What happens during a "loading" screen?
It''s probably worth doing a little profiling on the progress bar. Have it write out a timestamp to a file showing how quick it loads the different resources. Then you can calibrate the control so that it''s roughly evenly paced.
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[ MSVC Fixes | STL Docs | SDL | Game AI | Sockets | C++ Faq Lite | Boost
Asking Questions | Organising code files | My stuff | Tiny XML | STLPort]
Since I have my data pre-processed in a single file, ("Fast Data Load Trick", from one of the Game Programming Gems books) loading is pretty much just reading things into straight memory and performing trivial processing on them. This way my progress bar is incremented proportionally to the where in the file it''s reading from.
Is multi-threading really necessary for this? I just call the drawing routine periodically during the load. MT would be more useful for background loading, which may be used in games if you have an expansive terrain or use network streaming.
Tom
Is multi-threading really necessary for this? I just call the drawing routine periodically during the load. MT would be more useful for background loading, which may be used in games if you have an expansive terrain or use network streaming.
Tom
quote:Original post by Doc
You''ve been duped. The only purpose of the "loading" screen is to give the player suspense - no loading is ever actually involved since loading is always instantaneous. All those screens are doing is updating the % bar with some sleeps in between inside a for loop. The really clever ones try to make you think its actually loading something by writing (which isn''t instantaneous) bits of random information to the hard drive, then deleting it just before they decide to launch into the game. The length of time a game stays in the loading screen is completely arbitrary, but most designers seem to follow a pattern of making the duration proportional to the likelyhood of the player being killed in the next screen. This adds to the suspense as the player must reload his last save game and wait excitedly during the "loading" screen.
[ offtopic ]
I suppose this could contain some merit.
An extended load time (especially for a particularly difficult section) could increase suspense and increase the perceived difficulty of the section - and hence, increase the reward the player feels upon finally completing it.
Of course, long loading times often tend to get picked out by gaming reviewers. Maybe give the player something fun to do while loading?
[ /offtopic ]
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