still of some concept art. I prefer any of those to just plain LOADING..... or the annoying little bars.

The load screens in Headhunter were pretty funny. They were a bunch of fake advertisements for ridiculous products and slightly offensive services.

[metaleggman]

Honestly, loading is an issue that's at the fault of the developer. There are tons of ways to disguise loading screens. The best point to illustrate this is Metroid Prime. Because I went to GBC straight to GCN and then to 360, I really got spoiled loading screen wise, because I never had to deal with load screens more than 3 seconds or so. Nintendo has such KA load times. Playing Gears pissed me off so much, because you die and then you have to wait like 5 seconds to reload. Stupid. I seriously think developers need to stop load screens either through a creative solution (like MP) or at least put a game to play during the load screens (like max payne, as I believe that game had pong to play during loads).

Has anyone else played ATHF: Zombie Ninja Pro-am? For some reason I feel like the game has intentionally long load times, as they accelerate really fast until the 3/4 mark, and deaccelerate to a crawl by the 49/50 mark. Ridiculous, though, it fits the game: bad. I still love it though. I'll get to that sandwhich battle someday!

[RackGaki]

Load times use to infuriate me, though now they serve as a minor annoyance.

The PS2 is still a heavy offender on loading screens. Occasionally, a game will rise above and obfuscate loading times, like God of War. Then, I try to play a game like Magna Carta, and it's begging to be put out of it's misery. Every ten minutes of gameplay were brutalized with two minutes of loading time sprinkled throughout.

I've heard tons of scare stories on PSP loading times, and yet to experience anything too offending myself. My most played games, like Darkstalkers, Patapon and LocoRoco rarely require ten seconds of loading. I recall some games taking twenty seconds or so to load, but they weren't very common.