Opinion Why are unity so slow to load? (I mean commercial released games)

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jb skaggs

Guest
Te last few games I got from steam I really loved the concept and the game play- but I just really hate starting the games. For example Star Drive 2- I love it. But it takes like 5 minutes to load. Tried another game and loved the game but again super slow load time- and another same thing.

I found out the last four games I got on steam were all Unity games. And though I really like the play- 2 minutes, to 5 minutes load times is not bearable and so I rarely play them even if I like them.

I have never really noticed a slow load time on gamemaker 2 or 1.4, usually even big files wit lots of sound and sprites I can load in under 30 seconds. But I dont know of a huge commercial Gamemaker release to test against.

So is gamemaker superior on resource loading times? And why is unity so slow or is it my poor choice in games?
 
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Lonewolff

Guest
Why do cartridge games load faster than GameMaker games?
 
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jb skaggs

Guest
Why do cartridge games load faster than GameMaker games?
What is your point responding to me? I am asking legitimate questions and your trying to troll me? Unity and Gamemaker are 2 of the most popular game making engines out there. This posts is not an insult to either, but a simple questions to more experienced gamers. I spent a good bit of time reading posts earlier by Paradox Games how unity really messed up their production schedules because of how they changed file loading and saving schema which is now requiring network interfacing to do so. So if there is a similar sized Gamemaker game to Star Drive 2, Pillars of Eternity I'd like to find it and run it to see how it compares.
 
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Kobold

Guest
For one , most engines like to include ALL of their libraries no matter wether you use them or not.

and secondly, which is quite common for some developers is to not care about the size of their assets.
For example:
- a 2k texture map for a small hand-gun which you will never see fully scaled on a HD display resolution.
- Using surface subdivision on a cube which shouldn't have more than 8 vertices and 12 faces
- Using texture pages for every single object even if it stays part of a mesh group when in action.
- Using up to 5 different (diffuse,normal,specular,light,roughness and so on.) maps for one overly complex material which could have had the same rendering result when only using a normal and diffuse map.
- Skeletal data for a static model
- Uncompressed Audio
- Bitmaps

These 2 things could be a reason.
 

Ninety

Member
Inexperienced Unity devs will sometimes neglect to optimise properly which can blow out loading times, especially if there's a lot of high res textures to load. I've played a few games that were done super well so even though there were a lot of assets the load times were low, but there's a lot out there where the dev simply didn't bother.

But you can't really escape the fact that your average GMS game has much, much less to load than your average Unity game. They're generally used for quite different projects not just in scale but in asset size and quantity. Plus a 3D engine (in general) has a lot more ways to create file size problems, some of which as Kobold pointed out.
 
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Lonewolff

Guest
What is your point responding to me? I am asking legitimate questions and your trying to troll me?
Not trying to troll you at all.

Unity and GameMaker are entirely different beasts.

Unity has a hell of a lot of bloat. GameMaker has less bloat. Cartridge based games written in assembly, even less again.

All examples are entirely different and cater to a different demographic.

You are comparing apples to tomatoes. Sure they are both red, they are both fruit. But you wouldn't use both in a fruit salad.
 
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