you have to load that state from hdd when you die, regardless, because that state cannot sit in memory for the exact same reasons the game dumps obsolete data from memory when not in use and streams in new data as you progress.

the configuration isnt the issue, parsing the required data for the area is.

dumping a state to memory is not a fix, its an illogical waste, as you progress the state becomes obsolete, frequently updating the state in memory requires a variable pool, wasting a chunk of memory that the game needs for streaming its assets as you progress.

Let me put it bluntly.

Instanced states is not possible on consoles, there is not enough memory, and saving state to hard drive would decrease load times SLIGHTLY for disk based games, but INCREASE load times for digital download versions.

As someone with extensive experience working with memory management for shaders and texture data, as well as model lod, uvw streaming and as an ex employee of From software, I will simply leave it at this, your view of memory management does not work for the XBO or PS4.

Did you work for every single Japanese gaming studios? O_o

Most of the major ones, I was working at From Software when I first joined VGC, as some from here may still recall.

I am good at what I do, so when I leave studios I usually have invites to new ones waiting for me ;)

And that's why I think it's a waste to install the whole game to HDD, leaving a perfectly good source to stream big blocks of static data from unused.

Maybe I'm wrong yet most of the geometry, textures, models, all the stuff you need around each spawn point is the same every time. Loading that in 1 chunk from disk is more efficient, but yes indeed not optimal for a digital download version. You don't need to parse the spawn area every time, it's the same.
It's a trade off. I've worked mostly with gps navigation, maps of whole of europe, heavily compressed onto a 1 GB memory card with 1mb working memory. It's a balancing act but a couple smart caches and a bit of duplicated data where it counts go a long way towards a positive user experience.

Anyway I'm waiting for the day 1 patch to download, 2 hours on my shitty connection. My kids hijacked my ps4 already, playing Minecraft.

Game seems pretty cool so far to me - never really bothered with the Souls games before - but the load times are honestly starting to wear on me. =/

From is doing everything right. Hope Bloodborne is a huge success, because they absolutely deserve it.

Caching the area around the spawnpoint into memory would require a cache in active memory of about 2gb, thats a large portion of memory to "spend" on data that would become obsolete the moment the player switches area or progresses further, not to mention the process of duplicating this data to memory would impact overall performance and destroy the active memory area where predictive precaching is stored (there are no loading screens as you explore, only when warping from one area to the next).

GPS maps work in entirely different ways than games, you're working with a vector based map that streams in only one layer of detail at a time, as anyone who has used a gps device or google earth will know, gradually panning across a map delivers a generally smooth, seemless experience while jumping from one zoomed in portion to another causes a delay while the map area is parsed, that delay is the game equivolent of a loading screen.

I put it to you that duplicated data within a GPS device would use infinitely less storage space than duplicting the data stored in a spawn location for this game, the draw distance is insane, and thus beyond the intial high lod assets you would need virtually the entire citys low lod assets stored in memory too.

As I said the patch will likely reduce load times by adjusting the starting point with a less aggressive lod prefetch, resulting in more "beer eye" for the first 10 seconds and shorter overall times.

The engine as it is right now does already use memory storage for persistant data, which has a footprint of around 320mb, and stored the character data, statistics, and persistant world data, as well as the model data of fellow players that join during an active session, and the multiple forms of every weapon you possess.

While they will no doubt be able to find tune aspects of the streaming system beyond adjusting initial lod setup, the method you suggest would only really be feasible if there was only a disk version, and if ALL 8gb of memory for the system was available to games (which as we all know, it isn't).

i saw my elder brother play it last night. Plays pretty much like dark souls but faster and better graphics. The graphics are nice but nothing phenomenal looking. They should have used more AA as i could see jaggies. During his play, i noticed alot of frame pacing problem which can be annoying when changing the camera around or when attacking , plus there were quite a few areas where moving or breaking box causes fps drop. Looks like a fun though and hope they do patch it up. The loading page after you die, is not as bad as it people think it. it didn't seem that long to reload the level when he died.

this

Its a bit long, but its not the end of the world. Good to see theyre working on reducing it though...