Okay, here's what I've found out using Nimlot's extractor, hex editing, etc...

-The animation in the loading screen is actually a skeletal animation. Each picture that zooms is one texture. The animation actually zooms the texture in.

-Each shipped world is referenced via a file inside load.lvl. It basically refrences another lvl file inside the /load folder. So it might reference bes1.lvl inside the /load folder. Inside that file (for example bes1.lvl) are the textures, model, and skelatal animation. It should be noted that the world's loading file is the same name as the actual world lvl file.

-Placing a /load folder in your /addon will not work, nor will creating one in the particular level's folder.

-You can hexedit load.lvl to reference addon lvl files, so, in essence, if we knew how to 'rebuild' it (basically just the load.load file inside load.lvl) we could create a new one every few months.

-The other thing we'd need to know is how to munge files that are already compiled in BF format. In other words, we just need to know how to re-pack the files once we've decompressed them.




-The actual load animation is really easy. All you'd need to do is replace the textures with the new ones -- they'd have to be named the same. It's that load.load in the load.lvl that is the roadblock. Perhaps if we had the scripts to do it we'd have an easier time.

So this means that mod maps may soon be able to have their own loading screens, such as the ones that the shipped ones have. That is cool!

Not exactly -- we still need to know what to munge, and how to munge it. It just means we know a bit more about things, and that we will be able to do some cool stuff with loading screens once we do know how.

Ah... at least it's closer, then.

*fingers crossed*