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Geek Culture / How long you would wait for a game to load?

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GraPix
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Posted: 23rd Oct 2009 10:15 Edited at: 27th Oct 2009 10:45
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How long you would wait for a game to load? I am making a game. And my loading time is too much. Just to get a idea, how long you would wait for the game to load?

-GraPix

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Van B
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Posted: 23rd Oct 2009 11:10
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Long enough to get comfortable .

I would sit a gamer in front of it, and see if they comment - it's the only way to know for sure is to try it out. If they ask if it's crashed then it's too long.

There are things you could do though...

* Set the sync rate to 0 when initializing and loading up media.
* Use .DBO files instead of .X - they load faster.
* Clone or instance objects whenever you can, instead of loading them up - it's quite easy to do if you load objects in for...next loops.
* Show a progress bar - like work out how much video memory your game takes up and measure that to get a percentage complete value - seeing a number go up slowly is better than no numbers.
* Load all your media before doing anything with it - the more sync's you do when loading media, the slower it gets, as models are positioned at 0,0,0 by default.
* Turn off autocam (AUTOCAM OFF), this will avoid issues with creating new objects and sync.
* Reduce the render size of the 3D output (SET CAMERA VIEW). This can help as the smaller the render area, the faster it renders - so even if you do end up syncing with unnecessary objects on the screen, it won't kill performance so badly.


Health, Ammo, and bacon and eggs!
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Fallout
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Posted: 23rd Oct 2009 13:31 Edited at: 23rd Oct 2009 13:31
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About 30 seconds, tops, otherwise it's a pain, especially if you have to restart/reload a lot. Ideally 10 secs.

There are things in DBO you just can't optimise though. When you start my game Carnage with 10 AI bots and switch shadow shading on, it takes 8 minutes to initialise on my setup. The loading is done very quickly, but the way DBP initialises shadow shading takes all day. Even though the shadows renders quickly, I had to turn shadow shading off for that reason.

Worth bearing in mind.

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YavinB
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Posted: 23rd Oct 2009 17:20
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2-3 Minutes, i wouldn't wait like a hour just to play a game.

If involves money I'm in. (only if it Benefits me)
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Yodaman Jer
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Posted: 23rd Oct 2009 18:52
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Any longer than a full minute and I'll get very angry. So angry, I'll take the keyboard and swing it across my monitor, then jam it through the screen just for good measure. Then I'll rip out the hard drive and smash it with a sledge hammer, throw it out the window and burn it. Then I'll take the game disc and try it in the other computer.



What? I hate slow games!

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Indicium
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Posted: 23rd Oct 2009 19:48
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lol

Sounds like a plan
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TillyLala
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Posted: 23rd Oct 2009 20:46
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I'd wait long enough to get comfy on my sofa and my laptop settled on my knee...

I know its too long when I can go make my self a brew and drink it and dip my biscuits in it and it's still not loaded...

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BearCDP
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Posted: 24th Oct 2009 02:08
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The last thing I wanna do is have to get up and do dishes while I wait for a game to load, but if it's taking that long I don't feel like I have a choice.

And, if you can keep your music playing smoothly as you transition into, hang around for, and transition out of the loading screen, I will give you my first-born child.
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Slow Programmer
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Posted: 24th Oct 2009 02:42
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Obviously no one here ever played games on the Commodore 64 loaded from a cassette drive 10 to 15 minutes to load were common. Even with a floppy drive some programs took 3 to 5 minutes.
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Herakles
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Posted: 24th Oct 2009 04:08
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I'm quite a patient man, so I'd say 5-10 minutes, maybe even 15 or more, depending on how badly I want to play the game.

I'm working on Swordfight again! Come tell me what you think!
http://forum.thegamecreators.com/?m=forum_view&t=158681&b=19
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Indicium
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Posted: 24th Oct 2009 04:42 Edited at: 24th Oct 2009 04:57
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I disagree, I think 15 minutes would be a ridiculous ammount of time to wait for the game to load out, plus youd be completely locked out from everything else.
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Toasty Fresh
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Posted: 24th Oct 2009 04:52
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I'll wait for no longer than a minute, unless it's something like Crysis.
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Happy Cheesecake
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Posted: 24th Oct 2009 05:53
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I'm used to waiting nearly a half-hour for some of the simplest games to load on my computer. I've even left it on overnight to get to play something.

