Mod-Idea for ingame loading screens

[mic1184]

Originally Posted by Dau-U-42

Hi! I'm new to SHIII and just joined here to get to know this game it's mods etc.

And this is a brilliant idea! There are a few things I'd like to point out: First of all you should consider the length of the text displayed. It should be long enough so that reading it would last approximately the whole loading time. Another thing is the background. Are you going to leave it like that (in-game screenshots)? It would be extremely cool to use real photographs of the era, perhaps so there would be different sets of photos for every loading screen, matching it's text.

hi and welcome to the forum and thanks for your interest. of course you're right with all of your arguments, but im sorry to have to compromise:

1. of course it would be nice to adapt the text length perfectly to the loading time, but unfortunately this is impossible, as loading time varies a really GREAT range depending on which mods you installed and on your hardware configuration. also the texts should be comfortably readible, so text length will be very compact. I'm trying to pack as much information into as short text as possible.

2. real photographs are usually black&white and (mostly) of poor quality. good ones are quite hard to find. you're (of course) free to pm me with your wonderful photographs if you have them ;-)

3. even if i had such many different high quality background pictures as to completely customize them to the text displayed, it would be a whole lot of work, as good page layout is more time-consuming than you'd think.
where do i put text, boxes, additional pictures, symbols, logos etc in the picture. what can be covered, where should transparency be applied. does it look overloaded if i put xy to z... its more complex than just putting anything together by the first impression.
that is why i choose to employ only one single background picture so far. if i get others which i instantly fall i love with i will of course rethink it... again you're all free to pm me with your stuff ;-)

one other factor is quantity. i need really LOTS of different texts for this mod to become interesting for longer than 2 weeks. right now i got about 40 together, each of them carefully chosen, researched, composed, edited and layouted. these 40 screens were a good 2 days work (with 4 hours per day maybe), 1/2 of it simply doing the layout.

i think i need at least 80 - 100 each for game loading screen and career mission loading screen and maybe 30 - 50 for the single mission loading and 20 - 40 of the museum loading screen. so about 250 different screens. with only one layout that'd be a remaining 21 hours of pure work, with an average of 3 hrs per day thats 7 days to go to the first release... doesnt sound much, but i have a girlfriend, got university, a job, family, friends and an unfinished gwx career. so its going to be rather 2 - 3 weeks.

if i then added too much layouting time, it would become 4 - 6 weeks for one (good) layout per 40 screens. and 4 - 6 weeks of regularly work might become the death of a good modding idea.

as i wish not to compromise quality OR quantity of the texts, i will not put much more efforts in a variety of layouts.

duh, i guess this is a 'welcome to the modder's life'