Say you have the world of your game broken up into several frames. Walking left out of frame 4 for example, could make you enter the right side of the screen in frame 5.
Obviously, there will be a little bit of a load time between frames. What would you say is "too long" of a load time for a 2D game to take when loading between frames?
This is a game that is 1280 x 720 and uses many large sprites with alpha channels to anti-alias.
Too long just depends on the time needed for loading the level.
And what's "too long" is probably different per person and type of game.
In a fast game you prolly don't want to wait long before continuing the next level (or part of the level).
Try playing quake II or half-life and check if you like that loading time in between different level parts.
If you have a slow game, it prolly doesn't matter all that much.
Not sure if Croc for the PSX is a great example, because I think those loading times were taking a bit long.
You can also setup an example with different loading (correctly called: waiting time is this case) times between two frames and try out what you like. Or have some testers do it for you.
When you exit one area in ANY frame, it will jump to a plain black frame with "Loading..." In the centre of it. This frame immediately is told to jump to the target frame. But you will see this frame display for a few seconds before the target frame actually boots up.
Maybe I should just post a video showing the time it takes and see your opinion
What factors that most people probably aren't aware of determine how long it takes a frame to load? I imagine "Start of Frame" events are a factor here as well.
It's always nice to have a loading frame, that could easily be a world map in most games. As long as load times aren't that terrible. If the game and load can happen within 1000/50 = 20 milliseconds it won't be noticeable.
For timing: keep track of the time in the frame and write it to a text file at the end of the loading.
But what I don't know (or know little about) are the inner workings of the MMF runtime, because that also adds a delay and has it ways of loading which you can or can't control.
Another solution could be: load everything at start in one frame. But that probably wouldn't make coding easier unless you build your own level editor and use that in the game engine.
What probably has the largest impact on loading times are big pictures to load, lot's of objects and large objects in the level. Start of frame code probably isn't one of those factors unless you've lots of loops or a tremendous amount of startup code in that event running.
A lot of 2D games were on systems that used carts, right? So I'd say as close to none as possible would be ideal.
However, I hail from a long gone time where games could load levels from cassette tapes and could typically take a minute or so to load each one. I probably have more patience than most because of that.
Loading everything into one frame at start is a option i have used. I like it because you got all your art in one place. Which makes it easier to find after taking breaks in development. Their isn't any of that "what level was that object on again?"
but it can cause bad object error to pop up a bit. Which isn't to much of a problem to fix. Most of the time creating a new copy of the bad object in your set-up frame (the frame with all the loaded objects) fixes the problem.
With that said, it still doesn't always solve all ones loading issues all of the time. But i'm pro systems that create as many dynamic objects as they can. I like to use it as a way of keeping the object count to a minimum. because their are not six different objects in the game doing the same job. Like displaying text, for example.
If we're specifically talking about loading time between playable levels and not the load time at the beginning of a game or just before a cut scene, I'd get impatient after six seconds because I know that on modern hardware, the only reason a screen transition should take more than a few seconds is if the designer doesn't know what they're doing... which means I'm probably playing a game I wouldn't like anyhow.
I'll wait up to two minutes for games to initially load, though. I don't mind waiting a while just before playing a game - I just don't like to be interrupted for long while immersed (or attempting to be immersed) in a game - especially if it's 2D.
I'm much like AndyUK. I grew up playing Commodore 64 games and I recall having to wait from four to six minutes for some games to entirely boot, but I had the patience for that because I knew the hardware was limited. I was willing to wait the 2 to 4 minutes it took some games on Playstation to boot because I knew the optical drive in a Playstation was only 1x speed.
There's no good excuse for a 2D game to load for more than six seconds between normal playable levels on modern PCs.
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