18 réponses à ce sujet

[Cantina]

I am not sure if this mentioned before, my apologies if it has.

One thing I enjoyed from Origins is when the loading screen popped up you got to see your companion, you or total party stats. How many kills, most powerful creature killed etc.

I really would love to have this back in Dragon Age 3. It made the loading screens less boring and it was interesting to see what everyone stats are.

Modifié par Cantina, 15 mai 2012 - 06:03 .

[berelinde]

On the PC version, that was accessible from the character record page under "Heroic Accomplishments". I miss it, too. It was great to be able to cheer the screen saying things like "You go, Zev! Way to take out that high dragon!"

[Melca36]

I Agree 100%

[Leon481]

Character stats are fine, but I'd prefer they get rid of the loading screens. They make these games a chore to play. Loading screens are an inconvenience to the player and disguising them as features does not make them less of a problem.

[Nimpe]

Leon481 wrote...

Character stats are fine, but I'd prefer they get rid of the loading screens. They make these games a chore to play. Loading screens are an inconvenience to the player and disguising them as features does not make them less of a problem.

Loadscreens aren't a feature. It's there so the game can... load. Would you rather the game take an hour or two loading at the start of the game? 

[Dakota Strider]

Unless you want the adventure to remain in one setting that never changes, including going in or outdoors, we will have to tolerate loading screens. The delay is usually minimal if you have a decent PC. Sorry, have no idea what the wait is on a console. But since loading screens are something we are going to need to tolerate until they build better hardware, they may as well make them informative. I would like to get some general knowledge about the area that are about to enter, or some historical knowledge about Thedas, that our character would probably know, but we as players are ignorant about.

[PsychoBlonde]

It is actually possible to create a game with no loading transitions AT ALL, or very, very few of them. Gothic, a game that came out MORE THAN TEN YEARS AGO, had ONE area that had a loading screen to get in/out of it, and this game was HUGE, and it actually ran very well on less-than-current hardware of the time.

How did Piranha Bytes accomplish this? No friggin clue.

What I'd like to know is, what is *gained* by having the world broken up into little postage-stamp-sized areas surrounded on all sides by multi-second loading screens? What tradeoff exists here?

[Leon481]

Dakota Strider wrote...

Unless you want the adventure to remain in one setting that never changes, including going in or outdoors, we will have to tolerate loading screens. The delay is usually minimal if you have a decent PC. Sorry, have no idea what the wait is on a console. But since loading screens are something we are going to need to tolerate until they build better hardware, they may as well make them informative. I would like to get some general knowledge about the area that are about to enter, or some historical knowledge about Thedas, that our character would probably know, but we as players are ignorant about.

How long is minimal? I play on PS3 and the loading times are abyssmal for both DA games and ME2. (I haven't played ME3 yet to compare.) We're talking a good 20-30 seconds minimum. A lot of times longer. It really breaks up gameplay.

Also, hardware is not an issue. I've played plenty of games on PS3 where loading times were basically non-existent. Long loading times are usually the result of inefficent programming.

Modifié par Leon481, 15 mai 2012 - 08:20 .

[Loc'n'lol]

Leon481 wrote...

We're talking a good 20-30 seconds minimum.

Well that's not much.
It depends what is being loaded. Usually feels like from 10 to 30 seconds in my experience, though I haven't actually tried to time it. IT was always short enough that I never felt the need to watch how long it took.
Loading times in DA2 PC were noticably shorter than in DAO PC (using the exact same hardware / OS) and the game's framerates were overall better too.

[Realmzmaster]

Loading times depend on the detail level of the graphics being brought in . The Gothic engine graphics had less detail than other engines of the same time period so the loading time was minimal. Also if your computer have enough memory parts can be page in into the unused memory to diminish the loading time. The more detailed the graphics the longer the load time. Consoles have set specifications so the game is programmed to the base specifications which ensures all consoles can play the game.

PC specifications are shown on the box in the form of minimum and recommended. If your machine is below minimum it may not run and if it does load times can be horrible even at or a little above the minimum level it may struggle. The programmer has to program the game to take advantage of any extra memory whether it be RAM or Video RAM. The more photo realistic and detailed the graphics the higher the system requirements will be.

Modifié par Realmzmaster, 15 mai 2012 - 10:10 .

[Sylvius the Mad]

Leon481 wrote...

Character stats are fine, but I'd prefer they get rid of the loading screens. They make these games a chore to play. Loading screens are an inconvenience to the player and disguising them as features does not make them less of a problem.

They tried that with the ME elevators, and people mostly didn't like it.

I liked it, but it appears I'm idiosyncratic.

[TEWR]

Tony Hawk's American Wasteland had no loading screens at all. At most, the game might stutter a bit when you're entering a new part of the general area. Not a major stutter, just an incredibly minor thing that would very rarely happen.

I doubt it could be done for a game like Dragon Age though. Loading screens seem like they'll be a necessity for DA.

Not that I mind really. Sometimes I enjoy the nice little 15 second break where I can read something funny.

Don't play cards with Elves. They never pay their debts. And don't play with Dwarves. They'll just kill you. And don't play with Kossith. You can never tell when they're bluffing.

Modifié par The Ethereal Writer Redux, 15 mai 2012 - 09:51 .

