save game load times - are yours fast/short?

[Komag]

I'm trying to finish my contest mission and it's a very "platformy" map which will certainly lead to lots of falling deaths and subsequent quickloading.

 

I'm trying to get a feel for whether this will be acceptable due to quickloading being pretty fast (it is for me), or whether I really need to take the time to try to script in some sort of non-death auto-resurrection thing like the training mission did.

 

This is a separate issue from whether you dislike that style of mission (I know some of you will hate it! But some will really enjoy it!)

[Baddcog]

Sounds good to me.

[grayman]

I have a slow computer, so everything will be slow for me regardless of what you do.

[nbohr1more]

Looking forward to it Komag. I'm not worried about reload times but that's because I'm just grateful to be allowed PC time at all when I'm at home... (damn wife )...

[Fidcal]

No, don't worry about something like that at this stage. Time is better spent beta testing and polishing.

 

[edit] Also, many players, including myself, do lots of quickloads even without dying. In fact far more.

[HappyCheeze]

I do lots of quicksaves, sometimes if I get too crazy about it, It wil crash and loading that quicksave crashes the game too.

[SneaksieDave]

Weird that some are getting slow quickloads (though I guess slow is in the eye of the beholder). Even back when I was using a 1.4GHz system with a GF4600, my initial load times would be very slow (e.g. 5 mins to load Blackheart Manor at that time), but quickloads about 2 seconds.

[nbohr1more]

I think that ATI and Nvidia try to reformat the data in the driver compiler before sending it via PCI-E (or AGP) to be distributed to the video ram. This has lead to all sorts of problems with load times for games (see the many Battlefield BC load time threads at Rage3d...)

[Bikerdude]

but only because I have a raid-o array that delivers over 400mb/s read/write

[Mortem Desino]

Well, one-year-old custom desktop makes quickload a breezy 1-2 seconds on average.

 

My new laptop (and performance testing platform) churns out a quickload in about 4 seconds (Thief's Den) or 15 seconds (NHAT 2/3).

[aidakeeley]

Fast, after the initial load of the system. Slow otherwise.

 

Which brings me to this suggestion which I'm sure is well under consideration but would like to mention anyway as I hope it could be bumped up the priority chain?

 

Allow the player to review the "mission briefing" and or "starting map" and "opening cut scene" and etc.... (if these things are provided) while the mission is loading?

[Berny]

4x 3ghz, 4gig ram - reload doesn't nedd much time - your map sound very cool!

[Midnight]

My initial load is quite slow but even the longest for me is no more than 3 or 4 minutes unlike some others who seem to have much slower load times, reloads are almost instant, a couple seconds.

 

I was thinking about how slow load times might impact on a FM. In NHAT 1 there's a intro camera flyby that starts immediately following the mission load completing, but if some people are getting load times in excess of 5 minutes they might just leave the game to load and return having missed the intro without knowing it. This could potentially happen with other situations, like beginning the mission with a scripted sequence (anyone who's played Gonchong's "The Docks" will know what I'm on about).

 

What are people's thoughts on having a button appear after loading that lets you confirm you're ready to start? Also, I agree starting to load the mission while you see the briefing and inventory would be a great improvement, if it's possible.

[Fidcal]

Currently not really possible to show briefing etc while loading. The loading is in the doom code. Maybe when it's open source. Maybe then we can improve the progress bar too.

 

Again, doom loads and runs the map so the only way at the moment for a button start would be for each individual mapper to put one in. It would also need to be optional. This button would not work for later game loads; only at the start because the mapper would have to start the player in a black room and turn on a gui or something.