Music tracks, movie chapters seem to load relitively fast on cds and discs. Ever wabted to know the technicsl difference with video games? Why did thet range from 7 seconds to 30 plus seconds to load something?
There wasnt any magic to it other then these were music and movies were simple files located all in one specific spot on the disc. These worked sweel on the disc format.
Where did gaming go wrong for discs? The technicsl terms.
1. Seeking.
When loading specific scripts, character models, textures ecery time a menu or stage is loaded. It has to seek or fetch all these smaller specifc files to put into ram. This is trickier because these weren't always stored with this in mind on the disc.
This clumsy way of storing data physically on the disc leads to some increasigly long loading times on the ps2/gamecube. While the ps1 and saturn had less overall data to deal with regarding seeking.
To put simply the disc laser couldnt just load a level of any game with all its assets into ram as if it was one file in the sane way music tracks and dvd movies could.
2. Duplicate files. (were not as common)
Inorder to do this type of fast loading on a disc to some extent, what you have to is duplicate each needed texture character model and etc physically on the disc for each specific stage. In the specifc physical spots on the disc. The ps1 cds did not have the space to do that. 700 mb. But the ps2 and gamecube potentially could had tried this. To speed up load load times caused by seeking. Sometimes I wonder if that's how Rayman 3 on ps2 loaded as fast that it did.
Replicating deplicate files so that when loading content the needed files are always located closer to the actual stage on the disc physically.
How did some ps2 or ps1 games seem to load faster then other?
3. Disc streaming. Or duplicate files spread over the disc likely more doanle on ps2 discs then ps1
ps2 discs has atleast 6 plus gb of storage. Ps1 cds only had 700 mb!!
Some didnt actually the entire level at one loading screen like Crash Bandicoot warp. Instead it did disc streaming in real time. To make you feel as if you difnt have large load times. On games that did do full loading times statically, if they loaded fast its usually because the data on the disc or atleast some of it were physically close to a specific physical spot on the disc.
One game, that does disc streaming in a simplier form on ps2 is Guitar Hero, when you move around the highlight on the setlist when figuring what song ur selecting the ps2 is litterally streaming that audio from the disc in real time like ur auto playing music from a spotify playlist!!
this is why there is a brief pause between each time a highlighted song plays, because the laser is working on each and every auto play when u highlight over a song. Why is it fast loading tho compared to the actual gameplays? Audio is usually one simple file it didnt spread all over the disc like textures are.