[Kidd]

Oh wow, wall of text incoming. Sorry, but I hope it's informative xD

PsychoBlonde wrote...

What I'd like to know is, what is *gained* by having the world broken up into little postage-stamp-sized areas surrounded on all sides by multi-second loading screens? What tradeoff exists here?

Simply put, more unique locales than the alternative, not to mention designing them is quicker.

I'll explain a bit further using textures as an example. There's far more than just textures stored in the memory - probably more than I know of - but it's an easy to grasp concept I believe.

Every surface you can see is a "texture." The grass on the ground, the rocky surface of the stones, the wooden walls, the faces, the metal of the weapons, the skin on people's hands and the entire sky itself. Everything that you can describe as having a surface is a texture. These textures take up a lot of memory.

This is why you never see every race and gender combination at the same time in ME for instance. Every character model has unique sets of textures, and the consoles with their limited memory cannot keep all of these models in memory at once. If we have human females, asari can likely be in the scene cause most of the textures are the same. While quarian male and quarian female likely have some overlap, they are probably mostly unique from each other as well.

The developer has to keep these things when designing their games. What kind of items are in this room? How detailed is the sky? How many different kinds of characters will be in the scene? Etc. The game answers these questions during our load screen, where the textures that will be used in the room we're entering are placed inside the machine's memory (and old textures that will not be used are thrown out to make room for the new). If there is a mistake here and a texture is not loaded, the game might at best stop for a while mid-scene as it loads up the new texture, and at worst it may even crash. It depends on how the engine is written.

Of course there are alternative ways around this. You can do what ME3 does (if you've played Metroid Prime, this happens quite obviously in there too), which is to fill up the memory completely for a few rooms. Then when the player reaches a certain door, you pretend the main character is "hacking" the door or some equivalent to hide that you're currently flushing old textures from the rooms you came from and replacing them in computer memory with new textures of the rooms the player will enter from now on.

Another common workaround is what I'd call the "bubble" approach. Imagine that the player character has a bubble around them which extends further than you can see. When the character moves forward, things behind fall out of the bubble, and any textures that were unique to those areas can be flushed out of memory. And in front of the character, new unique textures will be loaded into memory to be shown in case the player walks up to places where they will see them.

The bubble approach seems like it has no drawbacks at first glance, but it really does. First of all, loading is slow. This means you have an issue - the player must never get to a surface without a texture before it is loaded. Either you make the protagonist walk incredibly slowly, which will be frustrating to play. Or you have to make the world much, much bigger, and without using new textures everywhere to boot.

This leads to large, open areas with very few details - and whatever details are there will be (often clever) reuses of details you can see in other places if you turn your character around. This gives birth to less diverse environment unless you spend a ton of zots in planning out where things will be positioned in the world on a purely technical level (you can get away with less money put here if you are willing to accept lack of graphical detail) instead of an aesthetic one. It will also drain money in that level designers will have to create these huge areas that you'll be walking in while the game is loading.

Not to mention that the loading itself is much faster if you allow the machine the game is running on to concentrate on the loading, instead of loading while doing other things. Meaning, by having load times, the designers can focus on creating memorable and unique-looking rooms, while cutting down immensly on your time waiting for load times as you traverse between these rooms by allowing you to arrive for new adventure the very moment your gaming machine is technically ready to put you in there.

ps, the person who takes my words and starts a console vs PC fight, shame on you. For the record, I'm an xbox player.

Modifié par KiddDaBeauty, 15 mai 2012 - 10:47 .

[MichaelStuart]

Some games use to disguise loading with a pathway you had to walk down, maybe they can do that, give your companions a chance to talk.
If not I would like something like skyrim, give me something to play with during loading

[FieryDove]

Sylvius the Mad wrote...

They tried that with the ME elevators, and people mostly didn't like it.

I liked it, but it appears I'm idiosyncratic.

I enjoyed it. I missed it in 2.

[BubbleDncr]

MichaelStuart wrote...

Some games use to disguise loading with a pathway you had to walk down, maybe they can do that, give your companions a chance to talk.
If not I would like something like skyrim, give me something to play with during loading

That's what they did with the elevator rides in ME1, but for some reason everyone complained about them. It honestly hadn't occured to me until I went on the interent that they were used to disguise loading screens, but seriously, I would rather sit in an elevator, listen to some nice music, and hear my companions chat with each other than have a loading screen.

Tho, unless Thedas gets some elevators real soon, I don't know what they'd do other than have loading screens (other than use a different engine or comeplete redesign how they set up their environments). So yea - give us some interesting stuff to read. Like stats, or lore, or something.

[Sylvius the Mad]

The main benefit of the elevator rides, I think, is that they forced the levels to fit together in a sensible way. I dislike having the interior of a building bear no resemblance to the exterior of the building.

If they're going to force detailed visuals on us, have them make sense.

[lyleoffmyspace]

In The Witcher 2 there are no loading times when you go inside or outside a building.

In fact there's only 6 or so loading screens in the entire game.

[Realmzmaster]

lyleoffmyspace wrote...

In The Witcher 2 there are no loading times when you go inside or outside a building.

In fact there's only 6 or so loading screens in the entire game.

Are you playing on the PC or Xbox? The Xbox loading screen time is a different story when entering/exiting buildings and the screen flickers when selling items.