if you play a game for more than 2 hours in one sitting, every 2.5 hours there is an unskippable intermission that tells you to go to the store and buy some more gamer fuel (dew, 'ritos, etc)
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I should’ve done some research, that patent expiring was a big enough deal to make the news. Here’s some fun facts about loading screen games:
– long before the patent, C64 load times were so unbearable people made programs to speed it up. this one had a game in it
– Splatoon had loading minigames while the patent was in place, but they got around it because the games were on the controller
– when the patent expired people devved a whole jam’s worth
– although loading screens are mostly short now you can once again find games on them, e.g. the ps4 Berserk
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Only game I can think of that benefits from load times is classic RE where door transitions have a scary anticipation behind them and a mini pacing shift (this is also true for rail games which often have moments of nothing/animation to give the player a second), but this is fixed through intelligent level design.
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oh yeah good excuse to post these
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I was thinking about this recently because Hob on Switch has loading screen tips that are often visible for just a second or two. It’s really jarring.
I don’t know what the solution is. Press a button to move on once the load’s complete and you’ve read the tip?
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every loading screen shoukd just be old snake smoking a cigarette and also five minutes long no matter how fast the console is
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dragonball z budokai 3 had a minigame that spawned saibamen as you spun the analogue sticks. the best part was that both controllers worked, so you and whoever you were playing it with would burn holes in the palms of your hands vigourously spinning the stick.
also, oneechanbara vortex on 360 had a little game where you killed crowds of little 2d zombies.
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I would’ve posted the youtube video of the saibamen one but it has some guys crowing obnoxiously over the top. I guess that’s accurate to how the dbz minigames sound irl but…
At least Namco Bandai made interesting use of the patent while they had it.
I am glad it’s expired, though.
Forgive me if this sounds completely naive but…what are the odds that loading times aren’t going to increase after this tech is out in the wild for a bit
Like once devs are like ‘wow, shit loads this fast’ why won’t they just use that to load more stuff at once?
Again, I’m probably not well versed enough in tech stuff, and maybe the loading speed as outpaced the average amount of RAM available, but I’d find that kinda surprising.
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Loading happens when games need to fill memory. Ideally, memory size increases come along with storage speed increases. When you moved from PSX to PS2, for example, the RAM to fill went up by something like 12x but the drive speed went up by about 16x, so load times went down slightly.
Disc drives barely got faster between 360/PS3 and XBONE/PS4, but memory got roughly 12x larger, so loading times would have dreadfully increased if games loaded from discs, and were only mildly salved by forced installs and loads from spinning platter hard drives.
Next gen is moving to solid-state drives (I believe that’s known since that PS5 leak), which is a massive increase in read speed. I don’t know what the memory budget will look like but given that desktops have barely moved it won’t possibly be more than 3x faster.
The bottleneck for the foreseeable future, then, will be CPU – time to decompress the assets. On a modern desktop you’ll still see around 5s load times no matter the disk speed.
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i remember i was SO EXCITED about namcos patent for videogames within their loading screens running out
and it DID in 2015, but no ones really done anything interesting with it!!! MORE MINI GAMES IN LOADING SCREENS
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Has anyone besides Nintendo done little game things for their internet load times? The Wii’s download animation with Mario collecting coins across the screens wasn’t really interactive but Wii U had that little slot machine that I don’t think I ever managed to win in. I suppose if you make your games or consoles sensibly these days you’ll just make sure that stuff can run in the background.
Honestly just give everything a dainty little tune
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[Long] loads for multiplayer games are also somewhat unavoidable from a technical perspective, right?
I play Destiny regularly and mentally triage zone changes to save time constantly, e.g. everyone does their business in the Tower, then we all return to orbit/lobby, then match up, then load into whichever zone. It still feels interminable at times and oddly underutilized as down time except for the availability of your inventory for fussing over equipment.
I forget that load times are obviated by recent PCs because so much of my diet is Destiny 
i didnt think being able to dick around in my inventory while spaceshipping was a big deal til i tried the anthem demo and couldnt do it
inventory management during loading is also wonderful
There’s a weird bottleneck in at least a few big modern games that mean that even on fast hardware loading times are multi-second (and even slower on magnetic-disc consoles): Loading is done on one thread, and this thread is under-prioritised.
In at least one recent release, whoever made decisions about thread scheduling decided that graphics are a ‘realtime’ priority, and I/O can wait. One assumes this confusion arises from referring to videogame graphics as ‘real time CGI’. ‘Realtime’ CPU priorities are intended for programs that actually need to be performed in a time-sensitive manner, so they absorb CPU time from everything else - even the operating system. The game could take minutes to load on consoles and good PC hardware because it was always doing as much graphics as possible and starving the thread doing the loading.
Issues like this are usually ignored on console where they have few major side effects (apart from loading taking forever) and are hard for the public to discover without debugging tools. And they often don’t get any attention in PC ports until post-release patches or fan fixes hack around it.
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Loading into the Tower is pretty quick in Destiny 2 PC with an SSD.
Anything multiplayer-synced you can’t really start until everyone’s system is ready. On console, you’ve got a single-spec so it’s not a big difference; on PC, you’re waiting for whoever is still trying to run the game off a cloud drive over a tethered cell phone connection.