Will we ever have games that dont have loading times?

lopkinfop said:
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
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Would be very hard as some actions are event triggered (depending on what you are doing) so the computer would have to predict what you are going to do somehow
 
lopkinfop said:
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
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They will, one day you will turn your pc on, instantly hitting the desktop, click your game, instantly loading to its menu, choosing your server and clicking join to instantly be in the map picking your team. What you just described at the end is pretty much how the very limited game engines of today try and cope with low memory space and excessively high access times to the bulk of their data (that stored on the HDD), all game engines try to render the absolute minimum of what you aren't currently looking at, this stems to what you are looking at in outdoor environments where distance sees a very dramatic reduction in graphical quality, which whilst also can be attributed to the processing power to render a much more complex scene the memory and subsequent load times also factor heavily here. So its very feasible as it exists in almost any game you have ever played.
 
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Helium_Junkie said:
One word: Solid state storage.
Okay, it's 3 words. But the technology that will eliminate load times is certainly under development :)
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Solid state will do absolutely zero to stop loading times.

Firstly it still has to move from storage to main memory and that will never be instant. Secondly size of game will always be larger than we have available capacity wise in a suitable cost to not have things compressed. Uncompressing game data is what takes most of the time so far, loading is not really an issue at all.

Check anandtech, they reviewed the 1tb hitachi drive which is pretty damn fast and when defragged you have fairly smooth game loading, against a raptor, it also included both the raptor's in raid 0 and 1tb's in raid 0. The overall effect on game loading despite 70-80% performance increase, 2-5% depending on game. Its decompressing data that is the issue and ALWAYS will be.

AS we get bigger and faster drives that may even be capable of storing games decompressed there will be several issues. Firstly, decompressed data is larger, so you have more to transfer, so compressed, faster transfer, but decompression stage takes time, or decompressed, takes longer to transfer. Then you have the issue that, in 10 years when we have fairly fast uber large hard drives, we'll still have system memory that is 20 times as fast and CPU's that are 50x times faster than now. At that point a game made to utilize the memory and cpu speed will still be more complex again than current games, etc, etc, etc.

While technology moves forward so does the software so there will not be a major difference from now, if it doesn't who would want to play current games on tech from 10 years in the future, just so it loads in half a second?
 
k3v said:
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... ;)
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Man, you kicking it old skool! :cool:

Multi-load games were the real hard core though. The original Bards Tale is a fine example of the unsuitability of cassettes for dungeon crawling RPG games.

We were real sadists back then. :D
 
Memory speed is incredibly slow to increase while the amount of data for games is growing rapidly, so I highly doubt it in the foreseeable future.
 
People don't know they're born these days. Anyone who had to hold their breath whilst waiting for a Spectrum to load a game from tape can attest to this.

I wonder if solid state hard drives would aid in loading times if they become mainstream?
 
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