History Main / DynamicLoading

* ''FinalFantasyXII'' has a variant of the Unreal Engine 3 Dynamic Loading Fail. After you enter an area, NPCs suddenly pop into existence as they finish loading. In busier areas this can 10-15 seconds.

* ''{{Doom}} 3'' has alot of speed bumps, such as waiting for a ladder to drop while fighting DemonicSpiders, and winding corridors and limited paths.

* Unusual Faster Movement - ExactlyWhatItSaysOnTheTin. Usually used key combos that are hard to repeat. Used for Time Trials, to give the player a feeling of more control and something to do in Dynamic Loading Corridors.

*** Because it predates ''Symphony of the Night'': I'm pretty certain I remember one or two Castlevanias in the NES era having an auto-scrolled tunnel sequence for loading.
*** ''Castlevania'' ''I'' and ''III'' featured characters walking from one stage to another, but it was to show the player where they were headed next on the map, not to load.
*** Cartridges have a load time to copy information from the cartridge to video memory. It's just measured in tenths of a second and so is easy to hide. Besides, a lot of middle-NES-era games either were originally designed for the Famicom Disk System, used time-consuming data compression, or both.
*** ''HarmonyOfDissonance'' doesn't have these hallways, and it's ''extremely'' offputting.
*** [[{{IncrediblyLamePun}} Well it is called]] HarmonyOfDissonance...
* The platform game ''Flushed Away'', based on the movie of the same name,
** Dynamic Loading Corridors - Sewer pipes.
** Grind Rails for speed through long complex areas, to a rockin' soundtrack no less.

* ''JakAndDaxter''
** Limited Sprint - Jak 'trips' if he runs too far in a single direction.
** Unusual Faster Movement - Jaguar Leap.

** It should be noted that, though not as long, the "decontamination" airlock sequence on the Normandy does serve as a loading screen in disguise.

*** Actually, when party members talk, the elevator sequences take much longer. That's ok though, normally they are shorter than the conversations... On machines not powerful enough to properly run the game though...

** Actually, Mass Effect uses Winding Corridors a whole lot as well as Elevators (apparently there was loads of loading to do). One obvious example is the bridge on the Presidium from the embassies to the consort's quarters, which has a U-bend right in the middle of it. It's also quite noticable on Illium, where apparently the best path between two points is a Z shape.

* The elevator sequences in the ''MetroidPrime'' games. Load times between rooms were "disguised" by having the door ''wait until the next room was loaded to open''. This aggravated a lot of people.
** In no small part because it tended to occur when you were trying to move through a room without bothering with the enemies in it, which required the Rage Mode to defeat.

* ''{{Portal}}''
** Elevators - although still fairly obvious.
*** The commentary ''claims'' the loading screens were "disguised" by the elevator rides, but in reality they occurred just as the elevator stopped, with a blatant screen freeze and LOADING message, just as in other Source engine games (although, this being a short game with loads between each test chamber, the loading is mercifully short). Perhaps this was a planned feature they never figured out how to do without majorly changing the engine.
** Portals themselves may be the best way ever to make extra use of already loaded level data.
*** Requires quite clever level design - especially in the later areas where there are no Material Emancipation Grills - to prevent players from portalling across loading screens. For example, the [[spoiler:U-shaped sewer near the end]] means players have to erase their previous portals to get through.
**** Not entirely true: using the "portalgun_id" cheats, one can technically have up to four portal systems and be able to teleport back to a previous area... but the game clears ALL portals as soon as you enter that area.

** ''WorldOfWarcraft'' extends this to all characters, making it possible to be killed by a player character whose model has not finished loading yet. Also, flying mounts are too fast for the Dynamic Loading to keep up in certain situations. The end result is the PC falling through the yet-unloaded ground and plummeting to his death.

** This troper hasn't seen the "streaming environment" message on the Dreamcast version, but the door camera angles are still there.

** ''WorldOfWarcraft'' extends this to all characters, making it possible to be killed by a player character whose model has not finished loading yet. Also, flying mounts are too fast for the Dynamic Loading to keep up in certain situations.
*** Since the game uses loading screens and dynamic loading, rarely this troper has seen the game switch from a loading screen to dynamic loading too early. The end result is the PC falling through the yet-unloaded ground and plummeting to his death.

* ''{{God of War}}'' received a LOT of technical applause for [[BeyondTheImpossible being a console disc game with almost no loading]]. This troper personally only experianced two '''extremely''' brief loading moments in the entire game!!!
** Its many, many battles rely heavily on Instant Enemies, presumably to enable this.

* ''{{Doom}} 3'' has alot of speed bumps, such as waiting for a ladder to drop while fighting DemonicSpiders.

** In no small part because it tended to occur when you were trying to move through a room without bothering with the annoying enemies in it, which required the Rage Mode to defeat.

