I'd like to see a status-bar...

[-=)Dante(=-]

... at the beginning, so I don\'t get the feeling, the program just killed itself but is actually doing something

Gr33tz

[Keldorn]

well chances are that if they did have a status bar the bar would stay still for a couple of minutes or longer while loading.
So most people will then still think that it\'s hanging and kill it just the same.

[-=)Dante(=-]

That makes point....

Alright then: Forget the statusbar and try the following:

Let the program find out, how much time is needed to load everything. Then let a counter show the remaining time.

Is something like this possible??

Gr33tz

[Shaded]

thatfore it would need to check of your internetspeed...
and still then the problem resides because while intializing the game the minor part is getting data from the server, the main part is initializing the grfx engine.
what u don\'t c is that an status bar is nothing diffrent than a timer just another way of visualization. such a stutsbar gets it data from such a timer and then dertermits how large it has to b to show the corresponding progress.
in fact for the initializing of an 3d engine u can\'t measure in time. what the guys would have to do is a measurement of jobs to b done untill the loading finished. and asumingly there r going to b called a lot of functions which all would have need to report back just to make the statusbar grow.
and assumingly these functions r going to b called hundreds of times so they also would need to report back with the actuall instance of something they have completed... so the system for checking this, definitly is some sort of overhead which already may also slow down the loading process.

but what would b nice would b to turn the music of while loading perhaps this would give some speed increase...

[Vengeance]

We have thought about doing this but because of the way loading the world works in CS, it is more difficult to implement than it sounds.

[gamer14]

the loading time will improve as the team works more with the 3d engine and models to maximize graphical quality while minimizing file size(thus more load time). Like anything else it will improve over time. We shall just have to wait and see.

[Wedge]

So I take it everything is loaded collectively and it\'s difficult to discern a relative percentage from that.  But if you just want to show that it\'s not broken, some sort of simple animated loading icon would help that alot I think.  If something is there and moving, it makes it feel a lot more like it\'s actually doing something, even if you can\'t display the aproximate % of completeness.

[Tylyu]

Yeah, but if the program\'s so heavy as the actual version (well, it\'s already 128MByte PageFile for the process !!), you\'ll get that animation freezing when loading if you don\'t have 512+ RAM and 2GHz CPU :!