Player Features and Ideas Discussion

Hi,
when leaving a station there will be a fake loading screen during which to my knowledge nothing really happens. After that you exit to space and space will be loaded, things outside will "pop" in and eventually finish loading.
Since the game already knows what will happen next, preloading all the required meshes and textures would make sense.
This applies to when:
- Hitting the undock button: the outside of the station begins to load immediately and is (partly) buffered when the player actually leaves the hangar
- Hitting "Dock": while the ship is being "towed" into the station the CQ or the hangar could immediately start to load
- Hitting "Jump": the other side of the gate gets loaded while the stargate animation plays or while the ship warps away from the warpgate. After all the game knows where I'm flying to and what there will be at the destination.
- Also when opening the fitting screen, modules should load while the slot-counting animation is playing and not after it has finished

This is no speculative behavior since it only preloads things which most probably will be displayed in very near future. And even if the player decides to cancel any of those actions which cause preloading of game elements, then simply discard those.

Any thoughts on this?
Thanks for reading.

+1

No, of course I am not sure. But to me it seems that this is only to feign activity for when the session change timer still is counting down. And when you leave the hangar nothing actually has been loaded yet, so yes, it might be possible that it is completely bogus.

To reduce server load and to prevent people from changing regions and stations too often in a short amount of time.

The session change timer was originally in place to reduce the load on the database server due to session changes: this is where the code updates the character to be in a particular ship, tells the database that this ship is fitted this way, is entering space here, etc.

Session change time has nothing to do with the client loading the space that the ship is entering, it is everything to do with the server loading the ship into the space it is entering. The client then has to wait until all the objects in space are numerated, one by one, before it can display them to the user. At present, this happens after the ship has entered that space.

i don't think the client can figure out what is going on outside the station without having a session change (player appeared in system X in ship Y, at pos foobar).

Preloading would be limited to the system background, your active ship and the station model..I am not sure if it is worth it... maybe

an easier fix would be to just fake it by delaying the space fade-in 1-2s.

btw there is a issue which is related to this:
if a ship initially appears the client does not know where it is heading to.. this causes the ugly in-warp spin effects (you can also observe this at station undock). simple fix: client should delay initial rendering of new objects 1-2 frames. This is enough to calculate the initial vector and feed it to the animation engine.