So, acknowledging the necessity of loading screens, can we spiff the current one up a little? Maybe it's just having seen it so many times, but it seems a little... dull.

Off the top of my head, using existing interface components, you could have the rotating ship model display like in the Ship tab, along with the ship damage display that hangs out on the right side of the HUD. Then, you could have "Loading [sector]" on the top, and the tip along the bottom. Probably toss in some random picture in there too.

Anyone else have ideas on how the loading screen could be made cooler? Considering the amount of time spent looking at it, I feel it deserves a little beautification.

"Considering the amount of time spent looking at it" what even with a mere 512 megs of ram it takes me 2~3 seconds per sector load?

Doesn't internet connection quality factor int he load time, as well?

Not everyone is from the US.

spidey isn't from the US.

And he's in Malaysia right now, if I remember right. He normally lives in Canada.

I've always thought that a ship flying through the wormhole going in all crazy directions would make a good loading screen, from a view like when you press F9 once, you know. Maybe something like when people go through the stargate in the one of the Stargate series, but you can see your ship.
Then again, that may require loading time for the loading screen as well...

not so much if the animation is small in size and gets cached.

I think a context specific loading screen would be very cool.

"Now entering Serco Space (with a serco logo and some propaganda or something)" or "Now entering Latos Mining (with a list of in demand supplies on the screen or something)". Right now they're boring and sorta useless. It would be cool to make available some useful information, perhaps in a HUD overlay element that starts at the load screen and remains for a set time after you enter the sector, so for example, you enter a station and the Trade Items in Demand list pops up and floats for a second after the load screen leaves so you can read it as you approach the station.

I also like the Eve warp effect. removing the loading screen completely and making something more seamless would also be cool.

I dont think it needs anything tat fancy, just a splash screen of the station your entering with a nice loading animation and some new tips. The current ones are awfully repetitive.

I like the idea about location-specific loading screens - it would help mitigate the "oh well, entering yet another anonymous sector" feeling, plus it would add to the game atmosphere.

Wait people have time to read more than LOADING.

I've thrown something together. :P

http://home.arcor.de/famscheffler/ven/animatedload.zip

It's not perfect. for some reason I can't get it to display the
tips with the original widget.

The animation would be smoother with a higher framerate and more
frames but that'd have made the package abit too large for my
taste.

Also if I had the filenames of the navmap backgrounds I could use
those for each system. Right now it just uses the one that's
packaged with it.

Didn't test it all that much .. so there may be other issues.

EDIT: oups .. may not work correctly on macs

Yeah, spuck. I tried 320x256 and 320x320. No go.

with images rescaled to 250x250 or so it works nicely

Both dimensions must be powers of two, so only 2,4,8,16,32,64,128,256,512,.. are allowed. I forgot about that.

Thanks for helping. I've reuploaded the packege with resized images.

EDIT: further updates will be here http://vendetta-online.com/x/msgboard/9/17115?page=3#229041
I don't want to hijack this thread even more.

Nope, 250x250... even 256x256 didn't.

[edit] Apparently, Photoshop does bad things to .png files. New download works.