HL2 - "Loading"

R

RTFMish

Guest
Do you guys remember back in HL1 when everytime you would walk about 30 feet, and every 30 feet, there would be a loading screen? I didn't really mind it alot, but it started to get annoying, has anyone emailed VALVe about that, if it will be like that in HL2? Or does anybody know?
 
Having those quick 2 second loads every few minutes saves having to wait forever for the map to load :)

No idea if HL2 does it though... I might email Gabe later.
 
IMO I would rather wait about a minute to let the whole map load, so that way if I have to backtrack or anything I don't have to wait for that annoying "Loading" stuff.

And I just remembered someone said earlyier today that you can spend hours on HL2 maps just exploring.
 
I think they've said that they will use the same technique when necessary: they believe that more frequent, but very short, loads help keep you immersed in the game better. Obviously, there are areas like in the buggy vid where you can trnasverse huge distances without having to see a loading screen.
 
Thats because HL1 maps were so small.. HL2 maps are HUGE compared to HL1 maps. So there won't be as much loading.
 
I might add that they have that in the Valve info thread, they e-mailed gabe and asked that exact same question. He said that they'll be very similar to the HL1 loading screens, and that they're trying to make the loading as transparent as possible.

EDIT: Crap. Too late

What Apos said.
 
I found the "loading..." symbol to be far less intrusive than cutting to a sceen with a slow loading-bar.

I'd expect that they'd be less frequent than before though.
 
RTFMish said:
Do you guys remember back in HL1 when everytime you would walk about 30 feet, and every 30 feet, there would be a loading screen? I didn't really mind it alot, but it started to get annoying, has anyone emailed VALVe about that, if it will be like that in HL2? Or does anybody know?
Click to expand...

I never had that happen to me? Ever.
 
I've got no idea how it works in HL2 but that's always been a little niggling annoyance to me. I mean, it really ruins the feel of an immersive game.

On my mid-range machine, a HL SP map can load in barely three seconds, if not less. Even saying that HL2 maps will take at least twenty times that (a minute), I'd like to know why precaching is such an apparent difficulty. I'm in a lift for ten seconds- why not load the level while the thing ascends? There's a gigantic, elaborate blast door sliding open- why not load the level while its doing so, meaning you can step through with no difficulty? There's a linear train ride where you can talk to a small group of NPCs, why not...

It just goes on. I don't see why no FPS has a precache-based loading system yet :hmph:
 
Delgarto said:
I never had that happen to me? Ever.
Click to expand...

Then you never played HL1, SP.

Can you explain how bigger maps would make those loading things less frequent? Wouldn't it make it more frequent?
 
Murray_H said:
Still stuck on the train into Black Mesa then?
Click to expand...

He's confused because the original poster called it a loading "screen", rather than just the small word "loading...".
 
It will work like in HL1, like Apos said, and this is just fine, because HL2 will make map segments bigger, although hopefully it won't become too much of an annoyance. What if, when you first start teh game, the wHol3 GeMa LoaDSA aS one map0?11

game.bsp

lol jk

Once again for the fiftieth time, TRUST VALVE, thay will know what is annoying and what seems like a too-long loading time, they are very dedicated to this stuff. Oh! I forgot! Remember in the E3 vids? Each segment took like 5 seconds to load! That's great! :D
 
thats the way metroid prime loaded the levels (loaded them just before it thought you were going to go through a door). the end result was great. seamless, only took a while to load sometimes if you backtracked straight away.
it was confusing at first, because the doors dont open until it's finished loading, so sometimes you'll shoot the door to open it, and the colour will go from it meaning it should open "now" .. but then it'd be 10 seconds until it opened.

but that rarely happened.
and its hardly applicable to hl2 anyway.

just blathering!
 
RTFMish said:
Can you explain how bigger maps would make those loading things less frequent? Wouldn't it make it more frequent?
Click to expand...


"maps" are just places were you can walk about freely without loading.

