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[Azure Lazuline]

Although I think that article is greatly exaggerating the issue, I agree. When someone boots up the game, it should just go directly to the title screen. Just put your company logo in the corner or something, nobody needs to see it for 5 seconds every power-on.

[rivon]

Like, if you have loading times of more than a second, then you need to actually re-structure your game for the sake of avoiding them.  Get rid of music.  Do simple 2D art instead of 3D.  Restructure your programming.  Do whatever you have to do to get load screens down to less than a second.

WTF? Get rid of music? Do 2D instead of 3D just to make the game load faster? Are you okay?

[iffi]

Like, if you have loading times of more than a second, then you need to actually re-structure your game for the sake of avoiding them.  Get rid of music.  Do simple 2D art instead of 3D.  Restructure your programming.  Do whatever you have to do to get load screens down to less than a second.

WTF? Get rid of music? Do 2D instead of 3D just to make the game load faster? Are you okay?

Yeah, um... Many of today's games simply wouldn't be possible if we limited ourselves to 1-second loading times unless loading is timed on an SSD...

[Paul Eres]

my game's loading time is about 20 seconds on my computer, with less than 1 second between areas, and i've been trying to reduce that lately. i don't think most players actually would mind that, but i mind it because i have to run the game dozens of times a day for testing purposes, and all that time adds up

so what i've been doing is going from a 'load everything at startup' into 'load things on use' -- which is how i should have done it in the first place (and did for the bigger files, but not for smaller ones)

another thing that i believe helps is to limit the number of files you load, grouping them into larger files which are then separated out after they are loaded. it seems to be faster to load one 1mb file than to load 1024 1kb files. but this is hard to do for some file types, such as wav files (although probably it could be done with archiving somehow)

as for ways to make load screens more interesting, right now i'm just using random quotes from u.g. krishnamurti

[DinofarmGames]

WTF? Get rid of music? Do 2D instead of 3D just to make the game load faster? Are you okay?

Yes.  Seriously.  Players' time is so valuable that you should restructure the game from the ground up so that you do not have to waste any of their time.

I know that that's like, radical to say in videogames - "don't waste any of the players time" - everyone is used to sitting down on a couch to play a game for 1 hour and getting to actually play for 30 minutes, but it's been a long, slow conditioning process that has allowed any of us to feel like this is OK.  It's not OK, at all.

[SundownKid]

I have an SSD, so loading times are quite low for me... but I would rather sit through a loading screen for a 3D game than have to play 2D games for my entire gaming career...  

Preload seems more annoying than a series of smaller loads. However, it really depends on the game's structure. If you are moving from place to place quickly, preload is a better idea.

[rivon]

WTF? Get rid of music? Do 2D instead of 3D just to make the game load faster? Are you okay?

Yes.  Seriously.  Players' time is so valuable that you should restructure the game from the ground up so that you do not have to waste any of their time.

I know that that's like, radical to say in videogames...

It's like saying to use only drums to a rock band. It's like saying to only record the picture, not the sound, to filmmakers etc...

[Paul Eres]

3d doesn't itself increase load time, though; i think that's a misunderstanding. it's the *textures* that take a long time to load, usually if they're *high-resolution* textures. if you use polygonal graphics without textures, like in starfox or ff7's models, it'll load almost instantly

and 2d can take a long time to load as well, if it's high-resolution and uses a lot sprites with a lot of frames of animation, etc. etc.

music also itself doesn't take a lot of time to load; most of the time you stream music from the hard drive, you don't load and decompress the entire file at once, so the effect of music on load times is almost nothing. it's loading a lot of sound effects that'd increase load time, not the music