Game loading screens

[Javster]

Do you think games will ever have no loading screens whatsoever? I assume having only a single screen at the beginning is already feasible with small games like FTL or Super Hexagon, but what about no loading screens within the game for big games like KSP: how soon do you think it will happen.

[SolarLiner]

As long as there will be content to load, there will be loading screens. But, they are all more or less disguised now (think at the last Tomb Raider, you have to go through tunnels to load the extra levels, the loading is disguised, and to the user, everything seems seamless).

[Nuke]

the only way you can get rid of loading screens is to generate everything procedurally.

of course if you ever played something like kkreiger you know that content generation takes longer than loading.

ssds have actually pretty much eliminated loading times for me. if you are still not happy with that, get several identical ssds and put them in a raid 0 array.

Edited August 14, 2014 by Nuke

[SolarLiner]

Yeah, but no. SSDs are not as efficient in RAID mode, plus that destroys the SSDs with unnecessary disk operations.

Having an SSD, it feels so good to be able to boot your computer in 45s, and load KSP in 20, but it is still loading time. What OP speaks about is NO loading time.

But there, even Space Engine has a loading screen, even being a "full" procedural universe generator (it is fully procedural when outside the Milky Way, but even not starting from there takes time).

Even if you have nothing to load, nothing to generate, even creating the geometry takes time. You can't spawn 500k+ triangles in a micro-second.

[Dunbaratu]

Long load times are generally not caused by I/O disk speed anyway, so the SSD won't matter much. It's because at the moment of loading the content, the game's software has lots and lots of setup work to perform, invoking new objects and getting them all squared away with the game engine.

The way to avoid load times is to spread the loading out over the entire duration of the program so its a continuous process as you walk toward new terrain on the edge of your "vision", rather than something that happens at single specific points. (i.e. instead of "wait 30 seconds every 10 minutes" it becomes "accept a smaller FPS all the time all along.")

This is the approach taken by KSP when you are near the ground and it's trying to load ground polygons. For about 5-6 km around you, there are polygons loaded for the terrain (it's a longer radius than the 2.5 km for ships, but still rather short). As you move along, it unloads the polygons from behind you and loads up more in front of you, continually. (The rest of the distant terrain you see isn't made of "full fledged" polygons. For one thing, the far away polygons are much less precise, and also they have no collision detection enabled on them and they are just passive do-nothing scenery. You can't crash into the mountian you see in the distance, until you get closer and the game starts replacing the placeholder do-nothing polygons with the real full-fledged physical ones.

[magnemoe]

loading screens then starting games will stay, they have two purposes, one is to load data the other is to process them (doing the stuff told then KSP starts )

Loading screens for levels can be avoided by preloading and preprocessing the data before the next scene, this is done in lots of games with huge open areas.

However doing this in huge scale is very memory expensive and you want you game to be able to run on a system with less memory too.

And if systems get more powerful you add more stuff, you have many games with more than 20GB data.

The old Nintendo systems did not have load times was pretty much without load times as the carriages was pretty fast while they only had to load KB of data as the system could not handle more. In modern games you has so much data and so much calculations its hard to get away from them without making the games simple like FTL.

[SargeRho]

Loading screens won't go away, at least not for a while. It's a matter of making something of them. For instance, EVE Online introduced a short animated sequence when you jump between solar systems.

[K^2]

Loading screens are a product of technological progress, not the other way around. NES and earlier cartridge games didn't have one, since RAM wasn't used to hold resources. Only state variables. Many of the early PC games didn't really need one either. Loading screens emerged as games and technology running them got more complex.

[vger]

I'm sure there's a way of making the data structure of levels so progressive that instead of loading an entire map at one time, it simply loads individual assets and their locations in the environment as the player approaches them. Similar to procedural maps (which can do this anyway). As for how easy it would be to make a game do that, I have no idea.

Of course, if SSD's become the norm instead of the exception, and a TB of space on one comes down to one or two hundred dollars, loading will occur so quickly that you won't even know it's happening.

[RockoDyne]

Well, if you owned any ps2 games, chances are several of them didn't have loading screens. All sony first party developers were mandated at the time to not have loading screens, or rather explicit loading screens. It meant most levels had seamless transitions, although there were also a lot of elevator rides like jak and daxter or in-game vignettes like the planet transitions in ratchet and clank.

A load-less game basically requires nothing to load though. There isn't any way around that. Load mitigation and management has to be designed for, but the biggest issue with modern consoles is 8 gigs of pretty takes a long time to get from any drive.