* ''{{Pokemon}}'' has its guardhouses/lookout stations. These weren't too bad in Red, Blue and Yellow as they weren't common and usually had interesting things in them such as binoculars and people willing to make trades. In Gold, Silver and Crystal they all had the same interior and became a little bland and annoying. In Ruby, Sapphire and Emerald they're gone completely, possibly due to technological advances, but they return in Diamond, Pearl and Platinum, mostly to allow the game to dump old textures and reload new ones (as towns often have textures unique to themselves), and are far more common and less varied than ever before. In [[VideogameRemake HeartGold and SoulSilver]] they added even more than were in Gold, Silver and Crystal, and by this stage it starts to get very annoying and jarring. In particular the new one at Route 1 is rather grating, as, being the first location visited in the entire series, everyone knows how that area "should" look.
** Starting in Diamond and Pearl (or possibly earlier), Pokemon games store the full map as a grid of 32x32 sub-maps, and in addition to the sub-map the one the player character is in, it attempts to keep the adjacent ones loaded (similar to the ''Luigi's Mansion'' example below). This can result in Dynamic Loading Fail ({{Fan Nickname}}d "[[http://bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net/wiki/Tweaking Tweaking]]") if the player rides a bike at top speed then makes a sudden 90-degree turn so as to trigger a load immediately before turning ''and'' another load immediately after the turn.[[hottip:* :For example, the player could start in a spot where moving one tile east would trigger a load, ride north far enough to trigger a different load, then turn east at top speed immediately after the first load starts.]]

** OlderThanTheyThink: ''{{Descent}}'' was able to get away with its impressively large levels via the same trick.

* ''{{Civilization}}'' had a text-based description of the creation of the world play while the game world was loading. ''Civilization IV'' has a similar sequence, with narration by Leonard Nimoy.

* The [[Game/{{Quake}} first]] [[QuakeII two]] ''{{Quake}}'' games used the Winding Corridors method, in addition to elevators and speed bumps.

* ''Tony Hawk's American Wasteland'' does not have loading screens when you move between areas. However, the game does force the player to travel through long, thin tunnels to hide the transition from one area to the next, somewhat missing the point of free-roaming, no-load-time playing.

* ''{{Pokemon}}'' has its guardhouses/lookout stations. These weren't too bad in Red, Blue and Yellow as they weren't common and usually had interesting things in them such as binoculars and people willing to make trades. In Gold, Silver and Crystal they all had the same interior and became a little bland and annoying. In Ruby, Sapphire and Emerald they're gone completely, possibly due to technological advances, but they return in Diamond, Pearl and Platinum presumably due to the 3D environments, and are far more common and less varied than ever before. In [[VideogameRemake HeartGold and SoulSilver]] they added even more than were in Gold, Silver and Crystal, and by this stage it starts to get very annoying and jarring. In particular the new one at Route 1 is rather grating, as, being the first location visited in the entire series, everyone knows how that area "should" look.

* ''RogueGalaxy'' has lengthy elevator rides that load the next area while you sit around, bored, and possibly [[MaleGaze revolve the camera to try and see your female characters from different angles]].
* In the NintendoDS ''{{Pokemon}}'' games, gatehouses are used to dump old textures and load new ones into the RAM. In the old games, this wasn't needed as towns shared the same limited amount of textures. The DS games, on the other hand, have unique textures for nearly every town, mostly in the way of different path tiles and special buildings.

* Speed Bumps - Rather than making the cooridor longer, throw stuff at the player. This can be enemies that must be defeated, timed traps, timed doors, vertical movement and so on.

** Any game that makes use of Unreal Engine 3 (The Gears of War series, Mass Effect, Bioshock 2) does this. You are guaranteed to see 8x8 resolution textures when you first spawn, at which point the game will actually start loading the full ones. Oh god, the texture popping. This is presumably done only to make the loading screen shorter, since there still ''is'' a loading screen.
** Pick a Saturn or PSX racing game. Popup, popup, and more popup. Some games make efforts to hide it with winding paths, hills, or tunnels.

** Oddly, these halls are also in many of the GameBoyAdvance and [[NintendoDS DS]] installments of the series, even though they're on cartridges that have no load time.[[hottip:* :Possibly to avoid having to concoct an in-story justification for where the corridors went in the time between games.]]

*** Cartridges ''technically'' have a load time. It's just probably measured in thousandths of a second, and so isn't exactly detectable. Besides, a lot of middle-NES-era games either were originally designed for the Famicom Disk System, used time-consuming data compression, or both.

** ''Chinatown Wars'' has no loading screens. Going too fast can cause you to arrive in a gray, featureless place until the landscape loads, though - this is more of a graphical issue than loading. Of course, it's a NintendoDS game, so load-times end up practically nil anyway.

* ''Saintsrow'': Both of the Saints Row games have a massive case of Dynamic Loading Fail, where you will drive into an unloaded area in a car, and you loose all control over the car/your character until the areas loads (if it ever does). There's even a song about the broken loading.

** The first game has a lot of Winding Corridors, eg on Assault on the Control Room and The Library. Limited Paths (sometimes involving "kill barriers") and {{Space Filling Path}}s are also often used, as well as Loading Barriers and Speed Bumps such as airlocks and {{elevator action sequence}}s. SequenceBreaking can lead to Dynamic Loading Fail.

* ''QuakeIV'' not only has LoadsAndLoadsOfLoading between levels, but also dynamic loading enforced by unskippable cutscenes and Speed Bumps such as [[LockedDoor time-locked doors]], {{drone jam}}s, long elevator rides, and more egregiously, {{invisible wall}}s.
* The [[Game/{{Quake}} first]] [[QuakeII two]] ''{{Quake}}'' games used the Winding Corridors method, in addition to elevators and other speed bumps.

* The PSX version of ''NeedForSpeed II'' occasionally had Dynamic Loading Fail where you would run into the end of the loaded section and the game would temporarily freeze before loading the next section.

** The first game has a lot of Winding Corridors, eg on Assault on the Control Room and The Library. Limited Paths (sometimes involving "kill barriers") and {{Space Filling Path}}s are also often used, as well as occasional Loading Barriers and Speed Bumps, eg airlocks and elevators. SequenceBreaking can lead to Dynamic Loading Fail.