When i boot up a game, it takes a hwhile to actually load up, and for me to start playing, how is it then, that when i save, and then click “quit to desktop” or even just close the game from taskmanager, the game closes instantly.
In: 0
Why does slamming a book shut take no time at all, whereas finding your place in a book you’re reading takes a bit of time? Because doing nothing is a lot easier than doing something 🙂
When a program is opening, the device has to load the various assets and start to get things running. When it closes, it just has to…stop.
Granted, to quit a program _safely_ the device does need to do a few things, usually related to memory/saving. It’s not always instantaneous.
That’s why sometimes, if a program freezes, you have to manually “force quit” — it instantly closes the program, but at the cost of potentially losing data from not shutting down properly.
Starting a game is much more complicated than closing it. The program is there in the midia (be a disk or solid-state-device) and it must be translated into some form of raw binary format the machine can work with, and allocate memory for the immediate tasks.
And to close a game is simply a matter of saying “I’m closing, I don’t need this memory anymore, you can use for something else. Bye!”
Take a board game, it takes a second to set it up, ensure you know the rules and get everyone ready to play.
Closing your video game is like taking that game board and tossing it all back into the bag, much faster
When you load a game it’s moving the data from the hard drive(or ssd) into memory(RAM) memory is much faster and where programs you are using are stored while you use them. Closing a program moves all that data out of memory. Ram is volatile meaning when it loses power it loses any stored data.
When you close your game, if anything needs to be saved the program will commit that to the drive then blank out the memory so it’s free and ready for the next set of data the computer needs
Loading a game to make it playable means taking the DATA from your harddrive into RAM. Like when you buy a computer it has both Harddrive (x amount of data) and RAM(x amount of data)
Its like taking toys you wana play with from the storage and putting it on your desk. This takes time as its reading the data.
Closing a game just means your computer no longer uses the RAM that is has prepared, allowing it to be replaced by whatever else you load.
So “Closing” your game is like you just don’t care about what’s on your table anymore. Its still there (in your RAM) just… ignored and ready to be replaced.
It takes longer than you think. Just because the window is gone, doesn’t necessarily mean the program has closed. Next time, open Task Manager and look at the Game in the list before closing it, then watch what happens when you hit “Quit”…
When you “close” a program from task manager, it doesn’t “quit” properly, it just terminates the process. There’s no unloading, no memory clearing. All that crap is still in memory, the memory just gets marked as “free to use”, which *can* (and used to) cause some problems.
Edited to add: also, when you wait for a save to complete, you’ve done about 1/4 to 1/2 the work (depending on the game) of closing the game already, which is why it’s faster if you do that first
Latest Answers