So 12 hours is a reasonable loading time for me, but you can't really listen to someone who plays games on an electrical rock.

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gamerboots
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Posted: 24th Oct 2009 09:46
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IMHO
if it takes longer than 3&1/2 minutes to load then it better be totally awsome.
The thing to remember is that even though it might be a little slow on your pc that by the time you are done with it and release it if someone has just bought a new pc with the lastest processor(s) and added memory it will usually load 2-8 times faster than what yours would. The good thing about this is that you can work out places in the program where it would load slow by putting in some debug lines that print to the screen and tell you whats loading or loaded (you can even have the program make a log file of how much time each section took if you need it to)
This will help you narrow down exactly whats slowing you down the most. Also, dont forget what Van said as those things are absolutely crucial for speed.

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prasoc
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Posted: 24th Oct 2009 19:29
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5 MINUTES??! You people have too much patience! I though my game was taking too long to load with just 10 seconds


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david w
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Posted: 24th Oct 2009 19:37
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10 seconds lol, you can't be serious. What game can you name that loads in 10 seconds?
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Grandma
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Posted: 24th Oct 2009 19:41
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Quote: "10 seconds lol, you can't be serious. What game can you name that loads in 10 seconds?"

Most normal games?

I would also not want to wait more than 1-2 minutes.

This message was brought to you by Grandma industries.

Making yesterdays games, today!
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prasoc
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Posted: 24th Oct 2009 20:39
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For a start, my game loads < 15 seconds (win 7 for some reason takes longer ??). I try to compress my images so they don't take as long, but if it took 2 minutes each time to test a certain thing, I would move engines lol


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david w
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Posted: 24th Oct 2009 21:38 Edited at: 24th Oct 2009 21:48
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Ok maybe I'm slightly confused here. When you say "load" do you consider that means you click it, it "loads up to a menu?" or your already at the menu, you "Launch Game" -- The level then proceeds to load? So the time from launch game to actual game play? Where does one start load time and end load time.

Load_time = start - end;

Once I get through all the "adds/splash screens" you know, MS game studios, Epic, etc.,etc. Sometimes these splash screens are like 5-6 deep and that alone takes 30+ seconds.

I have 2 fairly health PC's here and not one loads a game in 10 seconds. I consider this all part of loading. I sit down at my pc. I double click my games icon. [START_TIME] after 5+ company splash screens, I get to a main menu. I finally go through the {possilby many -- depends on game) sub menus and launch the game. Loading screen pops up. I cant walk/run/use menus. [END_TIME].

To me thats ELAPLSED_TIME = START_TIME - END_TIME; I have yet the encounter a game that actually loads in under 10 seconds. Were talking professional games here. Not games and demos made in dbp. Even if you started START_TIME at the sub menu launch. I can think of a "modern" pc game that loads in 10 seconds.

My pcs are not ancient. One is a dual core with 2gb of ram and a 512mb gfx card. The other one is a quad core with 3gb of ram and a 512mb gfx card. They are very fast espically the quad, but I dont see 10sec load times on any "modern" game.

I have a PS3 and a XBOX360 and these 10 seconds load times never happen on either of those. And I have a stack of games that are the height of a small child.
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David R
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Posted: 24th Oct 2009 21:42 Edited at: 24th Oct 2009 21:45
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10-15 seconds is the max I would wait before starting to become a little annoyed.

Quote: "Ok maybe I'm slightly confused here. When you say "load" do you consider that means you click it, it "loads up to a menu?" or your already at the menu, you "Launch Game" -- The level then proceeds to load? So the time from launch game to actual game play? Where do one start load time and end load time."


Loading is clearly referring to when you start a new game or change level / area etc. Splash screens and the like aren't loading screens.

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david w
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Posted: 24th Oct 2009 21:46
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Ok thats what I was thinking but I wanted to make sure.
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Thraxas
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Posted: 25th Oct 2009 03:57
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I'm pretty sure GraPix is using FPSC to make his game, unless he changed engines, and so really there is not alot he can do to improve his load times apart from split the levels up into smaller sections.

