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Comment by wsc981 | Hacker News Reader

I was always annoyed by the loading screen when moving by boat between west and east continents.

I guess this loading screen was added due to technical reasons. Likely each continent was managed by a different server.

Another loading screen that I didn't like, was the underground tram between Stormwind and Ironforge. It made the tram feel fake (which I guess it was). Would have been awesome if it really was an underground tram that ran under the game world.

These 2 loading screens broke te immersion a little bit.

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I expect the loading screen was in large part to there being no smooth transition when sailing from one continent to another.

WoW in its original form still had "zones" where there was a small delay in moving between them. These delays were actually exploited by players for PvP purposes (ie camping those zone transition points).

I'm guessing also a "realistic" time to travel between the two continents would not be very appealing the thousandth time you have to do it.

This is something EVE online deliberately leans into. Time to travel between star systems adds up really quickly and promotes a feeling of living in a particular part of the galaxy. Where going to a city to use the auction house has enough friction to be an annoyance in WoW, in EVE there’s so much more friction that it becomes a whole logistics game within the game. There’s money to be made hauling cargo because of this, and hauler ships offer the trade off of bigger cargo holds with fewer defences.

EverQuest had a long boat ride you could take between regions. It's hard to imagine any game company doing that in a MMO these days.

I think the tram had to be fake given the actual world geometry. If you consider where the tram should be it makes no sense. Well that, or they had to totally change the world to accommodate it or give it a very strange path.

The tram loading screen could have been an engine limitation. Streaming the game world from disk works nicely if the player moves at a pace that is slow enough that the disk can keep up. Long range teleportation breaks that assumption completely. You can deal with that case in two ways: accept a loading screen or build teleportation support into the streaming system, which means that both ends of the teleporter need to be loaded at once if you walk up to it. I assume that Blizzard decided against all that complexity deep in the engine for a single use case.

I think it's because you can't load assets from the entire game world in main memory, so when you go to a new zone it'll load assets from disk (slowly).

You could, even back in vanilla. I remember making a Linux ramdisk and installing the entire game into ram.

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