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| Continuously-Loading Gameworlds | |
| Posted By: butcher <butcher@bungie.com> | Date: 12/17/01 11:41 a.m. |
In Response To: Why can't their be no loading times in games? (no7orious the 31337) : Here is my little idea of rendering on the fly (with no load times) an entire
You can absolutely do this - in fact, many games these days use some form of on-demand loading. Halo loads its texture resources from the xbox hard drive in much this way. There are other games, most of them RPGs, that load the entire world like this... this can result in the illusion of a seamless world. The reason that it's not done more often (or more completely) is because often there are things happening outside the player's view that need access to the world geometry. For example, what happens if you grenade a jeep off a cliff and down into a valley that's out of your sight (and not loaded into memory)? The geometry for the valley isn't in memory so you can't run physics for the vehicle as you don't know what it will be colliding against. There are two options - either stop the jeep from running physics and freeze it in midair until that part of the world is loaded next time, or load that area of the world just so the jeep can bounce down the hill. Neither of these options is very appealing. And there are worse problems. Consider an elite that sees you from a hill who has two choices to get to you: either he can run down the steep face of the hill, or he can take a tunnel that leads through an underground complex and out into the valley. Problem is, the underground complex isn't loaded at the moment. How does the elite's AI know about that? More importantly, how can it even try to plan paths when it doesn't have access to all of the world to examine? This is why Halo loads its environment in discrete chunks rather than continuously loading a you move through the area. None of these problems are insoluble, but we chose to focus on other things... this time around. :) - butcher
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