If a corridor was split into 2 loading parts, then thats considered 2 maps.

In HL2 the engine is able to make bigger gaps between each load, there for bigger "Maps".

I didnt notice any "loading" in the beta.
 
the loading in HL was the best idea ever. no freaking loading scene.

I think your confusing HL with some cut scene based game. HL has no cut scenes, and therefor no seperate levels. (In the traditional sence)

Leave it as it.
 
I loved the way Half-Life loaded the next bit of the map. It made the game feel like one giant continuous level. I'm not suprised that Valve is taking this exact same approach with Half-Life 2, but I am surprised they're not using a precache system to make map loading completely transparent to the gamer. Is there some technical reason why they're not using precaching? Hmmm, sounds like a good e-mail question for Gabe.
 
You mean HL wasn't just one big level...? Damn... i knew it was too good to be true

:p



POST 100!... im so slow...
 
Wesisapie said:
thats the way metroid prime loaded the levels (loaded them just before it thought you were going to go through a door). the end result was great. seamless, only took a while to load sometimes if you backtracked straight away.
it was confusing at first, because the doors dont open until it's finished loading, so sometimes you'll shoot the door to open it, and the colour will go from it meaning it should open "now" .. but then it'd be 10 seconds until it opened.

but that rarely happened.
and its hardly applicable to hl2 anyway.

just blathering!
Click to expand...

But you have to remember that there is a lareg seperate loading time every time you take an elevator in Metroid Prime, and the world will be much smaller and less detailed than HL2's. I wished there was a way just to have a large area around the character loaded at all times instead of shifts, but I don't know if that is possible on machines of today.

Anyway HL2 will have the loading segments of HL1; but if the beta was any indicator, the loads will be even shorter than the first one's and they are much less frequent.
 
With most of the good-looking-ness of HL2 in shaders and realtime effects, most of the level data in terms of hard polys isn't going to be a rediculous amount. Therefore HL2 loads may well be as short or shorter than HL1 loads.

Depending on how low-level the sdk is, (and if such a feature doesn't exist), perhaps a custom hammer box trigger that will start prefetching the next level could be implemented. That way designers could have complete control over what prefetch loads start where.
 
manny_c44 said:
I wished there was a way just to have a large area around the character loaded at all times instead of shifts, but I don't know if that is possible on machines of today.
Click to expand...

Dungeon Siege has this technology where the engine streams new content in constantly resulting in only one loading screen when you boot up the game. :thumbs:

Not sure if this could be done as effectively with an FPS like HL2...
 
*sigh* what I meant was it wasn't every 30 feet and a loading words. I've seen the loading words, I've beaten the game. And it definately isn't 30 feet for every new area to load. That's just stupid, and you know the game wasn't like that, so don't act like it was. I just played it not more than 5 minutes ago, and it definately is more than thirty feet. Some people over exaggerate, and it pisses me off.
 
Yes I did over-exegerate, but you obviousily got the point, and understood what I was saying.
Did I piss you off? Are you going to cry? Do you want your bottle filled with warm milk?
 
Is there some technical reason why they're not using precaching?
Click to expand...

Perhaps because it would be a huge waste of limited memory space (would you rather have your memory devoted to making the game cool, or constantly swapping most of the content in and out?), and people who don't have gigs of system memory wouldn't be able to make it work?
 
I would much rather prefer the intermitten loadings as opposed to the occasional huge loading times. When the loading every once in a while is only like a second long at most, I can barely notice it.

If I have to sit there and stare at a loading screen for a while, I lose interest in the game and my mind wonders to other things, then when it loads I have to put myself back into the game, which can be annoying.

I think Valve probably put a lot of thought into this, and found that it best works the way they are going to implement it.
 
Yea, awhile after I made this thread I realized how good VALVe is at sorting this stuff out in order to make the person that is playing the game, the happyest.. Or so they claim.

Meh.. I have faith!
 
