Examples: diablo 4 on blizzard client will let you play it before the full game is installed. The ps5 also let’s you do this when installing a new game. But I’ve never seen this option on steam games.

  • Dark ArcAEnglish
    14•9 months ago

    It’s worth noting … RuneScape has done this for decades 🙂

    You would basically have to write your engine to be friendly to the idea that an asset isn’t complete, and set up a non-complete (possibly absent or just low quality) and complete state.

    You download everything to the point where it’s suitably non-complete… Then you keep downloading things in the background to complete the install, prioritizing things the player is likely to or is encountering.

    • @WeebLife@lemmy.worldOP
      3•9 months ago

      Oh really? I’ve never played runescape, but that’s interesting that this feature has been around longer than I realized.

      • Dark ArcAEnglish
        5•9 months ago

        Yup! They might be the first game that became large scale to do it honestly. Because their game was getting quite big but they were a Java applet they (speculating a bit) wanted to maintain the fast load times as they added more and more content and get new players into the game quickly.

        Plenty of innovation out of Jagex back in the day (sadly not so much now). The founders sold their shares and left the company, the founding programmer started a company where he’s been working on a new game engine concept that’s supposed to make multiplayer as easy as single player to program for, I try my best to keep an eye on it (https://www.fenresearch.com/).