I was trading today and seeing the same gridded planet for the umpteenth time while loading sector data really gets on one's nerve.

Now that almost every system/sector belongs to a faction (guarded or monitored), how about creating 2-3 nice screens for each faction that would be chosen at random when entering a sector "belonging" to this faction? I think of something like the image at the top of this website, something "atmospheric", with a hint of what the faction "does" or whatever.

Of course, neutral sectors would get few its-a-cold-big-lonely-universe-out-there screenies.

What do you think, people?

[moved to suggestions]

If you're Serco, entering Serco territory says "welcome home, warrior". Otherwise it says "GO AWAY" in big red letters.

or "Running away again I see....learn to fight like the Itani"

...which is to hop into a Valk and wobble away like a chicken after having wasted a full load of sunflares. Or to set oneself aflame via the fine art of rocket rammetry. Whichever one comes first.

I think having a wormhole animation from entrance to exit would be cooler than to have the generic load screen pop up. Example:

1. Player activates wormhole and enters wormhole as usual.
2. 3rd person view of ship inside tunnel now with stars and dust continuously blaze past the ship.
4. Player exits wormhole and into new sector when loading is finally done.
5. Apply motion blur or ghosting effect to give the illusion of space/time synchronization when ship enters sector.

It would actually be pretty easy to render. The entire scene would take place in a pitch black mini-room. All the spaceship would have to do would be to stand still, maybe bob up and down or turn ever so slightly from time to time, while a particle generator would spit tracers at the ship for the duration of the load time. Tadaa, instant warp drive special FX!

I think you underestimate how much it takes to actually load a sector. What your suggesting would add a considerable amount of time on to the load times on slower machines. Not acceptable imho...Also, motion blur and other effects that you're talking about are only available on higher end, (dx8-9) video cards, also screwing the low-end machines. It'd be an idea as an option in an add-on pack someday, just isnt practical right now.

This game, by release, probably will require a dx8 card. By then, everybody will have their 6800/X800's for Doom III anyhow. I plan to have at least a 6800 GT...

Still. Average DirectX card is a Radeon 8500 or a geForce III.

Once upon a time I did make the 'loading' screen be a 'inside wormhole animation'. The problem was that it was very jerky because of all the things loading. I would need to split out the loading into a different thread to be able to make the animation smooth. That would require a synchronized multithreaded resource loading system that I've wanted to do for a very long time but was too low on the priority list.

"If you're Serco, entering Serco territory says "welcome home, warrior". Otherwise it says "GO AWAY" in big red letters."

...LOL

Why not take it one step further and put a holographic no-entry sign over the 3->2 wormhole... bright red of course :p

Well okay. How 'bout just placing the new sector background behind the loading screen? It's a small step, but it'll do something to add variation.

AlienB, motion blur can be done with software rendering, as evidenced by games like Oni. I got some awesome blur effects from that game on my ATI Rage Pro (6MB) equipped iMac, which is an ancient system. There was no impact on performance, so they left it in the game at all graphics settings.

you're still missing the point....loading requires a good amount of resources, and unless they had some kind of load-balancing as ray said, it wouldnt be possible, and even then, it'd increase the load times quite a bit. It could/should be an option for high-end machines, and SMP boxes, which could handle the load without problems.

No, the motion blur suggestion was for when you enter the sector. Check out the below image.

http://freespace.virgin.net/hugo.elias/graphics/cubeblur2.gif

Imagine the cube being the spaceship. When the entrance wormhole animation is played, your ship is seen as a series of transparent models. When the space and time continuum or whatever synchronize, the ship will gradually merge with the blur, to give a cool effect. This can all be done with either software rendering or hardware rendering.

Yeah I know, it's not on topic but since it was brought up I thought I'd clarify.

There's some pretty cool resources out there that the devs can download if they don't want to spend the time to code it. I know it's not a priority now, but I think it should be considered later on to enhance the effect of speed.

http://www.garagegames.com/index.php?sec=mg&mod=resource&page=view&qid=5686

http://www-users.cs.umn.edu/~ashesh/papers/eg03_paper351.pdf

Good stuff. It's a shame very few games use these.

Ah ok, that makes much more sense. Different loading screens would suffice for now....

Well, the loading screen image still has to be loaded, even if it's "only" the current one - so why not include few more images on _client-side_ and have _client_ choose which one will be loaded.

No network traffic needed.

We'll cook up some more loading screens if we get a chance. There will be "tips" appearing at the bottom of the screen. At least that's something.

Like ray said (well, not quite like he said, but related..), what we really want to do is get rid of the loading screen entirely. If we had the multithreaded thingie like he was saying, we could pre-load some things in the background. Anyway.. someday..

hehe thingie hehe

/me acts like beevis and butthead

[kinda off-topic]
The funny thing is, if you press escape during the loading screen between sectors, the sector background appears on the sides of the loading image and you can see roids appearing as they are being loaded. Bug? Feature?