#11, by SimonSFriday, 01. August 2014, 16:49 11 years ago
You know, I gave this a lot of thought as I deactivated the threaded preloading because of multithreading issues, it wasn't just that I didn't liek it. The target we are headed to are games, that also run mobile. You can't afford loading an amount of animations early because it takes a lot of time and more ram than is there. The main bottle neck will be the hard drive. We recommend using webp btw.
But I didn't really see that is so much fury about the situation now. The release of the beta is still some time ago. But there were no such outbreaks I read about. I spend a lot of time optimizing our code and finding bottle necks and I managed to cut loading times extremely. The coming release will even be faster. So I just left the preloader deactivated (also its action parts won't work), and Goodbye Deponia was delivered with that, I did not hear anything about it being an issue. It's not like that, that we don't know what we are doing. We are often in conflict of the best solutions and many times leaving it to the users is telling them you're fucked and requires us to write big manuals (don't exist as far I know). If it will really become an issue for many I would suggest a hard disk preloader that fetches just the image from the hard drive and does not decode them yet, that would maybe fit already. But that won't be in the release.
Problem with the loading screen is that we can't see into the future what animations will be needed, what could we loaded, how long will take what. Loading will more like be spikes in your game and display a loading screen every time there would be blinking the loading screen every 2 seconds. So we can't determine 100% we can't calculate percentages. As easy as that. By the way, drawing a progress bar slowed loading down by 2 seconds in 3.7.