Load times - especially "restart"

[charlesr]

Play 1080 snowboarding (N64 or GC) and when you need to restart the race because you messed up, you press start and then restart and it gives you the 3,2,1. All good.

Forza1: gah. Messed up there. Ok, well, I'll restart. Start, restart. Loading. eh hang on. Loading? I only just loaded a second ago. What's wrong with cache?

Forza2: surely this will be fixed now? Nope. I'm sitting on the start line, but to restart from here, I still need to load something. Bah.

Blacksite Area51 demo: 2 minutes of gameplay in a very small arena. Can't be that much going on? But restarting isn't instant. In fact it takes an age.

Tragic.

It's the one area that I feel should have remained constant with advances in technology. Instead it has steadily got worse since we moved away from solid state. Oh well. Rant over.

Please assure me there are lots of games that are able to restart instantlyish on the next gen hardware.

[HaHaUK]

PGR3 restart takes you to a 30 second loading screen

[chopemon]

what people don't realise is that because more and more games are streaming, when you restart it has to load the beginning segment again.

i can't comment on forza but burnout revenge is a swine for it. it looks fantastic and that's because they are streaming the course, so when you restart it has to reload the original part of the track in it's original state. it is becoming increasingly rare for games to hold a whole level in memory.

Blacksite has an awful loading time because it isn't finished yet. it is an early build and form my experience of the unreal engine you can make it load quicker really easily but that's at the end of development. only once you have locked down level content and got all the packages streamlined can you make it load quicker. and that demo will use several streaming sections. when you cross over into the second half past the wreckage, it dumps the gas station.

[NecronomiconUK]

PGR3 restart takes you to a 30 second loading screen

If i remember PGR1 & 2 were instant

[Prophet Hero]

Motorstorm's restart is good. I've restarted many times without any frustration. However, the general load times in the game are poor.

[BeyondJumpFish]

Yeah. I've noticed this and it really pisses me off. And if i remember it's PGR3 thats the worst for it. However on the flipside Motorstorm is instant.
(Beat me to it Prophet hero)

[MikeRox]

omg PGR3 was a pain in the arse for it, as was Burnout Revenge on the 360, especially as you could mess something up within 5 seconds on the crash mode or whatever, then back to a 30 second loading screen >_<

This is something I have to take my hat off to Nintendo over, with the exception of Mario Smash Football pretty much all their games have had load and restart times well below 10 seconds. (I used to use 10 seconds as the benchmark for a fast loading game on Dreamcast).

[Yoshimax]

It's a tricky one - Devs will tell you it's technical constraints owing to the way they've had to write the game (i.e the streaming data example above).

With Nintendo it wouldn't surprise me if there's something in their dev guidelines and QA practices which determine how long a load can take - I'm pretty sure the GC discs were designed as they are because it highly reduces seek times etc.

[NecronomiconUK]

With Nintendo it wouldn't surprise me if there's something in their dev guidelines and QA practices which determine how long a load can take - I'm pretty sure the GC discs were designed as they are because it highly reduces seek times etc.

Yes on both counts

[MattyD]

I often wondered about this and it is definately more of a problem with newer games. Condemned is one of the worst examples I can think of - it's obviously all streamed because the disc drive sound like a jet engine whilst playing it, and every time you die you have to endure a good couple of minutes of loading time.

With Nintendo it wouldn't surprise me if there's something in their dev guidelines and QA practices which determine how long a load can take - I'm pretty sure the GC discs were designed as they are because it highly reduces seek times etc.

The GameCube also had a dedicated 16Mb buffer for streamed data to cut down loading times so presumeably the Wii has something similar.

[Goemon]

I don't know the ins and outs but surely streaming has the opposite effect!?

Streaming is when data is constantly streamed via the memory without the need for loading.

Loading is when a large chunk of data is dumped into memory for quick access

However I think games are getting worse as there is more data to store and also loaded data can be changed far more frequently.

Forza for example everything that's changed with the car, track etc. such as damage, environment, type marks, moved cones will have to be loaded back to their original state if the user selects to "restart"

This is why games will vary in the speed they reload stuff (that and depending on how lazily the game has been programmed)

Cart games aren't a fair comparison as all the memory is there so it's obviously quick access. (This is the reason Nintendo went with cart in the first place for the N64)

All companies have standards on how long a user should be left waiting for.

[Psyduck]

Streaming means that the data is gradually loaded in as needed, so by the time you've gone anywhere it's lost some of it and loaded new stuff. That means it all needs to be loaded up again. In theory it could look back and just load what it needs but I guess it's easier to just go from scratch, which is what it'd have to do in most cases anyway.

The other option (the 1080 one I'm sure) is that it just loads the entire level into memory at once. When you restart it's all still there. This takes more memory though and so reduces level size/graphics quality.

This totally ruined PGR3 for me though, since I'm rubbish and had to restart often.

[Wools]

Halo is always the bar that Developers should aim for in my opinion.

An almost instant jump to the main menu followed by a small 10 - 15 second load into a level and throughout that level you are un-interupted.

I still feel Halo's technical acchivments are still underated and forgottern about by most people. Maybe that's the point, if you don't notice the load or streaming then the Developers got it right.

Although I loved the games concept, Stuntman was a world of pain in this respect.

[Mr M0by]

Although I loved the games concept, Stuntman was a world of pain in this respect.

I was reading through this and couldn't believe no-one had mentioned Stuntman.... until i reached your post. I'm the sort of gamer that would quit a level/time trail after 10 seconds if i thought i was too far behind were i needed/wanted to be at that point. I could quite happily, or rather obsessively, start and restart for ages until i thought i had hooked up every corner quite well. Unfortunately for every 10-20 seconds of play on Stuntman, i'd have to sit and wait for 30-60. I really enjoyed the game up until the point when the waiting finally wore me down.

[Ajay1986]

Ive been playing God of War 2 lately and its amazing for load times. It has a quick load when you start your save game and from there there are no load times at all in the actual game as far as i can tell. Also if you die and have to restart its instant again no loading times, really is amazing how they have done it.