I’m a very impatient person. When I’ve played various unreal games over the years, the unskippable Bink Video splash screens have persistently ticked me off. The reasons are :
- They last about 10-15 seconds. I just want to get to the main menu and start loading a game.
- They tend to play at the full volume of my sound card, ignoring all audio settings made in game
- They are used forced full-screen, and tabbing out suspends the game so when I tab back in the splash screen resumes from where it was
So, what can be done to ameliorate ? I’ve seen dozens of games that had multi-million dollar budgets do , it’s hard to think of one that didn’t. I have no problems with giving credit where it’s due, I just would like for my project to have less unskippable dead time.
Ideas that might work around it :
- Play the various splash screens in smaller video windows at the actual main menu
- Display the mandatory logos plastered around the main menu.
- Define the main menu GUI as a separate application that uses the same full screen video window that UE4 will render to. Choosing to load a level will trigger UE4 to start, playing the splash screen but also in a separate thread it will load the level. That way the amount of time players have to waste to get to playing the game is about the same as if there were no splash : aka
Timeline 1 :
a. Play splash
b. Load main menu
3. Load level after selection at main menu
versus Timeline 2 :
a. Display a 2d main menu with no in-engine background immediately
b. After selection at main menu, play splash and load level at same time.
