It seems that in every multiplayer RTS/MOAB there is an inordinate amount of downtime/boredom inflicted upon the players through the match making / game loading system. Since I've yet to see anything like this, it may very well be impossible. But I believe it would be immensely rewarding if the pregame lobby chat was also available during the actual game load / network sync period. I'm positive everyone here has been in a multiplayer game loading screen, literally raging at the 1 player on a celeron 300a taking 10 minutes to start the game. In addition, it would be simply amazing if Planetary Annihilation could even 1 up the lobby extension and implement a mini/micro game to amuse ourselves with during long lobby times/game load times, e.g. Youtube's snake game during video buffering. Personally, I absolutely love mega RTS battles. A 4v4 Supreme Commander game was my favorite gaming experience ever. Unfortunately, between the 40min game lobbies (where players often wouldn't stay unless it populated within 1 minute which rarely happened in 4v4), the GPGnet port forwarding trouble and mid battle desyncs. I along with many of my friends just couldn't face that dull lobby wait again and again. If this has already been mentioned, my apologies, I couldn't find it on a search. Sincerely, Mike "Redwood"
Minigames during loading screens are awesome. Unfortunately, Namco has a patent on it Chat while loading is a good idea though and it should be pretty simple to implement. Many games already do this.
A patent on a games while loading? lol That's a bad idea anyway. I.e. the loadingphase in FA takes about 3 seconds of an animted video and 2 seconds of a hung screen. A game for 5 seconds? no thanks. Chatting might be a good idea in case of longer waiting-times, but really I doubt that there will be many such longer waiting-times of more than 60s.
"Namco owns the US patent to minigames during load screens ( US patent 5,718,632)" - http://www.giantbomb.com/interactive-lo ... 3015-1419/
If this is true, and it can't be circumvented/licensed, then maybe just during the lobby, unless that too is restricted. If the game load times are < 10 seconds, there wouldn't be much point in a minigame diversion. But if the lobby chat carried into gameload, then into game chat. That would be spectacular. I'm sure we've all had that message we don't see until after a 1 hour game because it was received during the load screen. Even if it was a shift-tab style chat system like steam would be a huge win.
Multiplayer games take 3 seconds to load? Loading time always dependent on how fast the slowest machine in the group is. Some games in SC2 take 5 seconds to load while others take 5 min. Would be nice to have something to do during load times. It's so lame that patent was even granted.
That patent sucks. Plus, wasn't it said that you couldn't put a patent on mechanics? Does namco own the DBZ Tenkaichi games? Those have minigames in the loading screens. Although i think that minigames is a bit too much, maybe have just the chat function available. Unless you could set up just a flash loader in the loading screens for you to input a URL for a game on the Internets.
I am playing FA a bit every week and all load times were so short that I never really even had the feeling of "having to wait". Maybe the remaining FA players just all have good computers, I dunno.
(Proper) Matchmaking alleviates the need to wait for very long by just finding the required number of players and dumping them straight into the game.
I think this idea about long loading times came from StarCraft2 which has for some inexplicable reason insane loading times every time a new match gets started. You can easily hang a minute or two in the loading screen in multiplayer or even longer. As for that patent IANAL but I highly doubt that this patent could be enforced. There are tons of absolutely insane patents in the US, which, if they were challenged in court, would be voided quickly.
I believe it's been mentioned that the actual gameplay processing will all be serverside, so presumably once the server is up, wouldn't "loading" be literally just establishing a connection to the server? That can't possibly take too long.
You need to load the map and all associated assets, and you need to load the commanders and the units and the effects and all that too.
