Namco has used playable mini-games during a loading screen. Another example is "the shop keepers quiz" in Dota 2 which was more of a game finding screen rather than loading screen. One well-known loader game was Invade-a-Load. Some games have even included minigames in their loading screen, notably the 1983 Skyline Attack for the Commodore 64 and Joe Blade 2 on the ZX Spectrum. In fighting games the loading screen is often a versus screen, which shows the fighters who will take part in the match. This information may only be there for storytelling and/or entertainment or it can give the user information that is usable when the loading is complete, for example the mission goals in a game. Other loading screens double as briefing screens, providing the user with information to read. Others, recently, are not even a picture at all, and are a small video or have parts animated in real time. Some loading screens display a progress bar or a timer countdown to show how much data has actually loaded. The loading screen does not need to be a static picture. Loading screen of the Ubuntu operating system, displaying progress Recently, however, more powerful hardware has significantly diminished this effect. For example, with a ZX Spectrum game, the screen data takes up 6 kilobytes, representing an increase in loading time of about 13% over the same game without a loading screen. Nowadays, most games are downloaded digitally, and therefore loaded off the hard drive meaning faster load times however, some games are also loaded off of an optical disc, faster than previous magnetic media, but still include loading screens to disguise the amount of time taken to initialize the game in RAM.īecause the loading screen data itself needs to be read from the media, it actually can increase the overall loading time. Loading screens that disguise the length of time that a program takes to load were common when computer games were loaded from cassette tape, a process which could take five minutes or more. using warps or fast travel) or moving faster than the game can load. While loading screens remain commonplace in video games, background loading is now used in many games, especially open world titles, to eliminate loading screens while traversing normally through the game, making them appear only when "teleporting" farther than the load distance (e.g. Melbourne Draw, one of the few 8-bit screen utilities with a zoom function, was one program of choice for artists. Drawing utilities were also limited during this period. In early video games, the loading screen was also a chance for graphic artists to be creative without the technical limitations often required for the in-game graphics. A loading screen is a screen shown by a computer program, very often a video game, while the program is loading (moving program data from the disk to RAM) or initializing.
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