Streaming/progressively loading level files
by Ironbelly Studios · in Torque Game Engine · 01/27/2005 (3:33 pm) · 1 replies
Has anyone implemented this with torque?
In the game we are developing we want the player to be able to go through the game start to finish without any loading screens(well except for the one at the beginning).. Dungeon siege did this wonderfully.. Basically what we want to do is have the level data gradually loading in the background instead of loading up a chunk of the game with a loading screen everytime a player reaches a certain point..
Has anyone attempted this with torque or know of any resources concerning this?
In the game we are developing we want the player to be able to go through the game start to finish without any loading screens(well except for the one at the beginning).. Dungeon siege did this wonderfully.. Basically what we want to do is have the level data gradually loading in the background instead of loading up a chunk of the game with a loading screen everytime a player reaches a certain point..
Has anyone attempted this with torque or know of any resources concerning this?
About the author
Associate David Montgomery-Blake
David MontgomeryBlake
One thing you'll have to define is exactly what you mean by "level" and how many models, interiors, paths, etc are in each chunk of the "level." This will determine your implementation specific load-balancing issues. Next, you need to determine a heirachical change for your chunks. Currently, each "level" or "chunk" is a mission. If you want to keep this structure, then you'll need to scale each mission down so that you can load balance according to your worst case scenario (if you're planning on a RPG, then a complex city with multiple buildings, models, textures, NPC paths and scripts, particle effects, etc broken into its most complex neighborhoods; or a massive battle with numerous animated models and textures and AI's looking for paths). You also need to determine a viewpoint. If you want to maintain a top-down viewpoint for nearly everything, then your mission size can be just outside of the normal window's borders. If you want a over-the-shoulder or first-person perspective, you're going to have to figure out some massive view-distance issues to compensate for even load balancing.
I started work on something similar for interiors, but stopped when I killed my platformer because there was no way I'd have time or money to create the art content needed. One thing about doing it with only interiors was that I would have had to rework the common TGE heirarchy of how interiors, models, particles, scripts and such are loaded and unloaded so that the interior levels I was "streaming" would act as loadable/unloadable containers. Managing paths crossing chunks would have been a problem that would have kept me up nights, too, I'm sure.