CyanideSandwich said:
I know I'm about to sound like a real idiot, but why do games have to load? Movies and CD's don't need to load, so why do games? I understand that games may be a little more complex than these things, but if you can shorten loading time by installing a game to your hard drive, then why can't game or console designers stop it altogether? Surely this should be what they are currently working on, instead of graphics, realism or size. Now, I know games are separate from other forms of media, but you wouldn't want to be in the middle of a movie and see "Loading..." in front of you. It completely kills the momentum. So why have it in games? Things that are (usually) more action-packed and fast-paced? This is my first question, and I look forward to youre responses.
My second question is a smaller, less important one, born only from curiousity: Why do we have a "Press Start" screen at the beginning of so many games? I've heard mixed responses, usually that it's a throwback to the "Insert Coin" screens of the arcade years. But surely it's not needed now, is it? GTA IV didn't have it, and no-one even blinks. It didn't make a lick of difference. As far as I've seen, there's no real use for these screens. Again, I look forward to your responses.
Oh, one last thing: I don't care if this thread has been done before.
Movies and CD's don't need to load because they play back in linear order, at a completely predictable data rate, and this was taken into account with DVD's & CD's so that the drives were fast enough to deliver this speed consistently.
If you want to see a dvd or CD 'load', skip to a random time, and wait the 2-3 seconds it takes for the drive to figure out where that spot is.
Now consider the problem with a game:
Firstly, what needs to be loaded is a lot bigger, and a lot of it needs to be there all at once.
A DVD only needs to load enough information for the next couple of frames, and what it is loading is only there because the speed at which the disk is read isn't entirely reliable.
It also knows with 100% certainty what's coming next.
A game can't get away with having half the scene missing, and worse, doesn't know what you are going to do.
This means you need to load as much as you can in one go, in case the player looks at it.
If you can load everything in memory at once, you'll spend ages loading at the beginning, but won't need to load at all during gameplay.
If there's not enough memory, or the game world is particularly large, (or you want to loading time to be lower at the beginning of a level), then you need to load a smaller amount of information, then swap it out in the background without the player noticing. But, because you don't know what the player will do, that's very, very, difficult.
And what usually happens is that you'll get a loading tunnel instead of a loading screen.
It looks like you aren't being stopped to load a new area, but it's a cheat.
What's at either end of the tunnel is very predictable, and the tunnel itself is long enough that by the time you've gotten to the other end enough time has passed to load the new area.
Incidentally, I don't know if you're old enough to remember this, but cartridge based game systems had almost 0 loading times.
In fact, that was a big argument Nintendo used to argue why the N64 used cartridges when everyone else said CD's were better.
And sure enough, once CD's/DVD's were used, loading times suddenly became a big deal.
The reason installing a game to a hard drive improves loading times, is simply that a Hard Drive can have data read from it more quickly than a DVD can.
But short of using solid state drives (which, ironically, is pretty much what a game cartridge amounts to), you're not going to eliminate it.
And guess why game cartridges went out of fashion?
Hint: A CD/DVD costed about $0.10 to make. A cartridge costed about $20
Basically, it's economics. Because the hardware causes loading times more so than anything else.
As for your second question, I can't come up with any reason. As a game programmer, it looks like it's just some kind of tradition. There's no real practical reason for it. (Although ironically it could function as a disguise for a loading screen. The time needed to press a button may be just enough to hide a short delay)
