Scene loading for optimisation, is it even necessary in modern engines?

Lethn

I realise I have just asked an extremely subjective question, at the same though I'm frequently left wondering. I've been pretty floored by the performance of Godot 4, it's laughed at most of the things I've thrown at it unless I've been doing something particularly stupid. With that in mind, we've all played old games right? Many of them even the ones by big studios make use of loading in scenes to keep things optimised which is a pretty standard practice. However with modern engine standards being what they are I wonder if it's even necessary to do that depending on the sort of game you're dealing with.

Let's say I've got fairly large scene about the size of a couple of city blocks, if I wanted to put an apartment you could physically walk into would it be better to have the classic, you walk into an elevator and load the scene? Or would you in fact be fine with a modern engine in Godot simply loading all that in at the same time? I think I'm going to try testing this because it seems to me like it wouldn't even be an issue. Now obviously, all sorts of factors come into play here like poly count but even with that I would be very interested in seeing how Godot handles this sort of thing. I'm talking as well an apartment like you see in a lot of open world games these days where there's interactable buttons and things like that, so it's not just a completely static scene.

Tomcat

Lethn However with modern engine standards being what they are I wonder if it's even necessary to do that depending on the sort of game you're dealing with.

I suppose it depends more on the target audience. If your potential players are the children of tycoons or wealthy geeks with powerful computers, you can certainly give up on optimisation.

I think I'm going to try testing this because it seems to me like it wouldn't even be an issue.

Testing is always a good idea. 👍️

vexymous

Lethn well first of all i don't really know much about how godot handles scenes, however for most of my use cases(2D reletivley big maps) i actually never noticed any issues, and if i ever needed to optimize it, i would just use some kind caching machanism, perhaps load/buffer it as a packed format in another thread ? Not sure, perhaps godot already caches all assets in memory on the run, even though that doesn't seems to be the case concidering the low memory usage

Lethn

I think it's just a matter of because this software is so new it's better to throw stuff at it and see what happens, I've already been pleasantly surprised by what I've been playing with so far.

synthnostate

There is definitely a limit to how much you can throw in one scene, and (especially if you have a lot of textures) it'll take more than a second to load, so you need a loading progress bar. For the 'lo-fi' games you're making, you can get away with pretty huge scenes, though.

Godot doesn't do open-world 'streamed scene loading' yet; they want to eventually. For now you have to implement it yourself. Either way you have to structure your scenes appropriately, whatever that entails. I wouldn't know, I'm just doing the traditional small-ish levels. Keep it simple!

Sosasees

how much you can load at once depends not on how modern the engine is — it depends on how strong the player's computer is.

nowadays most people have a supercomputer (if you consider a 16-bit microcomputer a normal computer), but many are much more limited than others:

my desktop has 16GB RAM. this is too much for performance testing,
so it's good that my mobiles only have 4GB (phone) and 3GB (tablet) RAM.

my desktop also has the graphics card 'AMD RX 550'. the goal was to buy a graphics card that has Linux compatibiliy and Vulkan support, but is otherwise barely any stronger than the desktop's built-in 'NVidia GTX 750'.

SnapCracklins

in my experience with Godot so far, I haven't had to do a bunch of preloading - but I have had some. It really depends on the size and complexity of the scenes being loaded. Most 2D is handled quite admirably though. You just have to test and see. The whole point of optimization is to make the game better and, if you don't need it, you know what they say: if it ain't broke, don't fix it.