Spring RTS Engine

First of all there's no redrawing of the loading screen save when a phase finishes, and it looks very unproffesional

There's no progress at all no bars, graphs percentages eta's etc.

The text should also have a black outline. Lots of mods have loading screens where the white text on the bright background is near indecipherable.

Last of all if some lua style control over the display of loading screens for example maybe to list the players and races and team colours, or maybe as a way of doing proper loading sequences and animations or progress bars or percentages etc.

Redrawing loading screens is very stupid imho. In practice it usually means increasing the loading times by 10..20% just because someone may be so stupid to move a window in front of it so you need to run an redraw loop...

Also the amount of work it is to do properly (ie. separate update thread or load thread, passing around ogl context between threads, making sure there are no race conditions/deadlocks etc.) is unproportionally high compared to what you get back for it.

Atually the loading screens already show the loading progress btw...

Yes but unless you know the different stages off by heart you have no gage of how far into loading you are.

And there's nothing stopping the loading screens being static and being generated by a lua script in a one of call.

AF wrote:Yes but unless you know the different stages off by heart you have no gage of how far into loading you are.

Does it matter? Is anyone going to quit because they dont know how far into loading they are and think its frozen or something? They cant quit anyway, because Shift-Esc doesnt work during the loading screens.

Personally I dont think it matters. If it means increasing times by 10-20% as Tobi said then it just isnt worth it.

Actually your incorrect sheekel. Tobi was referring to continuosly redrawing the load screens, and you've misunderstood what we were talking about.

But they're already redrawn when they move from 1 stage to the next, adding a percentage and a progress bar would not involve extra redraws and thus only add an estimated 5 milliseconds to the loading time at maximum.

Problem with overall percentages is that they are impossible to get right (partly due to the multitasking nature of today's OSes). You never know how many time e.g. pathing is going to take compared to some other part of the loading. Some loading screens aren't shown if certain features are off, making a proper estimate even more bothersome. So you'd just get a progress bar that takes some big jumps sometimes, then takes very small steps. In the end you still don't know how long it takes because you don't know the stepsize of the progress bar for future loading screens.

It's a heck of a lot of work to get it at least a bit right. And some self-learning mechanism is way too complex imho.

If it really appears to be a problem for some people we can always put a note in the installer mentionning "there are approximately 11 loading steps" or sth like that.

The only progress thing that would be good to add to spring imho is sending pathing % over the net. Or even the other players current loading screen msg, so other players know why people aren't in the game yet (pathing).

Ah, i guess i did misunderstand.

As far as priority, imo, Resync > Loading % bar

Tobi wrote:Problem with overall percentages is that they are impossible to get right (partly due to the multitasking nature of today's OSes). You never know ...

That is no problem at all. Just make like Microsoft's installer of Windows XP (and probably of previous Windows). At point x, it always says 36 mins remaining, no matter how fast the PC is. At point y, it always says 32 mins remaining. At point z, it always says 15 mins remaining. Hahaha!

A percentage would do fine

But the ability to reposition the text on the loading screen from the centre or pick a loading screen background based on the map or race of the player would be great