It is naturally a solution to put a loading picture directly in the game process. Apart from that, are there any other clever ways? The answer is yes. The classic text adventure (ADV) love game "Doki Doki Poyatchio" relies on a simple animated action to improve the loading speed, and this action is to "make the character fall", which is very interesting! The doctor will take you to see.
"Doki Doki Poyatchio" is an old game released on Sony PS1 in 1998. In the game, players will deliver bread to NPCs in a virtual world and interact with NPCs. It is worth mentioning that its character design was taken by Toshinobu Kondo, a well-known character designer who participated in the 2D platform game "Haikukawa". There is a little secret hidden in such a product 24 years ago.
In "Doki Doki Poyatchio", the characters can act freely on the map. For the hardware at that time, the real-time loading of map data became a problem. So, how can the game prevent the player from walking to a place without the scenery on the map being loaded? The answer is unexpected. When the system judges that the loading of map data cannot keep up with the character's movement, the character controlled by the player will fall, and the data will be loaded during the period when the character falls and then stands up again.
The above method is very clever. It not only solves the data loading problem, but also is consistent with the character's behavior, because the protagonist who delivers bread everywhere often needs to run and will inevitably fall. In addition, the above design was confirmed by Naoki Hori, executive of game developer M2, and it was not the doctor who was talking nonsense.
Faced with the problem that buildings, trees and other buildings in the game need to be loaded in real time, Naoki Hori said that a developer named Okada proposed the above solution at that time, and the solution ideas are still widely adopted by everyone today. For example: In "God of War" in 2018, Santa Monica Studio cleverly used obstacles such as the Kingdom Portal and the branches of the world to bring everyone an adventure experience of "one-shot to the end" and so on. The settings of these "interrupted" game processes are completely consistent with the world view settings, so the players do not feel interrupted.
After reading the doctor's introduction, if you play "Doki Doki Poyatchio" or some other games again, and find that the character will fall or do some interrupting the process, you will definitely have a new feeling. The little wisdom of game developers is still admirable. They are not studying how to do the krypton gold mechanism all day long.
