j-e-f-f-e-r-s said:
The problem, on consoles at least, is optical media. Even with all the advancements in disc storage size, speeds for reading data off a disc is still in the mb/s. That means that anytime the game needs to load something new into the RAM, such as a new area, it is limited by how slowly it can first read that data off the disc.
The funny thing is, cartridges were actually
infinitely better for this sort of thing. We like to look back on the PS1/N64 days as the era we left behind 'primitive' cartridges for 'hi-tech' discs, but it really isn't as simple as that. Chris Seavor, in his Director's Commentary on Bad Fur Day, actually went on a spiel about this. Cartridges are, in most ways, far better than disc-based media for games. The most obvious example is no loading screens. Go back and play some N64 games, some SNES games or some NEs games. No loading screens. You select a racer and a track in F-Zero X, and it instantly takes you to the race. Select a file in Super Mario 64, it instantly places you outside Princess Peach's castle.
The very reason developers dropped cartridges, storage size, is ironically enough no longer a limitation. Cartridge and memory card technology has evolved to the point that you can store huge amounts of data on them. Look at the 3DS.
Games like Super Mario 3D Land are able to load entire levels in a mere second or two, barely long enough to flash up the level titles. Solid state media means that all the data is sitting there ready for your console to access it. Disc based media means your console has to use a laser to read data a few megabytes at a time.
That's not actually the main reason. Cost was a much bigger factor. Compare the N64 with the PS1 and it stands out quite dramatically - the cost, to the publisher, per copy of a game is dramatically different. a PS1 disk (or equivalent CD, DVD or blu-ray in modern systems) costs about $0.10 per disk to manufacture. The cost for a cartridge is between $25-35, just for the cartridge.
Cartridges cost an absolute fortune to make. Optical disks are dirt-cheap. Seems quite obvious this would have an impact given the games sell for about the same price regardless...
You might think modern equivalents are cheaper, but look at SD card prices VS blank CD's. For the cost of one 8gb memory card, you can often get something like 25-50 blank DVD's. - Sure, the cost is lower for manufacturing, but the relative proportion of the costs aren't going to be radically different...
Hard-drives don't make things much better, given that most hard-drives used in consoles are still optical, and therefore require data to be read at a set speed. Perhaps when solid-state hard drives become more cost efficient...
Uh... Hard drives aren't optical. They're magnetic. But they do contain moving parts, and as such there is a very dramatic delay in getting to data, because the read head has to physically move to the correct track on the disk, then wait for the correct part of the disk to come past the read head. - The speed of rotation is in fact variable in some cases, but because it's limited by mechanical moving parts, it's often much slower than a solid-state device, which has limits based on circuit design and electrical principles instead.
But one of the biggest killers of hard drive performance is still reading lots of small files that are all over the place on the disk. - Because every change to reading a file in a different location on the disk requires physically moving the read head, and locating the correct spot on the disk all over again...
Solid state disks are almost always Random Access devices. - meaning that while there may be a delay in reading them, but it rarely matters where on the disk any two files are, because you can get at any location on the disk at about the same speed, irrespective of where the previous thing you were reading was located.
Of course, a solid state hard drive is fairly similar in construction in many ways to a game cartridge anyway, so...
If we really want loading screens to be a thing of the past, then the great irony is that we would need hardware manufacturers to start looking into cartridge technology again. It's not going to happen, but there you go...
Xarathox said:
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Yeah, Mass Effect 1 used in game resources to mask some loading screens. The elevator rides on the Citadel and the Normandy are primary examples. And yet, people complained about it. So much so, in fact, that BioWare basically just put as many "regular" loading screens every-fucking-where in the later titles, and people love those more?
I don't get it. If you can fucking hide load screens to seem like gameplay and not something that jars you out of immersion, that should be a PLUS!
If a game can hide a loading screen in gameplay, yes. Standing around motionless in a 45-second elevator ride in Mass Effect is not gameplay. It is the most inane, boring thing known to man.
Halo 2 managed to hide loading screens in gameplay. After you boot up the game for the first time, the game doesn't show you a single loading screen.
That is impressive. Sticking the player character in a box and slowly loading data in the background while they can't do anything is not impressive, it's a huge annoyance.
Heh. I find one of the most peculiar examples of this to be Star Fox Adventures on the Gamecube.
Many of the major game areas were separated from eachother by these weird, long symmetrical corridors, constructed in sort of a dual L-shape.
There was often some kind of environmental puzzle in them, but it got quite tedious because you had to solve the same puzzle every time you went past that point, and the environment was often incredibly simple and bland. (long corridors.)
Even though you were busy trying to get past the puzzle each time, it was still just blatantly obvious what was going on here;
The tunnel was long enough that when you got to the middle you could no longer see any sign of the part of the world you came from (aided no doubt by the bend in the middle of the corridor), nor the part of the world you were headed to.
The puzzle in the middle was clearly timed to take just about long enough to be able to load the new section, and the level construction ensured you couldn't just go back the way you came without solving an equally lengthy puzzle.
It's annoying because it's clear they tried so hard to disguise what was happening, but still managed to create something rather tedious in the process... (And you had to solve the same simple puzzle over and over again...)
