3 ms·

Tell that to Valve. The Source engine and all its games (Half Life 1, 2, Portal, Alyx) have horrible load times. They might not be as bad as the GTA example but

Tell that to Valve. The Source engine and all its games (Half Life 1, 2, Portal, Alyx) have horrible load times. They might not be as bad as the GTA example but they're long and extremely frustrating. And yet, no one cares, Those games (and GTA5) all sold millions of copies. The only way this stuff gets fixed is if (a) some programmer takes pride in load times or (b) customers stop buying games with slow load times. (b) never happens. If the game itself is good then people put up with the load times. If the game is bad and it has bad load times they'll point to the load times as a reason it's bad but the truth is it's the game itself that's bad because plenty of popular games have bad load times Also, any game programmer loading and parsing text at runtime by definition, doesn't care about load times. If you want fast load times you setup your data so you can load it directly into memory, fix a few pointers and then use it where it is. If you have to parse text or even parse binary and move things around then you've already failed.

gwd 6y ago
I think there may sort of be another thing going on: Basically, that the length of load time is an indicator, "This is a really serious program." I've sort of noticed the same thing with test machines: the more expensive the machine, the longer it takes to actually get to the grub prompt. Six minutes is probably excessive, but having GTA take 1-2 minutes to load almost certainly makes people feel better about the money they spent on the game than if it loaded up in 5 seconds like some low-production 2D adventure game.
- ric2b 6y ago
  > but having GTA take 1-2 minutes to load almost certainly makes people feel better about the money they spent on the game than if it loaded up in 5 seconds like some low-production 2D adventure game. Given that it has been the most common criticism of the game since it launched, I don't think anyone views it as a sign of quality.
danlugo92 6y ago
Do you have a link to how one would archiece this data pointer magic? I wouldnt know what to search for.
- wmil 6y ago
  In the simplest case, in C you can read file data into memory, cast it as a struct, then just use that struct without ever doing any parsing. As things get more complex you're probably going to need to manually set some pointers after loading blobs of data and casting them. It's just the standard way of dealing with binary files in C. I'm not sure what you'd need for search terms.
  - danlugo92 6y ago
    Oh I understand now, thank you.
- imtringued 6y ago
  Just use flatbuffers/capnproto.
  - danlugo92 6y ago
    Thank you.

gwd 6y ago

I think there may sort of be another thing going on: Basically, that the length of load time is an indicator, "This is a really serious program." I've sort of noticed the same thing with test machines: the more expensive the machine, the longer it takes to actually get to the grub prompt. Six minutes is probably excessive, but having GTA take 1-2 minutes to load almost certainly makes people feel better about the money they spent on the game than if it loaded up in 5 seconds like some low-production 2D adventure game.

ric2b 6y ago
> but having GTA take 1-2 minutes to load almost certainly makes people feel better about the money they spent on the game than if it loaded up in 5 seconds like some low-production 2D adventure game. Given that it has been the most common criticism of the game since it launched, I don't think anyone views it as a sign of quality.

danlugo92 6y ago

Do you have a link to how one would archiece this data pointer magic? I wouldnt know what to search for.

wmil 6y ago
In the simplest case, in C you can read file data into memory, cast it as a struct, then just use that struct without ever doing any parsing. As things get more complex you're probably going to need to manually set some pointers after loading blobs of data and casting them. It's just the standard way of dealing with binary files in C. I'm not sure what you'd need for search terms.
- danlugo92 6y ago
  Oh I understand now, thank you.
imtringued 6y ago
Just use flatbuffers/capnproto.
- danlugo92 6y ago
  Thank you.