Why loading so slow? Cause of the 2003 hackers?

[DEATH eVADER]

This question has been bugging me soooo much. However I am curious about this, after all, many engines as advanced as source seem to load rather quickly.

This problem struck me when I was playing Vampire: Bloodlines, the first ever game to licence the source engine outside of Valve. Although that game seems to lag pretty bad (but hey most open ended RPG's do, for example Morrowind), that game seems to have excellent load times. This is the question, why is the game so damn slow loading?

The most likely culprit that many people don't seem to be pointing the finger at is, the 2003 Hackers. Troika lincenced the Source engine prior to the leak of game content as well as Source itself. Offcourse this would mean either the hackers were more malicious then first thought, or whilst fixing Source, Valve missed important parts of the programming.

unfortunately, I'm not a programmer myself, so I'm purely lying my evidence down with no facts. Maybe someone of this site knows more about coding and progamming than me can help me understand about coding and stuff.

I hope this problem can actually be resolved as it bugs me as well as everybody else.

 

[epmode]

Half-Life 2's textures, sounds and pretty much everything else are stored in compressed GCF files. The reason the game has such ridiculously long load times is because the relavant assets for the upcoming map are being decompressed and *then* loaded into memory.

Most/all pirate releases of HL2 have the GCFs decompressed during installation, so while the hard drive space required is about double the legit version, it also loads twice as fast. D=

 

[BlackMesaDude]

Should be like farcry or doom3 one load at the start and thats it unless you complete the level there should not be any loading between.

 

[DEATH eVADER]

What are the textures and sound for bloodlines stored as? Can you store the files as other formats under Source?

 

[Przemek]

epmode, the GCF files are not compressed, so it's not the reason for long loading times.
And Doom3 uses compressed .zip files to store it's data and when you uncompress those files, you will have _longer_ loading times.

 

[ríomhaire]

This really shouldn't be a poll.

 

[^Ben]

It's because source's art assets are massively high quality.

Doom 3 = low polygon and low texture quality = still massive load times.

Vampire got away with better loading times because they cut the game up so badly, ever wonder why you had to load a room with only 1 person inside?

The GCF's have very little to-do with the load times, I have seen a pirate game load up on a comprable system to mine and the load times are practically the same.

 

[DEATH eVADER]

But even the hub-to-hub transitions didn't take long to load in bloodlines even though they were generally bigger than some of the small areas in HL2, which would often take longer to load

 

[Pesmerga]

Because your PC sucks.

Get an FX-57.

 

[iMMuNiTy]

Half-Life 2 was announced to be very flexible machine wise. So then VALVe are big fat liars? Not only Gabe Newell?

 

[DEATH eVADER]

Because your PC sucks.

Get an FX-57.

How long does it take for the levels to load on your comp.

 

[Sieg]

Half-Life 2 was announced to be very flexible machine wise. So then VALVe are big fat liars? Not only Gabe Newell?

Toally, a bad apple doesn't fall far from the tree.

 

[DEATH eVADER]

Half-Life 2 was announced to be very flexible machine wise. So then VALVe are big fat liars? Not only Gabe Newell?

It is flexible to an extent, just not flexible enough :afro:

 

[Puzzlemaker]

Stop whining, all of you. The loading time is fine. Its just its a BIG, DETAILED GAME. So it takes a LITTLE TIME TO LOAD.

Augh...

 

[Duracell]

Because your PC sucks.

Get an FX-57.

Uninformed post of the year award goes to...

It's down to the way Half-life2 stores the game data.

 

[^Ben]

Uninformed post of the year award goes to...

It's down to the way Half-life2 stores the game data.

Runner award goes to!

 

[smwScott]

I don't have a problem with lengthy initial load times, such as Far Cry, Doom 3, etc. However, in Half-Life 2 the constant mid-game loads completely killed the atmoshpere and mood for me. I would often times play something along the lines of phone tetris in between loads. Now I'm sure my load times were longer than some, as my PC isn't high end anymore, but I didn't have this problem on similarly detailed games such as FC and D3. I don't think it's a coding problem as much as much as it as a bad design decision to split the loads up evenly rather than a few large ones.

 

[xzeox]

Seriously, if you PC is completely formatted and youve got nothin on it except HL2, the load times are actually pretty fast and decent. Its all in the PC.

 

[Salad22]

The most likely culprit that many people don't seem to be pointing the finger at is, the 2003 Hackers.

Don't forget the 2005 hackers too :hmph:

 

[Drackard]

Hmm, i am currently on an :

Intel Celeron 2.5
768mb DDR
80gb Maxtor
ATI Radeon X700 256mb, AGP

and my loading times in hl2 and css are 2 minutes max, usually a minute if that .... so i aint complaining, but there are moments where it takes a little longer then i'd like, but hey, what ya gonna do eh ...

 

[DEATH eVADER]

Don't forget the 2005 hackers too :hmph:

There were 2005 hackers too!?

 

[xzeox]

There were 2005 hackers too!?

OH NOO!

 

[Drackard]

The World Will Come To An End .......

 

[xzeox]

How fast do people want HL2 to load? Seriously?

 

[Drackard]

In all honesty, i say, F*** Loading times, as long as you can still play the game, stop complaining

 

[Hyperion2010]

I experience the same behavior on all three engines, first load takes a long time, then all subsiquent loads are much much faster. What I want to be able to do is load more than one my into ram at once since I have 2 gigs and I could use a whole gig to load like 10 maps, and if valve simply implemented a system where maps already loaded into ram were seamless, they could compete with UnrealEngine3.

