Possibly add a progress screen when loading ground combat from Geoscape?

[TNoyce]

It seems to take a far amount of time for the game to switch from the geoscape to ground combat mode.

It is not clear once the button to enter the mission is clicked, whether the game is actually doing anything. It is also not clear the button itself has been pressed.

It would be nice to have some kind of a progress bar which would show the approximate % load completed, or perhaps a series of status messages which show as major steps have been performed - to assure the user that the game is physically still working in the background.

Not absolutely a requirement, but it would be a nice addition.

[peren]

I second this idea. I crashed my game the first 4 times because I thought it froze and then I ctrl-alt-del it.

[Sathra]

Yeah, you're not the first to bring it up. Fully agreed.

Could also have 'thematic' loading messages. Stuff like "uplink loading, weapons priming, etc."

[Chris]

It's not as simple as that - once the game hits beta we'll be looking at reducing the load times though. Essentially the engine doesn't have a proper texture library so we might need to code one from scratch. The issue with the textures loading is that while they're doing that I'm not sure we can display anything on top of it - I'll have to ask tomorrow, having a placeholder loading screen would be a good interim solution.

[RulerOfNothing]

Actually, I'm just wondering, would it be possible to quickly switch to the pre-mission splash screen, but put "Loading mission" somewhere on it rather than putting it up when the loading is finished?