Hopefully there are both clearcut and prechached loading capabilites in source and one can choose which to use through the game settings. Somehow I doubt that valve would bother to do this though, spend all that time coding an implentation of both that can dynamically switch, just to get rid of 5 second load times, which are short because they structured the entire game around the concept of loading large levels clear-cut piece by piece.
 
Well, of course it's capable of precaching maps and things like that, but Valve will probably choose not to because it's more practical in this case. In mods and in multiplayer and things you can probably expect the usual loadings.
 
"Are you going to cry? Do you want your bottle filled with warm milk?"

You aren't dissing warm milk are you. :O
 
Regardless of how they implement map loading in HL2, I've noticed in other FPS that having lots of RAM speeds up the loading times greatly. So if you want short loading times, getting 1 GB of RAM would be a good idea.
 
Flights Sims are the only game I know of that does the bubble map thing. Flights Sims (Im talking LO-MAC and F4 here, dunno about arcade ones) have a player bubble which works like LOD but for everything, so the terrain is high detailed, the enemy planes have AI etc inside this bubble, and outside you use lower detail textures and a lot cheaper Plane algorithms. Falcon 4 had the best one, basically you could go up and fly anywhere in Korea without any loading, and you would see realistic battles and planes wherever you went, was amazing. LoMac had missions where all the planes and stuff were defined beforehand, and it wasnt as good. But anyway I digress.

It's probably not really feasable in a FPS, as Apos said you'd lose a heck of a lot of memory bandwidth just swapping the geometry in and out. Flight sims have lots of the same objects so it's not to bad, but HL2 every building is unique (almost).

Tho I have to admit I would rather in the next 5 years we kept the same Graphics level as HL2 and they implemented this, it would make for great open ended games. My dream game is taking a Halo like setting, where your guerillas and just allowing you to go anywhere and blow up anything in order to defeat the enemy :).

Well theres a long post not really relavent to anything.
 
Think i read somewhere that compared to HL1, HL2 maps are 64 times larger. This could mean 1] the whole game is 64 times longer to play, if they make the same number of levels that were in HL1, or 2] the games are roughly the same overall size, making HL2 have 64 times less loading points than in HL1.


And btw....what a prat for saying HL1 loads every 30ft. HL1 SP levels have at least 10-20mins of movement before you get to the next loading point.

That could of course be down to your crap machine unable to hold enough data in the memory and so its caching bits of the level.....
 
I think its good thing , anytime i saw this loading, i knew i was going to the right place.
 
Apos said:
Perhaps because it would be a huge waste of limited memory space (would you rather have your memory devoted to making the game cool, or constantly swapping most of the content in and out?), and people who don't have gigs of system memory wouldn't be able to make it work?
Click to expand...
It's not an either/or thing. It seems that with a fast enough processor and sufficient RAM, you should be able to have continuous loading and all the cool bits that make the game fun. They could build triggers into the map that starts loading the next section before the player actually gets there rather than constantly loading and caching map information.
 
God , giv the guy a break wos jus an exageration to the loading times, lol no biggy

And also Valve said that HL2 has 12 or so 'chapters' or 'sections' that take 3 or 4 hours each to complete (to the average gamer)
 
the regular loading of small maps shouldn't be a problem if the map maker knows his/her stuff. They be able to make even the smallest maps interesting and long enough to avoid the loading cropping up every few minutes

Only reason why some sections of HL1 had it was the unfortunate limits imposed by the engine, meaning the odd tiny tiny section was unavoidable
 
Re: map size

Read this:
http://collective.valve-erc.com/ind...06159031874671600&question=106159074774468800

It seems to be 16x the max horizontal area of a non-extended HL1 map = approx 1.1km^2. HOWEVER, that is keeping the unit defined the same as HL1 ie. 1 inch. Mods can increase this and get maps as big as 30 km^2 without changing physics too badly either... Personally, I think it is good to have areas <1 km with quicker and more seamless load times - that is the whole spirit of HL1. Jolting, long and counter-immersive load screens are bad mmkay!
 
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