[Agentlien]

At my first job we made training simulations. One day someone decided to do make our loading bar more accurate by splitting loading into several segments and keeping a local record of the average time to load each segment. The result was a smooth progress bar from 0 to 100. We were proud of it.

Years later I worked on a popular AAA franchise and we had replace our loading screen spinner with a progress bar due to console requirements. We simply estimated a worst case scenario and made the bar driven by a timer from zero to this number, smoothly speeding towards 100 when loading was done. People kept complaining that something felt off and it didn't seem reliable.

[jandrese]

The failure mode becomes the bar stops at 99 or 100 but the game doesn't run, or worse, the bar flies off the end of the chart, hitting 101%, 102%, etc...

[Agentlien]

Neither of those could happen since it was capped at 100 and the time to fill it was just below the timeout.

[jandrese]

Neither could happen if nothing went wrong. What if there is a hardware issue that makes it much slower at reading data than usual, like excessive CRC failures that require loads of retries to get a good read?