One thing I don't understand is why games that target consoles don't do 
infrastructure-type improvements on PCs. For example, Portal has, at the end 
of each level, an elevator ride, that freezes in the middle as a loading 
screen, then resumes. Well, my XBox has half a gig of RAM, and my PC has 6. 
Or 16, depending which one you're talking about. Would it really be so hard 
to have a low-priority thread loading the next level into a second block of 
RAM during the current level, or even during the elevator ride? (I'm 
assuming it doesn't actually take several seconds to copy textures from RAM 
to video card, does it?)

Batman did such a sweet job of this, even on consoles, that I surprised a 
few friends by pointing out where the loading screens were that they hadn't 
noticed. :-)  That really was a technically-awesome game.

-- 
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   People tell me I am the counter-example.

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On 06/02/2012 06:33 AM, Darren New wrote:

> Batman did such a sweet job of this, even on consoles, that I surprised
> a few friends by pointing out where the loading screens were that they
> hadn't noticed. :-) That really was a technically-awesome game.

My old PC can run Crysis, but it can't run Batman: Arkham Asylum at 
playable frame rates, despite the former having infinitely superior 
graphics to the latter. I'm not sure if that counts as "technically 
awesome"...

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They don't want people to realize current consoles are so obsolete already.
This generation was not fair to PC gamers at all.

God of War also got technically smooth 0-time loading times well-hid between
level chunks, even on the PS2.  It seemed to begin to load as you were close to
get to the entry for the next section, which usually coincided with some narrow
corridor.

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On 2/6/2012 2:29, nemesis wrote:
> It seemed to begin to load as you were close to
> get to the entry for the next section, which usually coincided with some narrow
> corridor.

That's how batman did it. Crawling thru airways, or waiting for the security 
doors to scan you.  I noticed because I went back through the wrong door in 
the jail at one point and the door took about 3 times as long to scan me, 
and I realied that's because it predicted me going thru the door that 
progressed the game. And that's on an xbox.


-- 
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   People tell me I am the counter-example.

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Darren New <dne### [at] sanrrcom> wrote:
> One thing I don't understand is why games that target consoles don't do 
> infrastructure-type improvements on PCs.

  Laziness.

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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On 2/8/2012 8:12 AM, Warp wrote:
> Darren New<dne### [at] sanrrcom>  wrote:
>> One thing I don't understand is why games that target consoles don't do
>> infrastructure-type improvements on PCs.
>
>    Laziness.

Laziness???  Given how hard the games industry is known on working its 
employees, and that I figure you're aware of this too, I'm not even sure 
what you actually mean when you say "laziness" in this context.  I'd 
think that something like "other things have higher priority" would be 
far more accurate.

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On 08/02/2012 04:41 PM, Kevin Wampler wrote:

> Laziness??? Given how hard the games industry is known on working its
> employees, and that I figure you're aware of this too, I'm not even sure
> what you actually mean when you say "laziness" in this context. I'd
> think that something like "other things have higher priority" would be
> far more accurate.

The games industry is home to some visionary designers and very 
hard-working, productive programmers, who produce cutting-edge content.

It is /also/ home to developers who put out some decidedly lazy 
offerings. Short games with gratuitous padding to make them longer. 
Games which are blatantly identical to existing successful products. 
Hastily produced sequels with large sections of identical or minimally 
modified content. Oh, I'm sure some of these companies still whip their 
developers pretty hard. But the end product is still "lazy", IMHO.

I suppose it's just like any other industry, really. How many great 
films have had sequels hastily thrown together which turned out to be 
awful? Whilst I'm sure even a hasty sequel is quite a lot of work to 
produce, the result can still rightly be called "lazy".

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> I'd think that something like "other things have higher priority" 
would be far more accurate.

To put this another way: I'm sure that through the development of Portal 
2, the programmers had a lot of things to work on. It's very likely that 
they were aware of the loading screens, and were forced to answer the 
question, "Should we spend programmer time eliminating loading screens, 
or should we spend that time, say, implementing light bridges?" If you 
would prefer the game without loading screens, you should suggest what 
feature you would have liked to trade that for.

The other option is to push back the release date. However, even if they 
had done that, I guarantee you they would have said, "Should we use this 
extra time to eliminate loading screens, or should we implement <cool 
gameplay feature the designers thought of but was cut for lack of time>?"

You can see how the only way that loading screens are going to go away 
is if they push back the release so much that there's really nothing 
better to work on. The list of things that have a higher payoff than 
eliminating loading screens is long, especially when you're suggesting 
it will only work on one of the target platforms.

Laziness doesn't really factor into it. It's a matter of priorities.

  - Slime

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> Would it really be so hard to have a low-priority thread loading the 
next level into a second block of RAM during the current level, or even 
during the elevator ride?

In a word, yes. It's only (relatively) easy under the assumption that a 
level can be "loaded into a block of RAM," which is probably not the 
case. There are probably many different things in a level that are 
loaded into many different places that interact with many different 
systems, all of which would need to be updated to make that possible. 
This comes with new bugs that take time to track down and fix. 
Obviously, some games do manage to do this, but that doesn't mean it's 
an easy feature to add to an engine that doesn't support it.

  - Slime

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On 2/11/2012 19:43, Slime wrote:
> In a word, yes. It's only (relatively) easy under the assumption that a
> level can be "loaded into a block of RAM," which is probably not the case.

Actually, since most of the time seems to be spent pulling the level off the 
HD or DVD, I would think you could pre-buffer the files at least. *That* 
should be pretty trivial to implement, even if unpacking the levels into 
individual objects and such can't be done easily. I'd imagine that would 
reduce loading times a bunch.

 > If you would prefer the game without loading screens, you should suggest 
what feature you would have liked to trade that for.

That's a good question. Portal2 is pretty tight. On the other hand, if the 
loading screens took 5 minutes each, I'd bet people would balance the 
priorities differently, or even hire an extra developer to work on it, so 
it's not like I'm asking for something absurd. :-)  Plus, of course, it's 
the Source engine, so it's not like the work wouldn't be amortized over 
numerous games.

-- 
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   People tell me I am the counter-example.

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