Load time opportunity?

When you use teleport scrolls, there is a "teleport" timer where your character stands for quite a time doing the teleport dance. Then when you get to your destination, the scene load starts. My question is, why in the interest of reducing load wait times does the scene not load while the teleport dance is happening? Then when it is over, viola!!, you are at the destination, not waiting for the load screen to complete?

 

because teleport can be interrupted, i think? by the player or by external forces.
you'd have to keep the current scene loaded, so you'd have to have to scenes loaded at once, which could be quite a strain.

we don't have to do the teleport dance at all, that was added deliberately.

 

about textures: it could load with mipmap 8 (everything blurry), then slowly/background reload with mipmap 0 or 1, ONLY AFTER we get there, well, I would watch less u2b videos (while it loads) this way :>

 

I don't think load can be done, but preload can be done.

Preload: Setup the file buffers to put stuff in the memory.
Load: Actually import stuff into the memory, organize, process for use, purge unneeded stuff, and finally GC.

What setting up the buffers does is tell the OS where to preload it's cache from so it can get started on it's background optimization of loading what might be loaded. Worst case this is a tiny bit of wasted effort by the computer, best case you shave a few seconds off of load time.

A 10 second head start on Preload would substantially improve performance on high memory systems with slow hard drives. (Operating Systems use extra memory to read-ahead on buffers.)

Other things that could trigger preload are going very close to an exit or walking over a town.

Preloading is a background task that can be done whether or not it is followed by loading the preloaded data.
I am not sure if Unity allows preloading, with easy settings, though. It has a very ridged "scene load" function that may interfere with doing so.

 

As of the lower LODs/MIP-Maps, I think that would result in more stutter.

I don't want to get too far into the technical details, but when you process data in Unity you can create a lot of temporary variables. These then have to be cleaned up. Unfortunately Unity has to freeze gameplay for about a tenth of a second to clean these things up.

Additionally, due to the way Unity packages work, you wouldn't really save time unless you wanted to create a second package with the high detailed textures. This would further create stutter.