> Now, the final startup time when the game is installed on internal storage is 70 seconds, but let's not get ahead of ourselves.
Maybe I don't notice this with other games but that seems like a really long time.
Maybe I don't notice this with other games but that seems like a really long time.
On the other hand, factorio is a load once and play for hours type game compared to something like mario which incurs loads on each level
I just timed Breath of the Wild (cartridge version), and from the time I launched the game from the Switch menu to seeing the game menu was about 16 seconds, and the time from selecting a save file to loading the game world was about 18 seconds. What exactly about this game makes it take so long to load?
They did this by overclocking the Switch during load. I didn't see any mention of boost/overclock in the Factorio writeup, though.
I found a GameFaqs forum thread[1] from shortly after the game launched that claims it was about 20 seconds. And a US Gamer article[2] that says the update that came a couple years later only shaved off about 5 seconds (seems within the ballpark of what I measured)
[1] https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/boards/189707-the-legend-of-ze...
[2] https://www.usgamer.net/articles/breath-of-the-wild-load-tim...
Perhaps they don't get to mess with the clock "willy nilly" and it's more like an API that enables a higher - but fixed - clock speed?
[1] https://www.shacknews.com/article/112895/crash-team-racing-n...
It overclocks the CPU at the expense of GPU. It's suitable only for loading screens or other areas of the game where you don't need to render at more than single-digit FPS, but can produce a 20-50% improvement in loading time.
I think it'll be referred to for years to come as an example of not only how seemingly simple decisions can come back to haunt you, but also how patient users can be if they really want to play something..
0: https://www.thegamer.com/gta-online-fix-loading-times-offici...
> The majority of time spent starting the game is preparing the images from disk into a format that the GPU can use. The images on disk being compressed and or not the exact format that GPUs want. Now, what that time on switch is spent on… I don’t know for sure but I would guess something similar.
I'd be really curious to know how similar the Switch code is. On the surface, the game seems to have been extended quite a bit, but I feel like a lot of it is just uncovering functionality that already existed in the codebase, e.g. the ability to place arbitrary items on the outside grid, I'm fairly sure the "engine" already supported this, and it was the way outside objects were implemented, there was just no interface for adding/removing them.
https://www.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/fnfdic/nintendos_g...
Which is crazy since (having played NL and NH for a combined 1500 hours) even the little, deep details carry on from New Leaf. If I didn't know better I'd say NH was using an evolved NL engine.
My observation was the data structures/file formats were basically slight modifications of the ones used in other first party Nintendo games, primarily Mario Kart and Mario Party. So it seems like it's always drawn heavily from some internal SDK/engine, it's just not clear how much, or how much of that engine is saved between consoles.
Anecdotally, the DS and Wii (and ... maybe the GC? I don't remember now) used the same file format for the dialogue scripts, although the DS version was little-endian, and broke all my (terribly brittle) "tooling". The 3DS was totally different, and I ... Think the Switch was a variant of the 3DS format? It's been a hot minute since I've looked at any of this stuff :-)
I need to be absolutely sure i want to play the game five minutes before i do.