Load Times and Developer Laziness?

[tkioz]

Is it just me or have load times on a lot of games been getting longer and longer lately with more "area breaks" in place?

I mean look at Fallout: New Vegas you've got a long screen every twenty meters it seems in places, and even installed on a 360 you're looking at 15-30 seconds load each time, and when you've got to get through 4 or 5 of them to get to a quest giver it can get really annoying.

And it's not just that game, I've been noticing it more and more with RPGs in particular, but it's not just limited to that genre, it seems any game that doesn't have a linear progression path will have obnoxious loading times, at all too frequent intervals.

I remember a time when load times were decreasing, as it seemed like developers were squeezing every ounce of performance out of their code and pulling every trick in the book to make it less noticeable. And it's not just a console issue, I've seen games played on very high end PCs having longer load times games a decade or so ago (on older machines obviously), So have developers gotten lazy when it comes to load times?

 

[ShakesZX]

Yes there is an increase in load times, but there's also a decrease as well, many games are opting for the, give some short, in-game cutscene while a particular area loads as well. Or at the very least a lot of games are giving you something to do while a segment loads.

 

[RUINER ACTUAL]

Play Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit. Ridiculously fast loading times. Wanna race? Well you're doin it!

 

[oplinger]

You want games to be big and look nice. You get loading times. Simple as that.

If you want shorter loading times, get more powerful hardware. It's the only way to speed it up. Or somehow magically make people stop caring about how games look and bring them down to really small ugly textures and like 4 polygons per model. Not that that will ever happen.

 

[emeraldrafael]

I liek the games where you at least interact with the loading screen. or the ones that keep you visially stimulated. I dont like the blank black screen with a spinning circle.

 

[MR T3D]

blame the lack of RAM, devs have to be very careful what's loaded each moment, especially when faced with the task of improving the visuals on an ageing machine.

 

[tkioz]

You want games to be big and look nice. You get loading times. Simple as that.

Actually it's not as simple as that, there are tricks that can be used to cut down on the loading the player sees, but that requires effort.

 

[oplinger]

You want games to be big and look nice. You get loading times. Simple as that.

Actually it's not as simple as that, there are tricks that can be used to cut down on the loading the player sees, but that requires effort.

It is as simple as that. The more data needing to be loaded, the longer the load times. You can stream it like Fallout and Oblivion in the world map, but on some systems it will still skip (a loading time)

There are a few "tricks" yes, but not really. You have to sacrifice size and looks in order to cut down on load times, every single time.

Let's take....any game really and I can explain why this is. You hit a loading screen, the game loads all the stuff it needs, variables, textures, and geometry and the like. The more of any of those you have, the longer the loading time will be. There's not trick to make this go away. It's how it is.

Now, some games like games on the Unreal engine, you hit a loading screen and it loads variables, textures, and geometry. ...See the similarity? however it loads the lowest possible detail of all of them, and then keeps loading when player control is given. The loading time is then actually -longer- than it would be. You can just do stuff (sometimes extremely laggy) while it loads. You still see all of this too.

Basically the loading times will always be there. And plenty of people will complain if you load up -nothing- and then have everything just pop up as you go.

 

[Funkysandwich]

You want games to be big and look nice. You get loading times. Simple as that.

If you want shorter loading times, get more powerful hardware. It's the only way to speed it up. Or somehow magically make people stop caring about how games look and bring them down to really small ugly textures and like 4 polygons per model. Not that that will ever happen.

What, like Minecraft?

 

[oplinger]

You want games to be big and look nice. You get loading times. Simple as that.

If you want shorter loading times, get more powerful hardware. It's the only way to speed it up. Or somehow magically make people stop caring about how games look and bring them down to really small ugly textures and like 4 polygons per model. Not that that will ever happen.

What, like Minecraft?

Exactly like minecraft. Except minecraft still uses 32 bit textures and has like a thousand million of them. so it still has to load somewhat but it streams it...as the world sort of...appears and all.