Please wait.... Loading....

This is the first game I’ve worked on that has enough graphics and logic to make the loading an issue, it’s not ages, but it’s enough time for an end user to think there’s a problem.

As the loading routine is running pulling in all the graphics, I doubt the update or draw routines are being run? If they are I can load a simple graphic first and display it until the game is running, that’s a simple solution. But if those routines aren’t running, what do you do?

How do you folks, who do this on a professional basis, handle this problem?

I know a lot of x-bone games don’t bother and the screen goes black until the game starts. A lot of small PC games just rely on the system mouse pointer (working) to show something is happening, but I really dislike that.

Thanks guys and girls.

If you load content directly in the Game’s LoadContent() method, then yes, the Update and Draw calls will not happen while the content is loading (synchronous loading). What can be done is to load enough content synchronously to draw an animated loading graphic, then pass the rest of the content load to a task or thread. When this content load task is finished, then you can stop updating/drawing the loading graphic and move to the next stage that uses the content you just loaded.

3 Likes

Gotcha, and that will work really well, a lot of my graphic content is being loaded outside of the loading routine, i’ll just have to move it to a thread and use a boolean flag in the update routine. That’s going to be pretty easy.

Many thanks once again Konaju, you’ve helped with most of my questions and I really do appreciate it. Do you write for iPhones? If so let me know what to look for in the store. :o)