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!
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
"Now I guess we're... 'Path-E-Tech Management'" -Dilbert
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.
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.
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.
what's so good about 'loading' screens anyway? The less you need, the better...
"Say you're hanging from a huge cliff at the top of mt. everest and a guy comes along and says he'll save you, and proceeds to throw religious pamphlets at you while simultaniously giving a sermon." - Dustin G
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!
"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.
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
"Now I guess we're... 'Path-E-Tech Management'" -Dilbert
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.
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
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.
Edited by the Author.
Project Progress:
1.: Droid Runner (5% Complete)
Finishing Up Game Engine
Advertisement
Post Reply
Mike 
Edited by the Author.
