• Victor@lemmy.world
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    2 days ago

    lmfao what in the hell does the storage medium have to do with frame rate. You can’t really start rendering anything until you’ve loaded the things that should be rendered. And at that point the storage medium should be finished doing its thing.

    If your frame rate depends on your storage medium, I would consider that a bug, lol.

    Some games do streaming on the fly when you enter a new area to avoid loading screens for massive-world games like maybe the new Zelda games and GTA style games. But once the data is loaded, lay off the storage device.

    • tal@lemmy.today
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      2 days ago

      There are a number of games — particularly those since SSD storage became pretty much the norm — that do not load a whole level, but load while playing. Why not just load the game (or the level)? Because it lets devices with less RAM store more stuff than they otherwise would. You have more relaxed caps on things lile texture size.

      I’d assume that the engine is still going to try to predict what content is going to be needed prior to it being needed, that it’s got a strategy more sophisticated than just “load resource first time it’s requested”. But SSD storage is going to be more forgiving of a miss than rotational storage.

      Bethesda uses the term “cell”. I know that their engine uses a square grid as the loading unit, loads a sort of circle of cells around the cell where the player is.

      searches

      It sounds like the Unreal 5 terminology is “sublevel”, for the units loaded.

      https://old.reddit.com/r/unrealengine/comments/1tchk8k/is_level_streaming_even_worth_it_if_your_game/

      • Victor@lemmy.world
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        1 day ago

        Right, that’s what I was referring to in my comment. Games that load while playing to avoid loading screens between areas. 👍