One thing I've always wondered about pc games, is why the next level of a game isn't being loaded in the background when a cutscene is being played? It just seems like a complete waste of time to have the video play through and then spend ages waiting for the next level to load. Espically on games like warhammer mok where it takes an age to load.
Why don't games load while a video sequence is playing?
- Thread starter Energize
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Soldato
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Multi thread is still new, maybe in a couple o years
Soldato
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On splinter cell double agent they tried running a little sequence while it loaded, but it was insanly bad. I don't know if it was because of the game having a bad port but...
One explanation is that many games use in-game cutscenes rather than videos. By their very nature, they are in effect a 'level' in themselves and hence you couldn't be loading another one at the same time.
As regards playing an avi/bink or whatever, I guess maybe it would require extra work in terms of making sure that the next level doesn't start (or prompt to start) before the video finishes. You might also get issues when the video is manually cancelled by the player I guess.... but it should at least be possible. As mentioned previously, getting it to be multi-threaded and avoid performance issues could be tricky.
DoW
C does at least have voice-overs playing while levels are loading.
Probably the biggest reason is that for most people load times aren't a problem. I can't think of many games where I've thought "this load time is really horrendous". Battlefield 2 wasn't great, but I only had 1gig of RAM then. The only other one I can think of really was Far Cry, but then my disks tend to be really fragmented etc so I just take it on the chin.
The bottom line is that for most people level load times are under a minute which is a really short space of time compared to how many hours you spend on a game. It's one reason I've never bothered with Raptor drives etc - at the end of the day, whether a level takes 30s or 40s to load makes little difference to my life.
As regards playing an avi/bink or whatever, I guess maybe it would require extra work in terms of making sure that the next level doesn't start (or prompt to start) before the video finishes. You might also get issues when the video is manually cancelled by the player I guess.... but it should at least be possible. As mentioned previously, getting it to be multi-threaded and avoid performance issues could be tricky.
DoW
C does at least have voice-overs playing while levels are loading.Probably the biggest reason is that for most people load times aren't a problem. I can't think of many games where I've thought "this load time is really horrendous". Battlefield 2 wasn't great, but I only had 1gig of RAM then. The only other one I can think of really was Far Cry, but then my disks tend to be really fragmented etc so I just take it on the chin.
The bottom line is that for most people level load times are under a minute which is a really short space of time compared to how many hours you spend on a game. It's one reason I've never bothered with Raptor drives etc - at the end of the day, whether a level takes 30s or 40s to load makes little difference to my life.
Several reasons:
1) It is more work. It could take a fair bit of effort and the gain is small.
2) If the user skips the video, it adds difficulty.
3) Playing a video will often stress a lower spec PC quite heavily.
4) Hard disks are much more efficient when data is read in order, jumping around kills speed and so if you were to load whilst a video is playing, it would take much longger. After all, even FMV is copied to the HD upon installation.
Interestingly, Vista goes one more and allows users in supported games to install the game whilst playing it.
1) It is more work. It could take a fair bit of effort and the gain is small.
2) If the user skips the video, it adds difficulty.
3) Playing a video will often stress a lower spec PC quite heavily.
4) Hard disks are much more efficient when data is read in order, jumping around kills speed and so if you were to load whilst a video is playing, it would take much longger. After all, even FMV is copied to the HD upon installation.
Interestingly, Vista goes one more and allows users in supported games to install the game whilst playing it.
Soldato
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if they *could* do that reasonably, they would have been doing it already.
Caustic said:
Sounds like a bit of a gimmick to me (perhaps trying to dispel the perception that PC gaming is a lot of work to get started, compared to just bunging a disk in a console). All but the most casual of gamers are going to want to fully install the game first, to avoid any adverse performance considerations during gameplay.
That said, one thing I'm amazed hasn't been done yet (to my knowledge) is the ability to configure controls during install. Would be a great way to pass the time while files are being copied over, and would let you jump into the game much quicker than having to do it on first load.
Caustic said:
If you were playing an fmv though it could be cached to the ram first. I'm not an expert but it can't be that difficult to have an fmv playing and loading a level in the background. I mean I can play a dvd-video from the hdd and do encoding in the background so it doesn't need some uber powerful pc.
Energize said:
I think what he's getting at is that by playing the movie, you would be crippling your level-loading performance - in the same way that your video encoding won't be as quick while watching the dvd-video as it would be if you weren't.
Caching the FMV to RAM is an interesting idea, however in some ways it could be regarded as cutting off your nose to spite your face since:
-You would be reducing the amount of RAM available for level-loading
-There would be an (admittedly short) intial delay while the FMV is cached into RAM.