Will we ever have games that dont have loading times?

I thought we were pretty much there - I got most of Oblivion without loads (dungeons excepted), there is even a patch to blend the cities in. And even better was Gothic 3 - as long as you had decent kit it would load a whole country in one go and that was it - no load screens.

Shame more aren't doing it.
 
It'll only happen if games eventually shift from ever-increasing texture resolution to some other method of making an environment look 'real'. I'd guess textures are to blame for 90%+ of today's loading times.

CPUs of the future could have the sheer power to pre-calc life-like textures from formulas/fractals as an example. Crude (but still impressive) stuff like this can often be seen in megademos.

Or I could be just talking a bunch of arse :D
 
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... ;)

I remember those days with my Acorn!
15 mins to load space invaders!

You young wipper snappers really have it good!

Your loading times don't scream out sounds as the game loads like when ours did unless you plugged up the headphones socket.
 
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... ;)

By heck that took me back:p:D
 
Can anyone recommend one of these code generated games. I tried a couple a few years ago and my cpu couldnt quite handle it but now I'd like the challenge.

One game I saw was 64k big but had massive levels because instead of textures it was using randomly generated vectors.

There is some talk of realtime rendering instead textures, theres an app that runs on ps3 for example but you need to link about 3 of them to get reasonable fps i think
 
You won't ever eliminate loading times, because the data has to be loaded at some point, even if it is during OS boot, and no matter how fast your storage device and memory, there will always be at least a short delay.

The key point here is looking to minimise loading times, not get rid of them altogether. There are already some games which do this, for example small games which once loaded never need to access a mechanical hard drive again. Likewise if you have games running from a device with faster access time and throughput this will help. In theory something like windows superfetch coupled with a large amount of RAM should help for regularly played games, or even the more oldschool RAMdisk approach (still need that initial period copying into RAM on boot, though).

Personally I think the issue is overplayed in any case. Say 10-30s waiting for a level to load is no big deal to me in the grand scheme of things, I mean say you play a game for an hour and spend 1 minute of that time staring at the load screen, is that really so bad?

A game like Far Cry has some pretty hefty loading times between levels (say 30s), but I don't mind that because I know that once it's done, it's done. The only thing I find annoying really is when you get a load of mid-level loading such as in Halflife 2, where you get this message plastered in the middle of the screen, looping sound etc. And then you get into a fight round the first corner, back off to reload and trigger the loading sequence again because you backed into the previous level section.
 
had a commadore 64 with the Evil Kinevil game and that took easily an hour to load, shame it was the worst game ive ever played.......

"Hope you like hospital food"...... wtf was that about :/
 
Yes.

Games will reach the point where graphics are photo realistic and physics is life-like. Once reached hardware will far succeed the demands meaning load times will get smaller and smaller untill they are not noticeable.

A quick proof is trying a really old game on your 4gb ram, 8800gtx machine and :eek::eek: -ing at how fast it loads.
 
Publishers demanding the moon on a stick from development shop, pushing hard deadlines on them in attempt to maximise profits, acheiving sub-stanadard code.

Live for Speed loads as fast as I can click the buttons to navigate between screens - that's right, the development team don't have a publisher on their backs demanding milestone builds, but instead they release when they're happy with the code, and it shows.
 
Solid state memory and memristors might change things, but until then, we will have to put up with loading times, fast and slow.
 
Publishers demanding the moon on a stick from development shop, pushing hard deadlines on them in attempt to maximise profits, acheiving sub-stanadard code.

Live for Speed loads as fast as I can click the buttons to navigate between screens - that's right, the development team don't have a publisher on their backs demanding milestone builds, but instead they release when they're happy with the code, and it shows.
It's not really the publisher's fault. Consumers are incredibly fickle, and will judge a game often solely on the graphics.
 
BF2 takes so long to load when joining a server, for me at least (takes like 1+ mins). It's also really annoying when it has to optimize shaders ¬_¬
 
there are already games with no loading times tho,
like GTA, Guild Wars and most MMO's etc..

There will always be the inital loading times but the rest of the level will be streamed in the background so when you actually enter the "zone" the level is all ready so when your in game there wont be any traditional loading messages
 
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... ;)

Ditto did the same thing on my Spectrum 48k
 
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