Streaming

Powargrid currently clocks in at about 120 MB, half of which is the sound track, and all of which has to be downloaded before you can play. Depending on your internet connection, this may take a while!

Loading... loading... nope, still loading.

Fortunately, Unity comes with built in streaming support: you can load a game level by level, and start playing as soon as the bits you need have arrived. So that's what I'm working on now: making sure the game loads more quickly.

This mainly involves not loading stuff before it's needed. All of our levels have a "jukebox", an invisible object that's responsible for playing the music. Currently, all these have a list of all our music tracks, so to load the very first level (the main menu), you'd at least need to load about 60 megabytes of music, even though you'll probably not look at the menu for more than a minute.

So, now the menu only comes with two songs: the familiar one from our trailer, and one other song for variety. The first campaign mission, which we expect most new players to start with, has four songs, so that also loads quickly. In the meantime, the web player is downloading the rest of the game, so by the time you get to mission two, which has all of the songs in its playlist, everything should be in. If not, you'll have to wait a short while at the loading screen (instead of waiting up front, before you got to do anything). Also, our loading screen is less boring than the plain white Unity one, since it features blobbies!

Of course, the menu scene still needs all the building models and textures, but all in all, this should reduce the loading time to about a quarter of what it used to be. Not bad, eh? We have some testing to do to make sure everything works, but we'll let you know when the new version goes live.

Game on!
-- Michiel