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Silveraura

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20th March, 2004 at 00:06:27 -

The only reasion I'm posting this in the boards, is because their is no reasion to be posting some flashy artical for something this simple.
Basicly, the way to make a REAL loading screen is, if you ever noticed, when trying to load frames with high quality graphics, or large ammonts of sound or music. The game temp. lock's on the last frame it get's as it load's. (If you have a fast computer, just think that this is still useful for if your game is ran on a slower computer & you want to state to the person that the game is loading!) Basicly what you can do is add a frame that has only 1 line of events.
Start of Frame> Next Frame
For this to work, you can't have any fade's after the frame. The loading screen will instently go to the next frame, but if the next frame requires loading, it will lock up on the loading screen, letting the person know that it's loading. Now of course this wont let the person know the progress, & you wont be able to add flashy animated graphics, but all you need for a loading screen is the word "Loading..." or something to the effect of that!
Like I said, pritty simple, but you'll be shocked on how many people think it's great to make fake loading screen's & have places where the real one's should be, but don't!

Note: This work's for both TGF & MMF, just remember, unless you want a black screen, or what ever color you fade into, don't add end fades! You can though add a fade to the frame that is being loaded! Just not at the END of the loading frame!

 
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ShadowCaster

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20th March, 2004 at 01:47:44 -

A well-known tip, but quite useful to share with everyone. The only problem is there's no way of showing the user how much has loaded, and how much is left to load. For that, upgrade to Jamagic ^__^

Mike

 
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Cazra

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20th March, 2004 at 07:12:59 -

To show how much it's loaded, you can make a bar-counter and go to the next level when it's full. Just don't make the wait be long or else the player will get very P.O.ed.

 
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Matt Boothman

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20th March, 2004 at 07:35:48 -

How can you do that, when there is no animation on the loading screen?

You're talking about a fake loading screen.

 
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Silveraura

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20th March, 2004 at 08:26:42 -

Well, this really wasn't ment to be how to plump your game up with loading screens, but make them all real. This is basicly just replacing what appears to be the game locking up, with a loading screen, letting the person know that it's atleast loading, so they don't attempt to exit & miss out on the game.

 
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Tigerworks

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20th March, 2004 at 08:28:07 -

NEVER have fake loading screens. In Click products, you hardly ever need them, there are only a few special cases where they may be needed. Even with level editors, a fastloop can eliminate any loading times. The average level loads in under 1 second, and there is no need for a loading screen for that kind of load time.

Image Edited by the Author.

 
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Kris

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20th March, 2004 at 09:47:08 -

what's so good about 'loading' screens anyway? The less you need, the better...

 
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Chamzel



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20th March, 2004 at 09:56:27 -

Fake loading screens tend to anger players, especially those who know Click products.

But with this guy, what he's talking about, I have experienced a similar thing. I was working on a game pumped up with high quality graphics, boom boom, ra ra, sound effects, music, everything, super settings! But it took a few seconds of pausing to go between frames. So I ended up making a text object that said "Loading" that would pop up on the lower right corner of the screen every time a frame switch occured. This might have been due to the graphic level settings, though. I ought to go back through and change that graphic level setting and see how it would effect everything!

 
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X_Sheep

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20th March, 2004 at 10:27:40 -

"I ended up making a text object that said "Loading" that would pop up on the lower right corner of the screen every time a frame switch occured."
That's actually the best way to do it. A single line with "loading" is better than having a bar in it. It's very rare that TGF or MMF needs a loading screen though.

 
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Phlibbit



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20th March, 2004 at 11:35:45 -

That's a real good idea. I really needed that for levels where if you die, the level restarts. Without the loading screen, everything screwed up.

 
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Mr Icekirby



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20th March, 2004 at 12:37:59 -

lol... i use a 4mb 16 bit computer and it loads levels in about 4 seconds... hows that for slow?

 
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AndyUK

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20th March, 2004 at 15:40:32 -

Thats a tip i never knew!

but most of my games are under a meg anyway
so it loads the levels really quickly.

it was probably more usefull in 1996 when click products were newer and actually slowed pcs down a little more.

 
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ShadowCaster

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20th March, 2004 at 16:58:09 -

Yeah, I used this once with an old K&P game I made back in like 1995 or something cos everything back then was slow ^__^

Speaking of fake loading screens, I once downloaded this game was like a 2D maze which should have loaded in about 8 nano seconds, but they put in a fake loading screen which took twenty seconds to finish... by level 3 I was sick of it and quit, never to play it again.

Mike

 
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Knudde (Shab)

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20th March, 2004 at 17:03:16 -

I had to use the same trick in making the Noir Demo, when I would just restart it, it would paste half of the previous display onto the next level, it was very annoying, so that's when I made my general purpose "Status" screen.

 
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SoftWarewolf

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23rd March, 2004 at 09:51:46 -

it might be possible to make a real loading screen...
you can have a loop that checks how fast your computer is
then u need a calculation for how long it takes to load whatever your loading
then you can have a subapp show a bar loading

 
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25th March, 2004 at 17:04:17 -

thats really helpful! i think i'm gonna use it for my next project...

 
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Evil Monkey



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25th March, 2004 at 20:02:32 -

Start of Frame -> Next Frame isn't a fake loading screen. I used that method in my upcoming game, DroidRunner. Because of the large parallax image (Which takes time to put into memory) and the .xm music it has to load, it works out quite fine. You only see the loading screen for about half a second if you have a fast computer like mine.

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