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Comment by Jasber | Hacker News Reader

About loading screens, I've always wondered why games don't try to get rid of these (maybe they do?).

Anyone familiar with why you have to have loading screens in games? Would it be possible to pre-load a level while you're playing?

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Most modern games use various tricks to minimize or eliminate loading screens, with varying degrees of success. Common ideas include using low-quality assets for far-away objects, dynamically replacing them when the player gets closer; creating assets that can easily be reused; and making the player wait in a small room or hallway while the next area loads. Sometimes this can backfire, as with the infamously slow elevators in Mass Effect, which are timed to always take as long as the worst-case load time for the area they're linked to.

TV Tropes has a list of examples: http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/DynamicLoading

They can't follow the article's suggestion of giving you a mini-game to play during the load screen because that would violate Namco's patent 5,718,632 which covers exactly that:

http://www.google.com/patents/US5718632

Wow , that's ridiculous. Although I'm not sure what game you could play in the 10 seconds or so it takes to load a program these days, plus you've got to load the game itself.

I have always wondered though why when doing an OS install they never provided a game or something interesting to do while you wait rather than show adverts for the product you are currently installing ("Windows 7 has all these great new features!".. "I know , hence why I bought it.."). They could at least give me a browser to use though.

I had totally forgotten about that patent.

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