From the latest dev. stream and the comments in the P+U stream it became aparent that Pantheon will only use loading screens when absolutely necessary. Ie. the local system is somehow caught off guard, not having loaded all the resources it needs to display the game at the players current position.
VR has probably already thought of this, but here goes anyways.
Normally this will not be a problem when you are just running around as tiles are loaded in the required level of details as you get closer to them, hence why instant travel (long distance, outside current loaded detailed tiles) poses a problem for this algorithm.
Running allows the system to predict what tiles to load, whereas instant travel could in theory cause you to travel anywhere in the world, instantly requiring the load of a lot of tiles it was not possible to anticipate. But in practise, at least for most situations I can think of, the system could prepare for the instant travel by doing some early loading of the destination tiles.
Doing the early loading ofcourse comes with the risk that it may not be needed. The wizard could cancel the cast of teleport, or the player could choose not to click the teleport item, eventually making the system drop the early loaded resources. Matters would be worse if you were in a place like the EQ fire pot room or EQ PoK where a lot of objects allowing instant travel to different destinations exists. The system would probably prefer not to load tiles for 20 different places you just may go, both for load on the client, disk and the memory usage (depending on the memory size of the tiles). In the case where many instant travel targets exists which could be loaded, maybe load the most likely, and fall back on the loading screen for test rest.
The loading screen should always be a fall back mechanism, not least because different player client systems will have vastly different disk IO performance, causing tile load time to be significantly slower or faster (factor of ~35 in difference from a mechanical disk to a NVMe disk).
For teleports, do with EVE Online did with their stargates and put in an animation of you going through some spacial warp tunnel which, when you got to the end, had you visually zooming into the destination star system. At least it was intersting to look at and let you swivel your camera during the warp to look at your fleet.
Loading times are a good thing, .... well used to be :) Gave a chance to run to the faucet and refill the water! Or back in the EQ days you had time to go to the bathroom, PLENTY of time! hehe
If we have to look at a 15 second loading screen every once in a while I'll be totally OK with that. With that said, your idea seems legit.
Vandraad said:For teleports, do with EVE Online did with their stargates and put in an animation of you going through some spacial warp tunnel which, when you got to the end, had you visually zooming into the destination star system. At least it was intersting to look at and let you swivel your camera during the warp to look at your fleet.
Exactly, a loading screen doesn't have to be a black screen saying "Loading Please Wait"
Zorkon said:Vandraad said:For teleports, do with EVE Online did with their stargates and put in an animation of you going through some spacial warp tunnel which, when you got to the end, had you visually zooming into the destination star system. At least it was intersting to look at and let you swivel your camera during the warp to look at your fleet.
Exactly, a loading screen doesn't have to be a black screen saying "Loading Please Wait"
Many games already do this with things like elevators and other objects/machines that block the line of sight of the player. Ever wondered why that elevator in fallout took 2 minutes to go up 3 floors? It was a loading screen.
Personally feel immersive loading screens are the way to go as Vandraad stated, having your character walk into the portal with a portal animation and then pop out on the other side would be better than a wallpaper and a loading bar. Just have to make it not annoying and epilepsy inducing.
Ranarius said:Loading times are a good thing, .... well used to be :) Gave a chance to run to the faucet and refill the water! Or back in the EQ days you had time to go to the bathroom, PLENTY of time! hehe
If we have to look at a 15 second loading screen every once in a while I'll be totally OK with that. With that said, your idea seems legit.
I remember those! Always fun coming back to your dead character after zone train destroyed the zone entrance. But on a serious note, downtime in games is not a bad thing as it allows you to take care of real life matters like eating, drinking, and stretching. Part of why I liked the downtime in EQ(though it was too much downtime) as it allowed you some flexibility.
I'm not sure it works exactly the way the OP is thinking of it. Or maybe I'm not understanding the OP.
The new improvements they made don't alter the fact that there will be zones and that upon entering the zone there will be a loading process. It just circumvents the need to load all assists of the entire zone as you enter. And instead only loads those assets within a certain range of the player. This limits the amount of memory needed for the client, increases performance, and makes it possible to have bigger zones without crippling the average pc. It also provides additional flexibility in using LOD.
I'm not sure it works exactly the way the OP is thinking of it. Or maybe I'm not understanding the OP.
I think you are right. I may have assummed a bit too much about how the zones work from a technical perspective.
As I understood the stream, players are handed off between different zone simulation servers, so zones is in fact still a technical thing. But I would still argue that the major part of the time needed for loading the required resources to enter a new zone or area could be done like the tiles. We just dont know a lot about it, so I only mentioned the tiles and didn't try to elaborate on what I don't know how works.
There might also be a cheat concern here as a player technically would receive the live updated information about the other side of the teleport, which could be used to somehow in a modified client for the user to see what is going on, without risking entering the place. Im thinking place like EQ1 Plane of Fear entrance etc.
I'd never really thought of caching graphics as an exploitable thing. But I suppose it could be.
Regardless, what you're talking about kind of defeats the purpose of both the new tile caching and zone-based game architecture. The whole idea is that you're releasing art assets from memory when they are out of range (or out of the zone) to improve performance and to reduce client side resource consumption. When you enter a new zone one of the first things that happens is the release of the assets from the zone you left, freeing up resources on your pc to load the assets from the zone you're entering. If you're trying to pre-cache the assets of the zone you're entering before you leave the zone you're in, you're essentially doubling the graphics that are cached on your pc until you enter the new zone. You don't have to render both at the same time, so it's not a double hit to GPU or CPU (necessarily). But it would be a double hit to RAM.
If the assumption is that everyone has enough system resources to double the load just to prevent zoning, I'd rather have the zoning. Rather than making it smoother to cross a zoneline every once in a while to get where I'm going I'd prefer greater variety and fidelity of visuals for where I am.
You're absolutely right. It totally depends on the game.
Like in WoW, there are lots of zones. But transitioning thru them works like you're describing (caching the graphics as you approach before crossing the zone line). They architect the game to support this. There often isn't a definitive difference of visuals between adjacent zones right in the area where they meet, so at least as you cross a lot of the art assets are shared. And as you move thru the zone you load more assets to accomodate more unique visuals you're moving toward. Works pretty darn well too. Only rarely is there a stutter moving from one zone from the next. And you only see a loading screen when moving between continents/planes.
Wow has a bit of a different art style though. And resoluton of textures doesn't need to be quite as high as they appear to be aiming for with Pantheon. Higher resolution art (ground, trees, foliage, rocks, characters, buildings, etc.) equals higher memory consumption.
I was somewhat surprised by the fact that Pantheon wasn't going to shoot for a seemless game in terms of zones. But as I understand it that's one of the limitations of using Unity as a base engine. I think it (Unity) is built with the foundation of zones. Sounds like VR has already greatly improved that limitation, but they might not be able to completely avoid it. Not without going to a different platform, which would start this whole project over again from scratch. And if they can get a big bang for the buck on performance by using zones, well, I'm all in.