The Loading Screen

Just a thread to understand some of the inner workings of VS better, in particular the Loading Screen.

Is it possible to call this screen manually or is it exclusive to the start of the application?

I’m asking as it shows when I start the game (before my main menu), but not after I select a saved game and click Load. The game just freezes for the few seconds it takes to load and then continues. This doesn’t look very pleasing to me and I would rather show a loading screen.

Yes, I can do this manually with a kind of ‘dummy’ loading screen, but something that indicates actual progress of loaded resources would be preferable. Any suggestions?

The loading screen is essentially just a splash screen that is shown on game launch & can incrementally show an image/animation. To be honest I do not see the point in it.

What would be more ideal is if we had a couple of data entry values.... a bool entry to determine if data is being loaded & an integer or float value containing the current load percentage or the current blocks parsed out of x blocks or something.

& as for the incrementing image/animation in the load screen - I would like to see that added as an action part or at least to the data structure tables so that we can define how much of image/animation should be visible & from which direction. It would be a useful feature for creating progress bars, or for puzzles etc...

Ok, so no luck there (for now).

As the start of a workaround, how would one go about checking whether a selected save slot has a save game "in" it?

the save system takes a little while to get used to... in actual fact clicking on where you created a save slot/border sets that slot to true but to check if it contains a save you need to create a scene object with the object polygon around the same save slot square thingy & add a on mouse over or left click executed action containing an if query.

this will check if a save game is linked to the currently selected save slot or slot below mouse cursor.

Thanks, I missed that one while scanning through the action parts.

I am however only half way to a workaround. I have the issue that whenever an action contains "Load" nothing else happens before the load is executed. For instance, I cannot seem to change anything on the current menu/scene before the engine goes into 'hang-on-while-I-load-this-game-for-you'-mode.

I think this might have something to do with the discussion we had with Simon a few days back regarding actions being stacked and only completed when all the different action parts have been worked through.

I can't help you with that... but technically you wouldn't need to change anything anyway as it would be loading all values, conditions etc that have been stored inside of the save file. So if you wanted it to do something before loading then have it perform whatever it is before executing the load action. If you wanted to create a load scene/icon or something then sort that & disable mouse cursor to prevent player from interacting with anything & then execute the load action part after some condition or x time has passed.

Ok, now I'm 75% there. I've added a pause which does seem to do the trick -- the loading image now appears before the game is loaded. But (there's always a "but"), the save game thumbnails still show on top of the image that I overlay.

Do they have specific object centres (not that it would make sense for a menu interface)? Or is there a way to hide them?

Ah about that...

the save game thumbnails are always set to top. I have spoken to David about removing that setting as I find it very unintuitive. It prevents us from creating stylish save game overlays & filters etc.

I will ask David about it on skype in a wee bit to see if he, or one of other devs sorted it out or not.

Ok David told me that Simon fixed it already - I've just tested it & you can now add images/animations above it. but... there's no object center options for menu scenes so if you want to place anything below the save thumbnail, you will have to add it to the background image itself I think.

Ok, thanks for checking. Guess I'll release the "Improved loading screen" as a game patch.

hmm... how long more or less until you've finished developing your game? out ERD is still end of this month - just under 2 weeks to go until new release - hopefully.