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Dreamsenshi
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Posted: 25th Oct 2009 19:43
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Like most people here, I'm willing to wait a couple of minutes... unless I'm REALLY eager to play the game, but even then I'll sit and wait because that's what load screens are about; as long as that little bar keeps moving, I'll survive. I remember a time when I had to wait 10 to 15 minutes for my computer just to boot up (NEVER AGAIN!), so a couple minutes is nothing. Gives me time to grab a glass of water, toss a toy mouse to the cat so she won't leap on my keyboard during the game, and prepare myself for immersion.



Your error is my treasure. =^--^=
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The Master Dinasty
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Posted: 25th Oct 2009 21:45
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Lol Yodaman jer i couldent agree more i hate bad loading times i really cant wait moore then 1-2 TOPS, thats around when i start to cut my self with a razor....
or if its a game i really want to play i can wait days months until my foodsupply runs low then i need to go hunting...

no seriously 1-5 min!




-Massap2

Beacause massa is the master!
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demons breath
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Posted: 25th Oct 2009 22:41
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It depends on the game itself as well. I'd obviously wait longer for a professional game than an amateur one because it'd probably be better quality, with more media being loaded per time spent and suchlike. For people on these forums or your friends and suchlike, a longer loading time will be more acceptable than to random strangers.

Progress bars are important as well - if it's just a blank screen saying loading it can get disheartening and people will give up on it before it's finished, whereas if they can at least see some progress is being made loading it, they are more likely to wait it out. Another trick might be to make the progress bar quite wide so it looks like it's loading faster as there is more movement...

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Herakles
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Posted: 26th Oct 2009 01:17 Edited at: 26th Oct 2009 01:18
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Well, I'm accustomed to waiting for Gothic 3 and Neverwinter Nights 2 to load on my 512MB RAM crapmachine, so everything else seems lightning fast by comparison. I would definately prefer it to be faster, but I can bear slower.

I'm working on Swordfight again! Come tell me what you think!
http://forum.thegamecreators.com/?m=forum_view&t=158681&b=19
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RedneckRambo
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Posted: 26th Oct 2009 01:59 Edited at: 26th Oct 2009 02:00
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Well seeing as a 2x4 piece of wood would load any game faster than my computer I'd wait up to 20 minutes. But I would only wait that long if it was a game made from these forums. I wouldn't wait longer than 5 minutes for a commercial game.
I use FPSC and sometimes a single level will take up to 40 minutes to test.
And no I'm not patient. In those 40 minutes of waiting I don't just sit here and look at the monitor. I look at my tv

Quote: "10 seconds lol, you can't be serious. What game can you name that loads in 10 seconds?

Most normal games?"

That's not even fair that some people can load a game in about 10 seconds There is no 3d game that can load in 10 seconds on this computer lol.

Signature's are stupid.
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Chenak
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Posted: 26th Oct 2009 03:10
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30 seconds, but I prefer games that remove loading times or have them as little as possible. Soul Reaver 2 is the best example of a game I've played with no loading and its a really good game with quite a lot of graphical and audio detail (at the time). This is why I en devour to have my games have no or hidden loading times.
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Fallout
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Posted: 26th Oct 2009 10:32
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Just to slightly go off topic, what really annoys me is when hitting F9 to 'quick load' is as slow as the initial loading screen. It's lazy to dump and reload the entire game, when all you have to do is reset everything. Quick reload should take 1 second, imo.

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Van B
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Posted: 26th Oct 2009 11:33
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I think programmers have longer fuses with this stuff, because we're used to compile times. But I must admit I do get irritated at the PS3's loading times, I can suffer them but they're always longer than you expect them to be. Know what I mean?, there's like a set time you wait before bashing keys thinking the thing has crashed - only you can't do that on PS3, you have to assume that all is well, and it'll load up when it's good and ready.

I think that key bashing happens mostly when nothing is changing on screen, that's why loading screens have spinning logos and stuff to prove they haven't crashed.


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NeX the Fairly Fast Ferret
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Posted: 26th Oct 2009 11:40
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I, for one, am a fan of games that have one long loading screen at the start (40 secs max) and then no loading screens at all until you shut down the game. Like GTA.

