Acceptable Load Times On An Rpg?

[GP2X_Coder]

I would like to know what people think would be an Acceptable load time for an RPG game? What I mean for this is when you are walking around in a world and then you are attacked the time it takes for the characters and enemys to load into the battle screen.

I have managed to get the load time down to 2 seconds which will load in upto 3 main characters and 5 enemys + the menus and extra's.

Does anyone think this is to long or is it ok?

 

[iignotus]

Do the old Final Fantasy trick and apply a cheap, low-resource filter to the screen while loading. Even just a slow 2D fade or wipe will keep the player interested, rather than just a blank loading screen.

 

[GP2X_Coder]

I thought about doing something like that but wasn't sure. Anyway here are a few new pics of my progress.

I am losing way to much sleep working on this :blink:

 

[MagusZ]

You might be losing a lot of sleep from this but your work (fromt he pics) is excellent. I hope to see further dev on it And 2 seconds is just fine for me. If it would make it easier try putting less monsters on the screen by making less more. Make less monsters stronger so you don't need 5 or more on the scree. (just an idea don't really know the way you planned out the game)

 

[sehs33]

I don't know whether this is helpful or not, but why don't you start showing the battle field, after 0.5 second show your heros, than the monsters one by one? or if the battle field requires the longest time, show the characters on a black background and then show the battle field, guess this might do the trick (maybe), and btw, your work looks amazing, hope you don't discontinue it (please please please )

 

[Gadget]

Looking really really sweet!! Is there a bottleneck with the level loading? Just how much data are you loading into memory? 2 seconds doesn't seem very long to me, especially if you have a loading screen / progress bar.

 

[Blah]

Don't see why it would take that long, must be something inefficient in your code.

 

[Tobriand]

Fades are your friend. As everyone else has said, transitions are brilliant for this sort of thing. You might even find this is the kind of job that you could offload onto the second processor - i.e. capture the framebuffer, and tell it to fade whilst the first is left to sort out all the upcoming battle calculations and whatnot.

That said, a screen that said "LOADING" for 2 seconds would *really* get on my nerves. It's all about how you present it.

Basically, if the screen froze for 0.5 of a second and then went to a transition that took 1.5-2, then that's be fine. If the game just locked or the screen went black for 2 seconds, that'd be annoying, but manageable.

If you use the word "loading" it'll seem to last a lot longer...

 

[___]

Instead of a simple fade, you could also freeze the screen, fade it and show some animation, like two swords coming in and crossing... something similar that looks somehow like a transition into battle. Or a cool fancy string that says "prepare for battle" with a funky bitmap font.

 

[Blah]

Put on some battle music with a nice agressive intro.

 

[NoidZ]

Wow! That looks great. About the loading times: I'll be glad if it doesn't take as long as Morrowind : Elder Scrolls for the Xbox :lol:

 

[deepmenace]

Tasty, lookin very good.

there is more to it that load times tho, although 2 seconds is very good tho. favourably comparable to console rpg's.

how long might the shortest battle take?

are we gonna get hit with random encounters? if so, how many might we get hit with in 20 seconds of map running?

i ask these because one of the recent suikoden games had the problem of the loading taking longer than the battles on some occcasions! this coupled with too many encounters killed the game entirely for me.

i, for one, would love an "auto-button" that fought the match for you before the gfx were even loaded up. Maybe with an auto heal if characters HP dropped below a certain figure.

 

[AcidiC]

You may be losing your sleep - but you are winning out hearts

And yes, fades are the awesome - pokemon style; although i strongly recommend NOT fading with a giant pokeball.

 

[GP2X_Coder]

Thanks for all of the replys I think I will try sehs33 idea and load in each character and show them appearing one by one while I have something like Prepare For Battle Written across the screen like xnopasaranx suggested. I will try and it and see how it looks.

Thanks everyone.


I like pretty much all of the suggestions I just wanted to do something other than a simple fade to screen even though I might end up doing that anyway.

 

[Epicenter]

You can't precache the monsters for the area you are in beforehand, then load a new set when you enter a different area with different adversaries? Just an idea. Either way you shouldn't be hurting for RAM; there's about 57 MB for you to play with.

 

[Winterkid]

Perhaps a quick fade and small animation?

Or a small animation of an SD card glowing or pulsating or a picture of a CD spinning is always nice to look at?

Or some tense music like someone suggested to give the wait a bit of "atmosphere"

Perhaps a loading screen with a graphically pleasing progress bar, with a picture of some monsters or something in the background...

One RPG from a long time ago on the Apple II (I think...) had the option to switch battle animations to lower settings or off altogether, but with only 2 seconds loading time doesn't really seem a neccesity.

With the way the game is looking so far, I think everyone here might be willing to wait up to like 4 or even 5 seconds, if the battles aren't over too fast and provide decent "action"

Excellent work, by the way. Keep it up, but try to get a bit more sleep, man.

 

[Paradox]

looks nice. the battle menu could use some fancying up though, looks a bit plain and boring with just black and white lines

 

[GP2X_Coder]

You can't precache the monsters for the area you are in beforehand, then load a new set when you enter a different area with different adversaries? Just an idea. Either way you shouldn't be hurting for RAM; there's about 57 MB for you to play with.

I can precache a few of the characters but not enuff of them to keep the load time down each characters graphic file is about 5mb each uncompress raw data and thats just the basic animations(standing/running/death/hurt) I load in each animation on the fly when you select the move on the menu screen I load in that animations which you can't tell I am doing it all. So basically if I have a battle with 3 good guys and 5 bad guys thats about 35-40mb of ram needed and then there is the sound effects/music that has to be loaded in also I have a loading method working now and it's working pretty good I haven't have a battle take longer than 3seconds max to load in and that with 8characters being loaded in so about 35-40mb. The way I have it working is the background appears then each character appears on the screen one by one until its finished which seems to go very fast.

 

[BradN]

Another option would be to make the models smaller, which would let you pre-load more animations and/or fit more things on the screen. Not sure if that fits into your overall design though. I think it'd be cool to have a camera view above and behind your characters' heads, looking at the enemies, but that would probably be trickier to model.

 

[dodgyville]

Your game looks great. Congrats!