Will we ever have games that dont have loading times?

thecremeegg

thecremeegg

thecremeegg

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What bugs me the most about any game is loading times, be they large or small.

Do you think we'll ever get to the stage of eliminating them? Our technology is getting faster and more powerful, but at the same time developers push that hardware to its limits which seemingly keeps games requiring loading screens.

Will it ever end, or are we to put up with loading screens for ever?
 
you youngsters don't know you are born...... I remember when I was a lad, loading football manager on my commodore 64 and it takIng 30 minutes to load...... what was even worse was that it was a tape to tape copy done on my ghettoblaster and quite often it would refuse to run... ;)
 
When games are designed to be fully loaded into memory, and computers have the capacity to support this, then yes it could be possible. I don't really see the point though. You can afford to wait 10 seconds for something to load.
 
Loading times will never disappear.

Even though the hardware could cope, games designers will want to push the graphics, AI etc so much that they will have to compromise by still including load times.
 
thecremeegg said:
I had a BBC and it used tape so took 30 mins to load a game - things have moved on I admit, but games like R6:Vegas 2 still take ages to load for no explainable reason
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Takes me about 20 seconds to load a new map in that game, sure you can't be that impatient?

Infact the annoyingly unskippable UBISOFT movie lasts longer!

On my old amstrad (yet another taped device) it took bloody years, builds character :P
 
It’s inevitable at some stage, the only two factors to consider is if the loading times will be perceivable. Or if the software will always increase its demands ahead of hardware to such a level that a perceivable loading period is required. But I have little doubt that at some stage the bottle neck will be our own reaction times to respond to the GUI. Within our lifetimes? Probably, but I’m not going to hold my breath.
 
I very much doubt loading times will compleatly dissapear, although one thing they could try is to load the next room/scene ect while they are showing you an FMV or always load the next room while your in the previous one. not sure how feasible either of those would be though
 
I thought the only real reason for loading times was taking everything from hard disk to memory and since solid state is coming this would be gone in say 10 years. I guess there will always be some kind of loading but at some point it's going to be so small that it's not worth mentioning.
 
Initial loading times will be near impossible to eliminate, but streaming tech has been around for quite a while which loads the game on-the-fly, Dungeon Siege being the earliest example of a near-seamless game that I can remember.
 
As JamesU2005 stated, they will never go away.

You could argue that with hardware becoming faster loading times will be minimal, and you could argue that with hardware becoming faster that will lead to games becoming even more complex in design. Think Oblivion times by 10, in a few years from now.

Iirc the Unreal 3 engine streams data off the disk/hard drive but even that isn't enough to stop texture popup from occuring.
 
Ethics said:
Takes me about 20 seconds to load a new map in that game, sure you can't be that impatient?
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I meant to say that it was on PS3 :p

Games like GTA and Jak & Daxter are good examples of streaming, but even before each mission there are tiny loading times. As someone mentioned, will solid state largly eliminate this?
 
Leethal said:
I reckon that loading times will decrease & decrease as hardware & such gets better but i don't see them ever coming to a point where there is none ever...
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I disagree as the hardware increases the bar is rasied for the software.

That said however, I do wonder at times why as a PC gmer have to load the game onto a HDD first. Where as consoles load straight from Media. If there is no loading time benefit then what is the point of installing to HDD?
 
thecremeegg said:
I meant to say that it was on PS3 :p
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So it's loading from the blu-ray, rather than HDD, it's going to be slower.

As said above, once SSDs become more mainstream, load times will be cut into shreds.

Either that, or you can install the game to one of the gigabyte i-Ram things :D
 
The old console games with cartridges mostly had zero loading times, if they had only been cheaper to make then maybe they would still be with us.

As previous posters have said I think the closest we will get to no loading times, are with games that stream the info & load everything in the background. Oblivion's main world can have no loading times with the open cities mod & once technology has advanced a bit, going into the dungeons will be seamless as well.
 
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