For the people who have played the Metroid Prime series you may be familiar with the elevators that take you up or down as the game area loads. I was thinking of a loading screen on the lines of this. As you go down an elevator the loading screen will show a loop animation of your knight or party on the elevator grinding down, down deep into your destination. Sparks flying from the grinding of the metal, screeching and an actual look of what the clockworks would look like inside while going down. I know this would probably take some work for the Three Rings team if they ever thought of implementing it so this is basically for the "Oh wow, that would be totally cool" visual interest. So tell me what you would think and show your support if you like. :)
Idea for Clockworks Loading Screen
Agreed. The data that traverses between client and server seems quite unoptimized.
The fancier it is the longer it'll take to load right? At least on those without powerfull machines.
@Hexzyle:
It's not any (much) data transfer that happens at that time though. It's mostly just converting models from their on-disk format to their in-memory format, which is CPU- and memory-transfer-rate-bound. Hence the code and structure changes.
I really like the looping animation idea; I can't imagine it'd be particularly taxing on players' machines, especially if it's kept simple. I habitually alt-tab to Chrome or somesuch during loading screens, but having something a bit more interesting to look at for a bit would be welcome.
What the guys at 3 rings could do is put something like a limitation on the animation through the options menu. So you could decide if you would like the option of haveing the loading screen or not.
Great idea!
the 20+ seconds they currently take.
Ouch. My loading screens only take like 5 seconds. Keep in mind that this isn't a console game; loading times are based on your computer, not the game itself. I know people whose loading times are on the brink of instant, and others who have 1min+ loads.
Animations? You are probably going to make it more lag. Just stay with the current loading screen because people have trouble loading already.
I think that the code and data structures should be modified so that the loading screens are cut down to a few seconds instead of the 20+ seconds they currently take.