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I wish there were working elevators instead of loading screens for interiors.
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This would require them to stop instancing, everything everywhere, all the time. This game is even more instanced than CO, which has a TON as well.
Deadspace came to my mind first... and then the screaming started.
That came first to my mind. Made me shiver when my mind converted the Star Trek Theme to a similar elevator music theme
If the loading screens were the ship you're flying moving at warp, like the shows. Warping in or out. The loading screens for ground were you and your crew beaming out then beaming in they wouldn't be so bad.
Those generic loading screens with things that almost look like LCARS, are immersion breakers. They remind you're playing and game and you are waiting on it to load.
There are way to many loading screens. Loading screen to start the mission, then the space part. Loading screen to beam down and do the ground part. A loading screen to go up and finish the last space segment. Then another loading screen to leave.
This is the part of the game where the engine is the problem. Because you can't be both you are either your ship or your character. So you have to wait to change. You can't be your character on your ship it just a instance.
Have an elevator animation that plays on top of the loading screen. You can clearly do animations given the current loading screens, even if they're a bit choppy. So having a shot of some starfleet dudes in a turbolift with elevator music playing while the loading is going on would be pretty snazzy.
I've seen several other games that actually do stuff instead of having a loading screen (but might as well be loading screens), so it should be possible to do here. I guess it's a resources issue.
I have some Foundry test stuff with one. It's sneaky though. What you do is layer 100 or so identical objects at 1/10 of a meter height difference and use reach triggers to remove and add them to create the impression of an elevator moving.
TOR fixed that problem
Watch our Council introductions Video (1.3min
Get rid of all the pretty pictures and replace them with the interior view of a turbolift. (and the apprpriate hummm)
They already have the art done... Just use the turbolift from the Shipyard.
For beaming from one surface to another..., it wouold be really cool to see an effect like what Lt. Barkley experianced when he thought he was getting Transporter-psychosis.
(without the little buggers floating around though)
See, I think the real trick here could be:
Cinematic triggers. Camera moves to a pretermined point like the turbolift doors. The loading screen is a static image of the doors. Then the new map loads focused on the turbolift doors and zooms back around to 3rd person comtrol view again.
The worst thing is that people on lower video qualities will notice an increase in graphics quality during the loadscreen.
Mass effect, single player game.
Yes, we could probably do a bunch of fancy things with loading screens, but that would take a lot of work, and would take time away from everything else we want to work on now.
Yes, there are several very hacky ways to do this, but they are VERY likely to break in multiple ways.
STO. Multiplayer game?
Indubitably.
*grabs popcorn.
With that said though, if there was a cut scene just for interior, even better if you could designate a certain type of load screen in say, the foundry editor *cough cough*, for interior movement vs exterior map movement.
I remember there were animated load screens in the past, I also remember it was kind of a debacle then. Perhaps its an idea that can be revisited with just a dark colored telltale traversing a lit background, like in a Fed turbolift?
The big hacky tricks are especially prone to multiplayer breakage, which is where the Foundry missions tend to break whenever they do novel things. There are more reliable ways to do this than others.
In general, I could outline a pretty foolproof way to do this if I had access to timers as event triggers. And I could make it work for multiplayer.
The big thing is, platforms going DOWN is easy. It's just physics as players would fall anyway. You just need logic behind the triggers to ensure nobody falls through anything or gets left behind, which is where most Foundrymissions with gimmicks tend to fail. Players going UP on the other hand really requires mobile platforms with an AI behind them. At least, that was always my experience when coding video game platformers and it seems to bear out in Foundry tests.
You need to actually move the player along with the platform for platforms that go up or sideways. Like I say, platforms that go down aren't as much of an issue, especially if they go down in small increments so the player never notices that they're falling.
Thats a pity, imo, as we encounter loading screens in every aspect of our gaming experience and a positive change (as was the current loading screens over the old) had a noticeable, beneficial impact on many people's experience.
Load screens are inherently 2D eleements. Your characters are not. Doing a 2D animated image of a turbolift is more feasible than a 3d turbolift with YOUR character in it.
Mass Effect also completely locked you in place when the elevator moved. They were essentially canned animations, NOT true moving platforms.
Well.. I personally, don't need MOVING (animated) load-screens...
But, in a Star Trek Game...,
I would rather look at a static picture of the inside of a turbolift (where appropriate) and hear the humm, than stare at dreamy pictures of planets/ships/stations.
A small step towards refining the 2d animated elements would be well received I feel, however, the next step is likely to have different types of loading screen (2d animated) per activity. i.e. you don't want to get a turbolift 2d animation (such as a turbolift interior image with zooming lights going by on both sides) when your changing from sector to sector.
So such map changes would need to be tagged with a new unique identifier, presumably, for that to work. Probably a lot of work there, if not for the act of adding them in, but ensuring they are all properly quality assured.
They tried this early in the game (or was it in beta?) with the animated loadscreens that ended up being full of fail. They had the turbolift loadscreen for turbolifts, a transporter loadscreen, and a "entering warp" loadscreen. They ended up not working the way you'd expect (playing at the wrong transition, taking additional time to load the animations/sounds, etc.)
The game also punished me for trying to play it like it was multiplayer. More than half of the time, I didn't get credit for helping others on their missions, or I had to replay the last map alone to get the mission done (er, redone).
But, yeah, fleet actions that are not fleet actions.
There is more player interaction on these forums than there is in this game.
What I remember of the old animated load screens was that they never worked right. They'd add more time to the loadscreens to add the animations/sounds (which is probably the most technically important reason not to go back to them), and were rarely even hooked up to the correct map transition. In addition, people didn't like always seeing the same loadscreens (you only had FOUR for the entire game: ESD hangar, turbolift, transporter pad, Warp field). I remember people complaining that it took them 5 minutes to "beam down" to ESD (which still happens, but for some reason it's more disconcerting to stare at a half-transported humanoid shape for 5 minutes), or that they were being shown the ESD hangar loadscreen when warping to a different sector block. Or they were stuck in a turbolift all the way down to a planet... etc.
IIRC it also had an animated warp field loading screen for zoning between systems/sector blocks.
When I saw the title for this thread the first thing that came to mind where the turbolifts from DS9: The Fallen. In that game, the turbolifts showed them moving for a few seconds before entering the loading screen.
For example, when you stepped into the DS9 turobolift in ops, because it has no doors, you'd see the lift descend for about 5 meters then it would enter loadscreen. The reverse would happen on exiting the loadscreen, you emerge on the map, seeing the lift travel for the last few meters.
I'll see if I can find any videos online, failing that I'll have a look for my copy of the game and see if I can fraps it.
... vertical maps aside, you've got those giant floating mushrooms that show up on various maps and fly up and down- and I've never seen them break. While I've never managed to get on top of them to see if they're clipping enabled or not, at the very least you've got the tech.
it's definitely not a priority, and to be honest I'd much rather just have a turbolift animation for a loading screen, but it's something to think about.
I'd be more interested in seeing the door leading into ESD shipyard open into the turbolift, like it does leaving the shipyard back into ESD than animated elevator loading screens. QOL and "immersion" will get my thumbs up faster than fancy schmancy loading screens.