Just wondering ... how long do you guys feel (based on your personal opinions and anything you may have heard from your customers) is a reasonable load time for a game?

My games tend to take between 20 and 30 seconds to actually get everything loaded into memory and get running. I'm considering implementing a lazy loading architecture so it loads slowly in the background after the main menu comes up, loading screens on demand if you jump into a screen the lazy loader hasn't gotten to yet.

What do users expect from the time they double click the icon to the time they are looking at the main menu? 5 seconds? 10? They don't care?

What is the threshold ... ?

I decided to go with the exact opposite of "lazy loading". I load everything up front so the game is responsive once it starts. Sluggish response times in the middle of the game could look pretty bad - it would be ok between levels though I think.

I used to do lazy resource loading in Alien Flux - still do in fact - but now I preload a lot of stuff up front because I got complaints from people about pauses when the new stuff was loaded up on the fly (like a new alien or a new sound effect).

Laptop disk IO is terrible as well. It takes twice as long to load on a laptop.

Cas :)

For god's sake just don't have it sitting there doing nothing at all for 30 seconds... put in a loading bar at least.

Otherwise, you're likely to get "@!^%$# thing's crashed... [ctrl-alt-del]"

That's what I was going to shoot for. I was hoping to load the music files during the initial start up since they seem to take the longest (using Blitz3D here), and then load the rest on a timer in the background once the main menu comes up.

Hopefully it'll work out ...

A major complaint of my last game was the initial load time. I was thinking that loading everything up front would result in no delays while playing the game and people would appreciate that. Apparently not. :)

Anthony

Oh, of course. I always use a progress bar on the loading screen, but people were still peeved about the 30+ seconds to get to the main menu.

Originally posted by EpicBoy
Anthony

Oh, of course. I always use a progress bar on the loading screen, but people were still peeved about the 30+ seconds to get to the main menu.

I must agree with them. I hate when I have to wait to get to the main menu.

However, I don't mind waiting after I click 'Play,' provided there's something to look at while the game's loading. It's really impressive how shorter loading times seem when there's a progress bar.

Originally posted by Wayward
If you need to, stall the player with logos, anims, and help-screens.

How about non-skippable intros? ;)

20 to 30 seconds is a lot of time. What are you loading? And more importantly - what the file format like? Please dont tell me you're doing something like text parsing or loading all the game assets on startup...

grimreaper

Well, yeah, as I already said, I'm loading all assets up front so there is no hitching during gameplay.

This takes too long for people, generally speaking, so I'm considering a lazy loader of some sort and am gathering opinions on that idea...

Epic: I downloaded SETH and it's excellent - very, very polished, nice gameplay (it's addictive). Congratulations!

Here is a dump of filemon showing file access:

111993 19:09:22 SETHsPuzzleBoxe:3248 READ C:\Program Files\SETH's Puzzle Boxes\sounds\TMPTitleFade.wav SUCCESS Offset: 4466 Length: 512
111994 19:09:22 SETHsPuzzleBoxe:3248 READ C:\Program Files\SETH's Puzzle Boxes\sounds\TMPTitleFade.wav SUCCESS Offset: 4467 Length: 512
111995 19:09:22 SETHsPuzzleBoxe:3248 READ C:\Program Files\SETH's Puzzle Boxes\sounds\TMPTitleFade.wav SUCCESS Offset: 4468 Length: 512
111996 19:09:22 SETHsPuzzleBoxe:3248 READ C:\Program Files\SETH's Puzzle Boxes\sounds\TMPTitleFade.wav SUCCESS Offset: 4469 Length: 512

Why is it reading 512 bytes from TMPTitleFade.wav yet increasing the offset by 1? This is repeated in other bits of the log file.

This above should not be slowing down the loading too much as the fs maintains a look ahead buffer and the read is linear. On mine it loaded in less than 3 secs but then again I have an SATA drive is nice :)

grimreaper

Btw, I just uninstalled SETH, but it, er, didnt really uninstall. It just removed the install files. The cache files were not removed - they're still littering my hard disk which is not nice at all.

grimreaper

The short answer is, I don't know. :)

I'm using Blitz3D which does all the file access for me ... I tell it to load a wav file, and it happens automagically.

I also packed SETH into a single data file using a Blitz utility that was available ... it's responsible for the cache/tmp files and I won't be using it again. It also added overhead to the loading so that's gotta go.

Thanks for the effort though, I appreciate the info!

You know, this might be off topic but ...

Epic: I downloaded SETH and it's excellent - very, very polished, nice gameplay (it's addictive). Congratulations!

I appreciate that, thanks!

I wonder why it's only sold 11 copies though. At this point, other than the experience of developing it, it wasn't worth the time in any way, shape or form.

I know the game is somewhat short and the replay value is limited ... but is there something horribly wrong with it that I'm missing?

I really thought it would be a good earner for me, but nada ...

Originally posted by EpicBoy
I wonder why it's only sold 11 copies though. At this point, other than the experience of developing it, it wasn't worth the time in any way, shape or form.


Well, the game itself is excellent. 11 sales is pathetic for such a game - you certainly deserve better.

What's missing is probably the marketing. A small example: in your posts you dont have a signiture with a link to the site. It's something small, but the stacking up of these little things makes for a noticeable impact.

This is completely of topic now - why dont you start a thread elsewhere?

Edit: silly mistake on my part - I thought you didnt have a sig. I think the point still stands though: an excellent game wont go far without excellent marketing.

grimreaper

How about non-skippable intros?

Funny you should mention it, because I'm planning to get some of my media loading in on the sly while the intro is playing. If you skip the intro, then, you'll just get a loading bar instead. It will still be somewhat faster though.

@ Anthony
The comment was meant to pull your leg really! But yes.. it's an excellent idea.. since the player has to wait for the assets to load anyway, might as well get entertained with an intro!

Original post by Anthony Flack
Funny you should mention it, because I'm planning to get some of my media loading in on the sly while the intro is playing. If you skip the intro, then, you'll just get a loading bar instead. It will still be somewhat faster though.

Come to think of it, adding a loading bar on a non-skippable intro would be a good way to calm the players into watching it (even if nothing is actually loading in the background).