Game Development Community

Gamma fading the screen?

by Vern Jensen · in Torque Game Builder · 12/30/2008 (9:48 pm) · 1 replies

I'm wondering if it's possible to gamma fade the entire screen to black at start-up. Mainly because I'd like something to happen right away when I start my game. For whatever reason, even with a splash screen displaying before I load all my ImageMaps and AudioDatablocks, there is a delay of several seconds (more on slower systems) before it shows up -- where the icon just bounces in the OS X dock, or where it just sits there on Windows.

All quality polished games I've seen instead fade out quickly or show the splash screen quickly. Even if I can't show the splash screen for several seconds, I at least want to fade out right away, to give the user immediate feedback for launching the game.

Would I have to build this kind of gamma fading into the C++ source? Or is anything in the engine already?

I've noticed that the TGB game "Phantasia" does this gamma fading at startup, and it really helps.

-Vern
NextNext Thread
PrevPrevious Thread
More from Torque Game Builder


Torque Owner Ehrlich
#1
01/02/2009 (12:11 pm)
The long load times happens because (in my case) i load a shitload of things at startup... so, i had to reduce the resources loaded on starttime if i wanted my project to start faster... i havent designed a project manager or something like that yet, but at least i kinda know whats goin on then... the good side of this approach is that if oyu load all the needed resources into memory, you can load levels faster... BUT you need quite some RAM on your system, if you want decent performance.