Removing loading screens altogether

[Deleted1346576User]

Hi all,

 

I find the loading screens are killing immersion, taking me out of the game every time. I'd like to remove them completely, make loading a little more like Half-Life; the screen that is on when you hit the spacebar to load another area stays there until the new area displays. Is that possible? I won't need step by step instructions, I'll figure it out, but before I'm spending loads of time on this I'd like to know if it is at all possible. And ofcourse some pointers would be much appreciated. Thanks for any comments.

[grmblf]

It's possible. I really have no idea how to do that but there are a few mods with custom loading screen, so you could start by taking a look at some of them in the CS to see how they did it.

[Noggog]

I don't think it's possible without some super custom coding workaround. The way loadscreens work is that there's a list of viable load screens to pick from. Vanilla Oblivion has around 100 or whatever, and you can replace those if you like, and you can add more. But you can't take them away altogether because if you don't supply data for the loadscreens, Oblivion reverts back to it's vanilla settings. You can make ALL the loadscreens show one loadscreen, you can change them all to be new, but you can't have it do nothing.

 

You could do it if you had a script that recognized you were going to be transitioning a cell, and it took a screenshot right before you did, which overwrote a single file to which ALL the load screen references pointed to. That way, every time you went to a new cell, that script would replace that single file with a screenshot of your screen right before you entered the new cell, and then it would show up in place of your loadscreen.

 

All that to say, there's no quick fix that I know of.

[majikmonkee]

You could always do a totally black or blank load screen with no words if nothing else.

[grmblf]

yeah you're right Leviathan, I missunderstood the OP, I was thinking about something in the line of that black screen majikmonkee says

[Deleted1848331User]

You could always toggle off the menus in the console *tm cough cough* and it will stay like that :P

[Noggog]

That's Voodoo Magic. Dangerous stuff

[Deleted1346576User]

I was thinking towards what Leviathan mentions, and given how the load screen system works it does indeed seem impossible to remove them completely. The automated screenshot idea is cool but I see many problems trying to implement that. For one, the somewhat exotic DDS filetype is needed, so that would have to be created from that screenshot. Then there's the timing... I'm not sure I'll be able to get that to work, but I'll fiddle a bit more with the CS. I might be tempted to go for the all black loading or generic (unobtrusive) screen, that's easy enough. Or I could make screenshots of every cell transition area and connect them as loading screens to the appropriate cell. Hell of a job... Or use generic shots (cave doors, city doors, house doors). Make a nice shot of the open landscape for the quick travel stuff... Ideas taking shape. Thanks for your thoughts. Edited December 25, 2010 by Guest

[tizerist]

You could always do a totally black or blank load screen with no words if nothing else.

This. And what the OP said. I have wanted this for a while, I knew a guy who made custom tomb raider games, and his theory was a black load screen stops the player from being 'ejected' then 'injected' back into the game. And its true, his black load screens felt more like a 0.5 second pause rather than a load screen.