Game loading

[Techicolors]

what exactly a game does while it is loading? i assume it is textures but is there more? 

[Christophe Corazza]

Loading into RAM the code to run the game, characters, vehicles…

Loading the geometry of the 3D world, loading the geometry of the characters, vehicles, etc…

Loading the textures…

[Mira Yurizaki]

30 minutes ago, Technicolors said:

what exactly a game does while it is loading? i assume it is textures but is there more? 

It's loading everything it needs to run the game, from game logic to the graphical assets and audio data. It also has to initialize the game so it's in a playable state. To put it in another way, if eating a meal is playing the game, you still have to get the ingredients out and prepare and cook the meal.

[GoodBytes]

If you wonder how the game looks while it loads (what is behind the loading screen):

You'll usually see:

• Everything is white with a sky box appearing
• The level terrain is fairly flat, mountains are basic pyramids like shapes, like an old, early 90's 3D game (but again, all white), however the level gets progressively detailed
• Objects (trees, rocks, vehicles, buildings, etc), start to appear
• Textures are beginning to appear everywhere where they start in this very low resolution, and gets progressively details
• Shaders are being compiled and executed one by one, so you'll see lighting taking affects, clouds forming (if its outside), rain effect starting (if it is supposed to rain), etc.
• And other game specific things to do or load that is not specific to graphics.

There is no order to what I said, and everything is happening at the same time, your GPU and CPU is usually hard at work.

 

Files from your HDD/SSD needs to be loaded to the system RAM which may or may not need to be processed (beside decompression and decoding of data), and then pushed to the GPU memory for it to use with instructions on what to do with the data it received.