A game goes to load an asset, and it hasn't been fetched yet. Would it freeze pending completion of the download?
While I personally wait for games to completely finishing installing before I play them, friends of mine have dabbled in launching games that haven't finished installing yet on consoles (and this includes installing games from disc as well as downloads). In the case of one fighting game I saw, you couldn't choose from all the characters and stages cuz they weren't all installed yet (but on the character selecting screen it would show you which characters were still being installed with progress meters). Some games will tell you what features are missing when you launch them before they've finished installing. I've also seen partially-installed console games exhibit performance issues and glitches. Games can run kinda wonky. I seem to recall cases where stuff like certain music tracks don't get played cuz they haven't been installed yet. I know these games have to have a certain minimum amount of data installed before you are even given the option to launch it before full installation is completed. How well it all works depends on each individual game, and how the developers implemented the feature. Of course that's with the normal setup I've seen on consoles and some PC game launchers, not this fancy-@ss way Steam is planning on doing it. Steam is taking an interesting approach, I am curious to see how well it works.
...it's a good option to have for the majority of people who are still on a poor internet connection.
I guess this would be nice if you happen to have a slow internet connection.
Yeah I guess I hadn't realized that this is probably a very useful option for people who have sh1t internet, where it takes them days to download games of the kinds of sizes we see today.
Unrelated, but speaking of options like launching games before they've finished installing, one option I have not made much use of in the past decade is remote installations. Like when I'm away from home and telling Steam or one of my consoles to start downloading and installing a game. I've used this feature like maybe 2 or 3 times in the past. I think every single time was when I was at work, hoping the game would finish installing by the time I got home. I know some consoles automatically install your games (and keep your games up-to-date) if you have the system in standby mode, but the only system I ever leave in standby/sleep mode is the Switch. All the other consoles that support such a future I usually turn them completely off when I am not using them. This topic is not relevant to this thread, but I was reminded of remote installation features, and I'm curious if anyone else has ever used such a thing, on any platform.
never experienced such a problem before.
Games like
UT1,
UT2K4,
Far Cry 1, and
Riddick: EFBB tend to get confused and lose performance (or straight-up crash) if they detect 2 or more CPU cores/threads.
UT1 used to, but they fixed it in a patch. Same for
Unreal 1 I believe. I think
UT2K4 mighta gotten fixed too.
Quake 3 I think was another game where you had to limit the amount of cores the game would see and use in order to get it to work properly/optimally. I wanna say Gearbox's original
Halo 1 port as well.
HL2 got a patch to make it more multi-core aware. It's an issue I've had to deal with, and have been wary of, ever since dual-core CPUs came out. It usually happens with games that came out before dual-core CPUs were a thing. I know I'm missing some games, but back in the 2000s this was definitely an issue friends and I ran into quite a few times. Around the time when Threadripper came out, I recall hearing about quite a few modern games getting confused by and crashing/not running when they saw 24+ CPU threads (like I think some Codemasters racing games).
When I need to set CPU affinity for a game and specifically pick which cores and threads a game will run on, instead of doing it in Windows Task Manager every single time the game launches, I use THG
Task Assignment Manager. I'm sure there are better programs for that these days, cuz that program is old as sh1t, but it works for me and does what I need it to do, so I've never tried using anything else. You can set affinity on a per-game basis, and it saves those settings. Only thing is the program has to be running in the background before you launch the game. I rarely have to use that program anymore though. Some old games I should probably be setting CPU affinity for, but I still don't bother to do that. Usually only if a game is having noticeable issues will I try setting CPU affinity, after looking the game up to see if it has issues with multiple cores/threads (and if so, what the thread limit is). Oh yeah, I also recall that with some games, you can modify their config file(s) to help them better deal with CPUs that have too many threads. Don't remember the specifics on any games where I did this, but I seem to recall that being a thing.
And that was a 2012 game, so multi-core CPUs had already been out for a while. The devs should've accounted for that from the get-go. According to the PC Gaming Wiki,
Prototype 2 needs to be limited to 8 CPU threads or less. I did play that game back in the day (never finished it, but I did finish the first game), but I don't remember what year I played it in. I know I didn't have a CPU that had 8 threads back then, so I wouldn't have needed to set affinity for that game's executable. So yeah I wasn't aware that was one of the games that doesn't like too many CPU threads.