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GraPix
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Posted: 26th Oct 2009 12:53
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I agree to Van B. Loading screens should have something that proves it hasn't crashed, this increases the players patience. Also, if the screen contains level objectives or story or something.. helps to keep the patience of the player!

Offtopic:

I owned a copy of DarkBASIC Pro a year ago! I think its a great language for completely new programmers that land in the game development. This is the first step for a non-programmer to start developing simple games. Then it is easier to move to UnrealScript etc.

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TheComet
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Posted: 26th Oct 2009 22:19
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After about 10-15 seconds I'd start to get annoyed. You know, I have never managed to make a game (I have hundreds of projects) that loads more than 5 seconds... How do you do it? Every Nintendo game doesn't take longer than 15 seconds to load. What takes so long? Do you make tons of do-loops and wait 2000 commands through your loading stage of your code?

Follow what Van B said, and you'll be on the good side. Also, don't make huge textures and really good poly characters. What counts is the game play, not the graphics.

TheComet


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Sven B
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Posted: 26th Oct 2009 22:30
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To me it depends on the loading screen and music.
For example, I can wait much longer when I see a progress bar.
And when there's music, I can wait even longer.

I've seen a lot of other interesting things too: Random concept art (like GTA on PlayStation), in-game screen shots, help or tips, etc.

They all make it very easy to wait for the game to load.

Sven B

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demons breath
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Posted: 26th Oct 2009 22:50
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If you're having some random concept art thing it would be quite cool if it loaded and displayed it entirely randomly so that loading screens weren't always the same.

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Dreamsenshi
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Posted: 26th Oct 2009 23:13
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Quote: "And when there's music, I can wait even longer."


Quote: "If you're having some random concept art thing it would be quite cool if it loaded and displayed it entirely randomly so that loading screens weren't always the same."


This is exactly how cinemas started. If you have a cinema "load screen," no one even notices the wait.



Your error is my treasure. =^--^=
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NeX the Fairly Fast Ferret
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Posted: 27th Oct 2009 00:50
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Quote: "You know, I have never managed to make a game (I have hundreds of projects) that loads more than 5 seconds... How do you do it?"


Quote: "Object oriented programming is great in that it makes a really nice, simple problem look really, really complicated."


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Jeku
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Posted: 28th Oct 2009 16:26
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^^^ I don't understand the point of your post.

For a game like Uncharted 2, there's no load times at all during gameplay. There's about a 15 second load at the very start and then after that it loads as you play, which is pretty cool.


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NeX the Fairly Fast Ferret
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Posted: 28th Oct 2009 16:32 Edited at: 28th Oct 2009 16:33
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My point is that some engine developers get so wrapped up in making everything architecturally beautiful and internally nice that they forget that the outside; how fast/well it actually works is much, much more important than how many times you can reuse the same tiny bit of code or how organised the whole system is. I can't remember who I'm quoting there but it was someone pretty important... on the level of Carmack, but not Carmack.

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Morcilla
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Posted: 29th Oct 2009 11:21
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I experienced the 10 minutes load times when the cassette tapes where used, and the load was sequential, back in the C64 times.

My current DGDK project takes more than 60 seconds to load with a powerful PC, using the high quality but not the highest (it could take even more time).

And it is not that hard to reach those loading times with DBPro. Just try to load a bunch of 4Mb textures and 10000 vertex meshes.

DBPro and DGDK produce very large load times for nowadays standards. It is starting to be a problem here.

They need to be able to do multi-threading, at least for loading, if they are to be considered to do 'professional' programs.
That way, not only the initial loading would be flawless, but also it would minimize the impact if loading during the game runtime.

Currently is one of the most worrying aspects of DGDK/DBPro. Long load times can ruin a good work.
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Aaagreen
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Being a Source modder, I have to get used to long compiling times. Sure, they have nothing against FPSC's freaking HUGE compiling times, but yeah. Patience is required.

