Desktop to Game in 1 Second

Seeing is believing...
https://youtu.be/h5EhwJvJqDk

As reported by PC Gamer: http://www.pcgamer.com/durante-shows-off-an-instant-resume-feature-we-want-in-every-game/

ALT-TAB has been around for a while, hasn't it?

What are you talking about. This is about loading time, not alttabbing.
The game is port from consoles. ToCS is the best port from garbage hardware I've ever seen, seems ToCS 2 will be even better.
Console (originally) games for whatever reason have horrible loadtimes.

Why is this thread in nonRPG section? It should be in either RPG or jRPG.

I just had a thought.

jRPG should stand for jokeRPG AKA joxerRPG

I doubt its loading any quicker. I'll bet its just something like silently loading the game when windows starts then making the shortcut alt-tab to it.

That is pretty fast. I think he just quit the game and opened it again, so the game was still cached in RAM. Still, where are all the stupid logo splash screens? I wonder if it's a mod that removes them.

EDIT: Ok I read the article and it's a modder dude who's working with the localization team or something.

Maybe they're using superfetch? The Windows feature introduced a while ago that makes your browser/applications start instantly by caching appropriate data in reserved memory?

Some games seem to make better use of system caching than others. You can tell it's being used by the difference between launching it the first time upon boot - and then subsequently.

I think the idea is that Windows will attempt to determine what applications are most frequently launched.

Not sure if that's still the case.

Anyway, the vast majority of games launch pretty fast with a decent setup. The actual game doesn't really change because it launches faster, sadly.

You can load only what is needed for the current area, than have threads to load everything else in the background.

wolfing said:

it's a modder dude

Click to expand...

Durante.
His modder/modding reputation is legendary even with people like me who don't use mods much.

I'm guessing he's using a virtual machine or that new(ish) Docker technology. That gives you a "fake" machine inside your own machine with its own copy of the OS and whatnot. In a normal save, you pick out the state of all the quests, what chests you've looked into, where all the junk you've dropped on the ground is sitting, and so on and save that into a (relatively) small file. Loading it means interpreting all that stuff and setting everything the way it should be. Another option, though, is to save the ENTIRE machine. Everything in the fake machine's memory is saved - not just memory the game is using but even the operating system so it knows what DLLs it has loaded and so on. Then there's no interpretation need. Just load one huge hunk off the hard drive and kick it off.

Whatever the case, it's basically trading memory for speed. Consoles couldn't do that because their drives aren't that big but PCs? Even SSDs are starting to be big enough to let you use that space for a single ultra-fast save then use the normal save system for all the rest. And when it's a console game from the previous generation… of course do it!

joxer said:

Why is this thread in nonRPG section? It should be in either RPG or jRPG.

Click to expand...

It's more about the tech than the game itself. Seems like this could be done with several games - especially ones with no online aspect that requires logging in and whatnot. D:OS2 is using 4500MB right now. Throw in another 500MB for other OS stuff and…. yeah, I can spare 5GB on my SSD if I can load D:OS2 in 5 seconds!

Zloth said:

I'm guessing he's using a virtual machine or that new(ish) Docker technology. That gives you a "fake" machine inside your own machine with its own copy of the OS and whatnot.

Click to expand...

I've never heard of this. Reading about it, it's supposed to be somewhat OS-independent. I wonder if it hurts/cripples performance like a regular VM does? (On consumer hardware I mean.)

No virtual machines, no.

About consoles and horrible loading times there, remember, they all use ancient SATA2 and cannot possibly match loading speed on PC. You can plug 1 petabyte SSD drive in a current console, it'll still be slow as dirt Mass Effect elevators.
But they can upscale 720p to 4K, oh whatta spectacle, what's half an hour of waiting to load something if it'll be upscaled "visual candy".

It's bound to hurt performance a tad but it might be a very small tad. I've never used it so I don't know. This is just a PS3 game, though, so I doubt you'll have many worries on that front.