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.
5 Likes
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.
8 Likes
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
2 Likes
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
1 Like
[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.
1 Like
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.
-pushlatency -999
I can’t really think of what the replacement for that kind of stuff would be that wouldn’t just be more audio logs and on screen tutorials, outside of bringing back manuals (but people barely make digital manuals as is).
We use a bunch of profiles to simulate bad connections when testing multiplayer
1 Like
I liked the loading screens from Assassin’s Creed because they’d let you steer your guy around in the digital void. I could see this being useful in a game where a few seconds to practice maneuvers might be beneficial for the muscle memory
3 Likes
ive been doing a little digging and cant find any non-namco games that have smaller games within their loading screen after 2015
i once saw some obscure post on a forum nobody reads anymore in a topic much like this one that said the ps4 berserk had loading screen minigames. that might be a good place to start. i think the site was called something like choose switch
1 Like
thank you ive been digging with my bare hands and i appreciate your shovel
1 Like
this is as far as i can go… it’s up to you now…
5 Likes
just toss up some hardcore porn
1 Like
Post snippets of the credits so people wind up incidentally reading and absorbing more of them
6 Likes