Animal Crossing has some pretty long load times on startup or coming back from islands, but I'd still expect it's under a minute.

On the other hand, factorio is a load once and play for hours type game compared to something like mario which incurs loads on each level

Civ VI can also take a while to load. Especially if you’re loading a game that’s already in progress. I haven’t timed it but I wouldn’t be surprised if it was over a minute.

That jumped out to me too. I was hoping "let's not get ahead of ourselves" meant he'd explain why the startup time is so long but it's never mentioned again.

I just timed Breath of the Wild (cartridge version), and from the time I launched the game from the Switch menu to seeing the game menu was about 16 seconds, and the time from selecting a save file to loading the game world was about 18 seconds. What exactly about this game makes it take so long to load?

BotW got some after-launch patches that significantly reduced the launch time.

They did this by overclocking the Switch during load. I didn't see any mention of boost/overclock in the Factorio writeup, though.

Interesting, I wasn't aware (or forgot)! I looked into it though, and it seems like it wasn't anywhere near the minute+ mentioned in the article.

I found a GameFaqs forum thread[1] from shortly after the game launched that claims it was about 20 seconds. And a US Gamer article[2] that says the update that came a couple years later only shaved off about 5 seconds (seems within the ballpark of what I measured)

[1] https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/boards/189707-the-legend-of-ze...

[2] https://www.usgamer.net/articles/breath-of-the-wild-load-tim...

Do you know if this technique is available for all games or just Nintendo's own? It seems like it would be easy to cause issues if games were allowed to mess with the clocking willy-nilly, so I assumed that it was only done on Zelda because it's a first-party title (and one of the biggest on the console).

I've used this technique in the past on various shipped Switch games. It's an API that puts the Switch into "CPU Boost Mode".

It overclocks the CPU at the expense of GPU. It's suitable only for loading screens or other areas of the game where you don't need to render at more than single-digit FPS, but can produce a 20-50% improvement in loading time.

Interesting, curious if Factorio is using it then.

I work on the game, and can confirm this technique is used wherever it makes sense!

This article[1] claims Crash Team Racing takes advantage of boost mode, so seemingly it's available to third-party developers.

Perhaps they don't get to mess with the clock "willy nilly" and it's more like an API that enables a higher - but fixed - clock speed?

[1] https://www.shacknews.com/article/112895/crash-team-racing-n...

This is available for any game since 2019, here’s an article talking about it: https://www.eurogamer.net/digitalfoundry-2019-nintendo-switc...

Why manual and not a dynamic allocation of power budget like gaming laptops use? The driver decides which of the CPU or GPU is "starved" and gives the other more power.

One theory: If a game is GPU limited, which most are, it will be at 100% utilization no matter how much power it steals. However the CPU can't be power limited too much. Games have a physics loop that has to runs at a constant rate, independent of rendering. If the CPU is at 100% any disturbance might cause the physics step to not finish in time, and the game crashes...

Gonna have to wait for someone from the community to come along and profile the game to find that 10 Mb json file of in-app purchase items being parsed in O(n*2).

I love how this still comes up all these years later

I presume the GP is referring to the GTA V fix, which was only 18 months ago [0].. having been ever present in a game that had been out for over 6 years!

I think it'll be referred to for years to come as an example of not only how seemingly simple decisions can come back to haunt you, but also how patient users can be if they really want to play something..

0: https://www.thegamer.com/gta-online-fix-loading-times-offici...

I’m kind of surprised (and bummed) that they ported it to the Switch and not the iPad. The Switch is a bit slow (can’t imagine big bases performing well) and I’m not convinced using a game pad will work well. By contrast, modern iPads are smoking fast and I bet an iPad touch interface would suit the game fairly well. Ah well, maybe some day.

I think you could say this about a lot of games. IMO, Apple doesn't make it easy to port a game from PC to iPad (app store guidelines in particular), and I doubt there are as many iPad gamers as there are other platforms.

This is true but Factorio is not Madden; for example they have a sizable (for Factorio) built-in audience of everyone making iOS apps. The pencil would work well for input, I'd gladly buy it again.

The Switch got a touch screen as well?

A teeny tiny one in comparison.

And not a great one, as well.

I think I only use it when entering my character's name in an RPG after slowly typing a few letters with the controller then remembering I can press the screen.

For anyone who wants a Factorio-like on iOS, there's a great game called Builderment. It's not as complex as Factorio but it does get rather involved. Works well with touch and even works well on the smaller screens of iPhones.

I was going to check it out, but IAPs are full of gem packs, which is not very encouraging. How is the freemium aspect?

Sorry for the late reply. It works fine for free. There's no impediments to the actual gameplay. Gems aren't mandatory for anything. It's been a while since I last played, but when I did, gems weren't needed for anything other than random decorative items.

How does a game like Factorio take so long to load? The game assets themselves are like megabytes. What is it doing?

A comment from the developer on Reddit: https://old.reddit.com/r/factorio/comments/xlufvr/friday_fac...

> The majority of time spent starting the game is preparing the images from disk into a format that the GPU can use. The images on disk being compressed and or not the exact format that GPUs want. Now, what that time on switch is spent on… I don’t know for sure but I would guess something similar.

Some games, like ACNH, have a long load time.

Which is a little disappointing, since one of the things I loved most about the GameCube game was the instant load times. I also enjoyed taking the disc out of the slot after the game was loaded.

Animal Crossing is an interesting game to me because of how little the series code has changed over time. The GameCube releases seems to have almost literally been the Nintendo 64 release recompiled against a different SDK for the GC platform (weighing in at only 27MB total for the GC release! An entire 1.4GB DVD for 27MB!), while the Wii and 3DS games, and seemingly the Switch one, are variants of the DS rewrite (seemingly the last time the codebase was scrapped and restarted).

I'd be really curious to know how similar the Switch code is. On the surface, the game seems to have been extended quite a bit, but I feel like a lot of it is just uncovering functionality that already existed in the codebase, e.g. the ability to place arbitrary items on the outside grid, I'm fairly sure the "engine" already supported this, and it was the way outside objects were implemented, there was just no interface for adding/removing them.

New Horizons used the standard internal game engine Nintendo deploys for most of their flagship Switch games, called LunchPak/LunchPak 2.

https://www.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/fnfdic/nintendos_g...

Which is crazy since (having played NL and NH for a combined 1500 hours) even the little, deep details carry on from New Leaf. If I didn't know better I'd say NH was using an evolved NL engine.

Hmmm, I wonder! My experience with this comes from doing some minor reverse engineering work on the Wii game back in my teens, in order to pass all the dialogue through Google translate, for great amusement [0].

My observation was the data structures/file formats were basically slight modifications of the ones used in other first party Nintendo games, primarily Mario Kart and Mario Party. So it seems like it's always drawn heavily from some internal SDK/engine, it's just not clear how much, or how much of that engine is saved between consoles.

Anecdotally, the DS and Wii (and ... maybe the GC? I don't remember now) used the same file format for the dialogue scripts, although the DS version was little-endian, and broke all my (terribly brittle) "tooling". The 3DS was totally different, and I ... Think the Switch was a variant of the 3DS format? It's been a hot minute since I've looked at any of this stuff :-)

[0] https://imgur.com/a/hFRbY

Pretty much all of the games on Switch have very long loading times. Some stretch even into minutes (XCom and Civ6 come to mind as being pretty bad).

I haven’t measured, but Subnautica (on Switch) takes forever to load a save when it starts. I would not be surprised if it takes more than one minute.

Playing modded Rimworld (even on reasonable hardware) is a total ball ache for loading times.

I need to be absolutely sure i want to play the game five minutes before i do.