Chapter 167: Better Loading

At 6:00 in the morning, under Allen and Mike's watchful eyes, Frank officially powered on the console and entered the game. 

"Quit wasting time and get started already!" 

Mike gave Frank a shove, urging him to hurry up and get into the game. Sitting on the title screen just to listen to the music was ridiculous! Though, to be fair, Mike himself was enjoying the music quite a lot. 

"Oh, yeah, you're right! We should actually play the game." 

Frank finally snapped out of his daze. His eyes lingered on the [Multiplayer] option for a moment before he operated the controller and selected single-player mode. 

"Choose a civilization?" 

The first thing the game asked them to do wasn't to enter a character name as games usually did. Instead, it immediately presented them with a list and allowed the player to choose for themselves. 

This was completely the opposite approach from the design of many games in the past. 

Frank quickly scanned the entire list. At first glance, it seemed to cover everything from ancient empires long since faded into history, like Babylon, to the United States, a young country which had been around for only a few hundred years. 1

Frank turned his head and exchanged a glance with the other two. What else was there to say? They were playing as the good old U.S. 1

"Let's see, Theodore Roosevelt and the United States..." 

The moment he made his selection; a portrait of Roosevelt appeared on the screen. The limited resolution meant it was still impossible to escape the pixelated look, but his trademark glasses and mustache still made him instantly recognizable. 7

At the same time, the various entries for the United States appeared on the other side of the screen. But by then, none of the three had any attention left to spare for those words. 

"These colors... can a game console really do this?" 

The image wasn't particularly refined, but the transitions were smooth and the colors were rich. 

"256KB of VRAM… And somehow, they managed to squeeze every last byte out of it." 1

Even Allen, who hadn't been much of a fan of the 16-bit console, couldn't help but let out a genuine sigh of admiration. Their own PCs couldn't produce anything that looked this good. 

Allen glanced back at his desk. His computer was still running, but the green and black DOS interface on the screen suddenly looked painfully primitive by comparison. 

Nothing looks good when you put it next to something better. 

"Hey, can we not be so superficial? Let's look at the gameplay! If all we care about is graphics and sound, why don't we just go watch a movie?" 

Mike was the first to come back to his senses, and he gave Frank a hard shove. 

"Look at the entries! Check it out, they've even got the P-51 Mustang!" 

"Huh? What do all these things mean?" 

Frank finally came to his senses and carefully read through the description of the United States. By the time he finished, he felt like his brain was about to give up, and his head was practically buzzing. 

What was all this supposed to mean? There wasn't a single term he understood, and the more he read, the more confused he became. 

"What's a Natural Wonder? What's Science? And what the heck is Culture?" 4

"Mm... Okay, I think I understand it now." 

"Really?" 

"Of course not." 2

"..." 

"This thing… there's no way anyone could figure it out just by looking at it." 

Clearly, they wouldn't really understand what any of this meant until they actually started playing. 

After choosing their civilization, they also had to select the difficulty. That was nothing unusual, as players were already familiar with the idea from other games. 

Civilization didn't simply label its difficulty levels as Easy, Normal, and Hard. Instead, it used titles like Prince, King, Emperor, and Deity. GAMENOVA had already used a similar system in Wolfenstein. 

"Let's just go with the default Prince difficulty. We'll figure out how to play first." 

As for the map and its size further down, Frank simply chose the default small sized continents as well. 

The random map generator, which had evolved from the experimental system previously tested in Fire Emblem, had gone through several iterations and was now nothing like the basic little thing it had been originally. 

The dramatically improved capabilities of the 16-bit machine allowed Ethan and the team to incorporate far more complex mechanics. 

However, even with their highly optimized algorithms, they couldn't make the loading process completely seamless. 

Generating a random map still took time. But Civilization had found a very interesting way to make the process... slightly more interesting. 

"From the first spark of life stirring beneath the endless seas…" 

Frank froze for a moment when the narration began playing through the television. The narrator sounded like a storyteller recounting history, slowly unfolding an epic tale before them. 

"To the mighty beasts that once ruled the ancient Earth…" 

"Then came humanity's first steps upon two legs. A journey spanning millions of years, shaped by survival, discovery, and wonder." 

"You've already come so far." 

"But this is only the beginning." 

"Now, embark upon your greatest exploration yet!" 

"From the cradle of early civilizations... to the vastness of the stars." 

"Your journey through time begins now." 

... 

"And so it is upon your broad shoulders, Theodore Roosevelt, to charge forth and lead your people on their great adventure. Use your military might to give the peoples of your homeland the square deal they so desperately deserve. Surely, you will raise America into the limelight and attract visitors from across the oceans just to see your lands. Bully for you, Mr. President." 

The narration continued, but a prompt had already appeared at the bottom of the screen, indicating that they could press the A button to officially enter the game. 

They had been so focused on listening to the narration and trying to understand all those entries that they hadn't even noticed the entire loading process. 

"What a brilliant solution!" 

Frank couldn't help but exclaim in surprise. 

Civilization had cleverly hidden most of the loading process behind the narration. While the audio chip played the prerecorded introduction, the CPU worked in the background, generating the map and preparing the necessary resources. By the time the narration ended, most of the work was already finished. 

In the past, whenever a game needed to load something, the usual solution was simple: put up a black screen and make the player wait. 

Honestly, the three of them were so used to it that they barely noticed anymore. In fact, whenever a large game didn't have a loading screen, they almost felt like something was missing. 

With the loading speeds of storage media and the processing speeds of processors at the time, completely eliminating loading time was simply impossible. 

But Civilization had found a clever way to make that unavoidable wait far less boring, all without putting much extra strain on the system. That kind of attention to detail surprised even Allen, who had always been somewhat skeptical of the new console. 

This was almost the opposite of what he had expected. Instead of simply piling on better hardware while overlooking the small details, GAMENOVA seemed to be doing exactly the opposite. 

And yet, the surprises Civilization had in store were only beginning. 

When Frank finally entered the game, what appeared before his eyes was a hexagonal map, it was unlike anything he had ever seen before. 

The familiar square grid and tile-based layout of older games were gone. In their place was a dense field of hexagons stretching across the screen. Aside from several rings of tiles around the starting location, everything else was completely covered by a parchment-like fog of war. 

"Hexagons? How did they even manage to do this?" 

The dramatic change in the map's design sent the three of them down an entirely different line of thought. 

On a square grid, representing a position was straightforward enough. You could simply assign it coordinates like (1, 1). 

"…I think they shifted every other row sideways by half a tile. That way, the tiles in one row sit between the tiles in the row above and below, which creates this hexagonal pattern." 

After thinking it over for a moment, Mike gave his own explanation. 

By shifting every other row sideways by half a tile, the tiles in each row could be positioned between the tiles in the rows above and below. Once those tiles were rendered as hexagons, the familiar square grid was transformed into the dense hexagonal pattern they were seeing on the screen. 

It was a somewhat counterintuitive approach, but the solution was surprisingly clever and elegant. 

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