I would like to apologize if this thread has already been used. I searched for it but couldn't find it.
I am a big fan of video games so a couple years ago I started making them. But just yesterday I was playing a game and was waiting for a level to load when I realized that none of the games I created have loading cutscenes. But they seem to work fine without them. So are they really neccesary? And if they help how would I go about adding them to my game? And how do you make itso your computer knows when its loading quickly, therefore playing the cutscene quickly, and when its loading slowly, therefore slowing your cutscene down?
I don't believe that you could create a game by yourself that would be detailed/advanced enough to require much of a loading screen. Console games require extended loading screens for the following reasons:
Disc media read times are not as fast as hard drive read times.
The assets probably require some sort of decompression before they can be used.
The quality of the art, resolution of the textures, and sheer size of the game world is incredibly large, and takes a lot of time to setup.
Huge teams of (sometimes) hundreds of people work on the game that you're loading, and there's often a lot more "stuff" to load.
You don't need a loading screen if your game doesn't take any extended period of time to load.
I'm assuming you were playing a console game off of a disc. Streaming data from a disc takes much longer than streaming from a hard drive(which I'm sure all of the games you made are played off of). Therefore its much more common place to mask these longer load times with cutscenes to keep the player entertained.
First of all, cutscenes are not necessary when loading. Sometimes just a simple progress bar is enough. They give the player something to look at and, if you are going to show them anyway, may as well show them between the action.
The second part of your question. How does your computer know how fast the next level is loading so that you can adjust the cutscene playback speed? Normally, you would not adjust the length of your cutscene to fit the load time. I would use Application.LoadLevelAsync (pro only feature, sorry if you have regular) to load the level in the background and play your cutscene from start to finish then load the next level.
Let's say you have a very large scene probably larger than you will make, but as an example, and it takes 15 seconds to load. You can play a cutscene in front that takes 30 seconds so that there is room for slower computers to load the scene also. Then at the end of the cutscene go straight to the scene or you can give the player the option to skip the rest after the level is loaded. This way, the user gets the same experience so matter how fast their computer loads the level.