Slow Load Times

I posted last week about testing my 5GC app/game/book on several devices at once. What I did not really mention or talk about was their respective load times. Load times are something that I feel is very important, and how you deal with slow load times as even more important.

As games get bigger their memory footprint just gets bigger as we add more and more content. It is in theory a great thing for players to have more content of a game to enjoy, however if the load times are truly bad, then this will put the player off before they get to see your starting content.

There are TWO main things we can do to improve the situation.
1. Compress data to make it load faster, uncompressing data is usually much faster than loading it.
2. Hide the data loading behind splash screens or other intermediate pages etc.

I like both of these options, and yet they are both trouble and work. Let me show you the numbers I am working with currently.
I have two main times that i recorded, the time it takes to load the images into memory, and the Time it takes to load the Audio into memory. This audio will also be exactly twice as large later this week.

Kindle Fire:  images= 7,  audio= 9
Sansung phone:  images= 6,  audio=  8
ipod3: images= 12, audio= 14

As you can tell. My target will be the ipod3.

To start with I am going to try to improve the images loading. I have no more artwork to put into the game. So once I have the best load time i can for this area. Then it is done. I am going to start by combining half of my large images and see what difference this makes. Then I will cut my load into two sections. One smaller group of images required for the title page to work. The rest will load once the first set has. This should all happen in a separate thread. Though I will not allow them to go past the first 2 game screens if the load of images has not finished.

Next up will be looking into the audio. Currently i have no plan for improving that.. I will get back to ya hehe

Laters
Da Voodoochief