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David R
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Posted: 29th Oct 2009 14:44
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Quote: "My point is that some engine developers get so wrapped up in making everything architecturally beautiful and internally nice that they forget that the outside; how fast/well it actually works is much, much more important than how many times you can reuse the same tiny bit of code or how organised the whole system is"


The overhead of OOP on a modern machine has a performance effect of practically nil unless you do something incredibly odd (make everything virtual / lots of virtual->virtual->virtual function chains)

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Jeku
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Posted: 30th Oct 2009 16:58
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Quote: "My point is that some engine developers get so wrapped up in making everything architecturally beautiful and internally nice that they forget that the outside; how fast/well it actually works is much, much more important than how many times you can reuse the same tiny bit of code or how organised the whole system is"


Can you list an example of such a system that's over engineered in the way you describe? Sounds like it is incredibly common judging by your tone. I can only think of one open source project where it was so over-engineered it was faster for me to rewrite the system from scratch than to learn how the authors originally intended it to be used.

Quite honestly, from my experience the people who complain of OO "overhead" are merely procedural programmers who don't want to learn. I could list issues with procedural programming as well, like the higher tendency for spaghetti code.


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NeX the Fairly Fast Ferret
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Posted: 30th Oct 2009 17:00 Edited at: 30th Oct 2009 17:03
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OO isn't inherently bad. Overusing OO is. UT3's engine springs to mind. It's just about acceptable on PC, but on 360 UT3 and Mirror's Edge take most of a decade to load. 600Mb RAM usage on a stock install on the main menu. Something is going wrong when that kind of statistic pops up. Everything is broken down into too many objects and it's like the developers were so scared of writing anything specific that everything has ended up outside of the main codebase. This isn't such a bad idea, it makes for more reliable programming because you don't need to use a line of C/++ to do anything, but the overhead is massive.

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gamerboots
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Posted: 30th Oct 2009 18:30
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Quote: "My point is that some engine developers get so wrapped up in making everything architecturally beautiful and internally nice that they forget that the outside; how fast/well it actually works "


I have to agree with nex. take kings bounty for example , its graphically pleasing but , without the patch has long load times , slow frame rates, and worst of all, it hates certain graphic cards ( will reboot your system it you have an unsupported one or have one that has less than 500mb-1gig )

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dark coder
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Posted: 30th Oct 2009 19:05
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Quote: "OO isn't inherently bad. Overusing OO is. UT3's engine springs to mind. It's just about acceptable on PC, but on 360 UT3 and Mirror's Edge take most of a decade to load. 600Mb RAM usage on a stock install on the main menu."


How can you equate any of this to OO usage? 600MB RAM usage tells me a lot of media is being loaded, for the bulk of this memory to be caused by OO there would have to be an insane amount of virtual function usage and dynamic allocation going on which I find impossible to believe. UT3 is a very flexible engine and sports many many features, I would assume that the bulk of this loading time is spent loading and validating script files as well as pre-caching various media. I'd like to see the evidence you have for making such claims that the loading times and memory usage is the result of OO usage.


Quote: "Quite honestly, from my experience the people who complain of OO "overhead" are merely procedural programmers who don't want to learn."


And the ones who think it's back in the stone age when 99% of people were writing asm and couldn't fathom why you'd want to potentially lose a few cycles.

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Jeku
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Posted: 30th Oct 2009 19:17 Edited at: 30th Oct 2009 19:19
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Quote: "600Mb RAM usage on a stock install on the main menu. Something is going wrong when that kind of statistic pops up."


How can you speak with such certainty that you know exactly what's happening behind the scenes? The game could be doing any manner of things--- pre-loading common objects, sounds, music, textures, or anything to speed up the loading process. It might also be loading a third party Front End system like Scaleform.

You are taking perhaps one of the most highly optimized game engines as an example of poor coding? You assume you know what is going on, by inventing the idea that OO structure is the only explanation for 600MB of RAM being taken. Please, give a better example than that, or at the very least read up on OO principles and its memory overhead.

EDIT:

Quote: "I have to agree with nex. take kings bounty for example , its graphically pleasing but , without the patch has long load times , slow frame rates, and worst of all, it hates certain graphic cards ( will reboot your system it you have an unsupported one or have one that has less than 500mb-1gig )"


And this can be blamed on OO overhead how?


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