Think about it, depending on which map you are on certain surronding maps are already being streamed into ram while ones that are now farther away are dumped. Coding and implementation could theoreticaly be worked out in a gui interface in the sdk pannel, and then the game would load accordingly depending on how much ram the user had.

 

[Salad22]

There were 2005 hackers too!?

Yupp, well not exactly. They alomst made it this time too.
In my Chat cummunity system, I have Valve Network progress in my account.

Those Bastards hacked into my account and compressed the whole security.
They sent threat e-mails to valve and almost managed to steel programs.

The news chocked me though

 

[StardogChampion]

Half-Life 2's textures, sounds and pretty much everything else are stored in compressed GCF files. The reason the game has such ridiculously long load times is because the relavant assets for the upcoming map are being decompressed and *then* loaded into memory.

Most/all pirate releases of HL2 have the GCFs decompressed during installation, so while the hard drive space required is about double the legit version, it also loads twice as fast. D=

This man speaks the truth ^^^^^^^^^^^^^

I only hope Ritual don't use .GCF's to store their content.

 

[^Ben]

This man speaks the truth ^^^^^^^^^^^^^

I only hope Ritual don't use .GCF's to store their content.

You need to know what your speaking about before you spout crap about it, did you fall for the "hitbox issues video"

They are not compressed, they are fully uncompressed. You download files compressed but as soon as they get to your PC they are uncompressed(which you won't be playing a game at the same time)

There is a placebo effect with pirated versions that make it seem like it loads faster, when in fact it dosent.

Please get a clue before you spout crap.

 

[RaBiD WeAzEL]

I seriously do not think that the load times are bad at all...

Doom 3 takes longer to load on my computer. Same w/ Farcry.

The only reason that HL2 would take a while to start is because it has very high quality textures and what-not. The GCF's shouldn't slow it down much, or not at all.

 

[BlackMesaDude]

How fast do people want HL2 to load? Seriously?

I want a 1 load at the start like farcry,doom3 and thats it, then if i get some stutters etc here and there lies on my problem end but one load is enough and if farcry can store a huge island why cant hl2 store a level ?

 

[UndeadScottsman]

I noticed a significant increase in load times from the initial release of Half-Life 2, to the current version, which I suspect are caused by the anti-stuttering measures Valve implemented.

 

[Kare Bear]

I thaught valve made a new streaming technology for the xbox version.So it has small load times.

 

[^Ben]

I don't think that's implemented yet.

But the way I understand what it's intended purpose was for, because the xbox has very little texture memory you need to stream textures in and out of memory, I don't think you can stream bits of a BSP file out so it won't technically make the "levels bigger" it will just improve texture usage.

Maybe if they put all the levels in to a massive BSP it would work?

 

[DoctorWeeTodd]

Hmmm...I remember entering a post here but it's not here. So here I go again.

1. There was apparently only once hacker involved in the 2003 leak not a vast army of them involved in a conspiracy.

2. Why does everybody blame him for everything? Next thing I know, I log on here and read about the l-l4><0l/ sinking a boat full of refugees and murdering UNICEF workers.

 

[r2000]

Half-Life 2 was announced to be very flexible machine wise. So then VALVe are big fat liars? Not only Gabe Newell?

Your stupid.
Its flexible in the sense it runs on some pretty crappy equipment and still has good framerates.

Load times have nothing to do with flexibility and everything to do with optimization.

And Far Cry uses a lot more processing power than HL2. I'm convinced that its source's scalability (ability to run on crappy equipment) that causes source to load slowly.

 

[Computer5k]

I noticed a significant increase in load times from the initial release of Half-Life 2, to the current version, which I suspect are caused by the anti-stuttering measures Valve implemented.

Or maybe it's because your hl2 gcf is fragmented all over your HDD

 

[Pesmerga]

How long does it take for the levels to load on your comp.

A long time, because I have an amd64 3000+/1024gbRAM but you don't see me complaining. Get over it, it's not anyones fault.

 

[bam23]

I don't think it takes a long time to load, how fast does it need to be? It's not instant but it doesn't take forever, it's just right to me.

 

[Foebane]

All of you have overlooked one thing: distance covered in a fixed time.

Let me explain:

In Doom 3, a whole complete area of the Mars base is loaded at once, but once you start, you're progressing slowly, and checking every nook and cranny for ammo and monsters, and the fights with monsters slow you down as well. Because of this, it can take about half an hour to complete each map.

In HL2, the same is true for some areas too, but HL2 has fast vehicles that propel you through areas quickly, and since the HL2 maps have more detail, that means smaller maps covered more quickly (depends on detail in each map).

So because of HL2's detail and the speed at which you travel through the maps half the time, it's not surprising the loading times are much more noticeable. You could also argue that the loading sessions on Doom 3 act as a welcome break from fighting between maps, whereas in HL2 they happen whether you want a break or not.

I'll tell you of an incident when I was playing HL2 once where I ended up crossing the same load boundary THREE TIMES in a row:

I'm in the buggy, and I arrive in a tunnel with headcrab zombies in it milling around what look like rooms, so I stop and get out. I walk towards the rooms... BAM - Loading time!

So I investigate the rooms, deal with the zombies and find ammo, etc. I walk back to the buggy... BAM - Loading time!

I get into the buggy and drive off... BAM - Loading time!

You see, the issue is not really the loading times but where they happen, and sometimes the frequency at which they can happen, and if you're as unfortunate as I was above, it can be REALLY annoying!

That's my two cents.