A long, long time ago, in a PC far, far away...

... I was given the actual files with which to build SWBF2 load screens. I'm not talking the one-picture loadscreens, I'm talking Pandemic-style, random loadscreens, loadscreens that apply to specific modes (like the campaign-specific screens). Well, I thought I'd lost those files in my hard drive crash that stunted work on the Convo Pack years ago, but [RDH]Zerted found what I needed randomly in his stuff. It's not all of what I had originally, but it's all the most important files; the rest can be easily redone.

Now, on top of that I was searching through my hard drive last night and found the SWBF1 loadscreen configs that I was given after my hard drive crashed. I didn't know what to do with it then, but now that I know how to use a hex editor to rip out munged animations, models, textures, etc finally SWBF1 players will get to have custom loadscreens too, and can do it in SWBF1 style if they so choose.

So, over the next number of weeks I'm going to put all of this together in a sort of loadscreen builder utility. Some things will still have to be done manually (like renaming folders, moving munged lvl files), but it will also come with complete documentation on what to do. I'd like to get things out sooner, but I'd much rather have a proper utility that people can follow.

So -- nothing more than an announcement right now, but I was excited so I thought I'd pass it on.

That is the first time I have ever used that one.

When you say for each mode can it be applied to eras as well as modes?

Yep, so if I wanted say my "ABC" map to have custom loads per era/mode, I can specify them by basically calling the lua name without the ".lua" at the end.

Ohh ahhh...

Looks very promising.

Awesome! I remember hearing about these loadscreens a while back, and wishing that we could still use them. Good on you, Tean!

What else does Zerted have stashed away in there. Keep looking Zerted, you might find some more awesome stuff.

Glad to hear this - I had always wanted to use the campaign-style loadscreens for the campaign modes in my Aldura maps, but had to settle for placing the story text on the actual image and replacing the tips/tricks text with just the name of the mod. I take it the only real difference between campaign loadscreens and ordinary loadscreens is where they grab the localized text from, correct (and the way it appears on-screen)?

Yes and no. Here's a campaign example:
and here's a regular example

Tean, did you get my message?

EDIT: I fixed the link. So its the same link you got in the message before, only that you can now download the files.