Spec Ops The Line.

Early in the game, the loading screens have the standard gameplay tips or reiterate some of the backstory.

As the game progress, they start breaking the 4th wall.

"This is all your fault"

"Do you feel like a hero yet?"

Ahh, memories...

There was a kid in my highschool who was a real pest and, I thought, deserved some comeuppance. He would ask me about computer stuff because he was obsessed with becoming some sort of black-hat script-kitty. So I gave him a disk one day with a program that overwrote this boot image with... shall we say, age-inappropriate images and a cliche 'You've been haxxored' message, knowing full well he would run it on his family's computer. He was grounded for a month. He never suspect, since the program also had a legit behavior.

In hindsight, it was a pretty dick move on my part, but it was the ease of the attack that stuck with me -- No real protection on the file, no encryption, not even an obscure binary format. All you had to know was the name and location of the legit file, and that it was 400 pixels tall rather than the apparent 200, and an 8bit bitmap. Just create a replacement and write it over the legit one. Anyways, an artifact of a misspent youth, I suppose.

Since we are still talking about this ...

Why do a *LOT* of games have this behavior:

When ever a level or part of a level needs to be reset ( such as in a player's death ), the game unloads all of it's assets, and reloads them again ?

Wouldn't it be a lot more efficient to keep textures, audio, models and all other non-changing items in memory ??

When ever a level or part of a level needs to be reset ( such as in a player's death ), the game unloads all of it's assets, and reloads them again ?

AFAIK if you have some kind of streaming system it works just like walking around. Same thing as ever "Player is at X, we have all these things that are close, all these others that are far". And it would decide what to load/unload.

For example, say that you die and have to return to the level's beginning, if you die far from the beginning it will take longer, if you die close it wont.

When ever a level or part of a level needs to be reset ( such as in a player's death ), the game unloads all of it's assets, and reloads them again ?

Yeah, that's an annoyance of mine in games - death and respawn should be nigh-instantaneous. Same with quick-loads, unless you are quick-loading into another level.

[Edit:] @TheChubu: I don't know for sure if they do, but some games certainly seems that way. One that comes to mind is the Call of Duty: Modern Warfare campaigns - the dying and respawning took 5-10 seconds or so on my old machine. The levels streamed fine, when playing, but dying and returning to the last checkpoint (usually just ~30 seconds back) noticeably paused the game.

It feels silly complaining about 10 seconds, but it definitely breaks the flow of the gameplay and makes things seem less smooth. Other than that, I thought the three Modern Warfare games were very well polished (but not so the Black Ops ones - those were noticeably less polished).

Why do a *LOT* of games have this behavior:

When ever a level or part of a level needs to be reset ( such as in a player's death ), the game unloads all of it's assets, and reloads them again ?

I'm inclined to guess that in some cases it might simply be that it's much easier, and more reliable, to simply destroy the level completely and instantiate it anew. For one thing, resetting selectively means picking through the various level-elements and determining which to keep and which to discard, which might be prone to mistakes, whether leaving loaded something that shouldn't be, or failing to keep something that should be.

I'm inclined to guess that in some cases it might simply be that it's much easier, and more reliable, to simply destroy the level completely and instantiate it anew.

It might also have to do with defragmenting video memory or whatever equivilent. I'd imagine that streaming engines might sometimes be forced into a corner and have to shuffle things around during gameplay otherwise, so if you have an opportunity to do it somewhere the player won't mind so much, perhaps its a good idea to take the opportunity. Not certain about that, but there are certainly plausible reasons in favor of a brute-force approach.