On mods and ship components and ships and RAM and other technical stuff!
This lays the foundation for in-game ship creation, since now ships can be saved as very small JSON files.
Viewing post in The Galactic Line
Hm, I'll keep that stuff in mind, but the UI I'm working on now isn't in any of the videos, so you can't really critique it yet. The issue is that there are 20+ ship components, 6+ crew and missions, but displaying details about their status is very hard, especially given that I want to keep showing the main game view (the ship) in the background.
I think I have to give up on that. The sidebars I've created can give some overview, but when you want details, I think I just need to take up the whole screen with them.
The problem isn't really the download bandwidth, it's just the fact that you're loading stuff midgame. Like there's that little stutter when you walk out of a house in an FPS, because it has to load up a bunch of new textures? Or how you get low-res stuff for a bit before the high-res stuff loads? That's what we'd see.
This system looks pretty neat, although I did have one question. Streaming the resources in and out to load ships and in gameplay sounds great, but when you're designing a ship and you want all that content available, aren't you stuck loading all of it at once? Unless you're looking at a single 'tab' at a time like SE, I suppose, but given that loading things in takes time I have trouble imagining loading things in and out per tab as a smooth solution.
You appear to be much better at thinking these things through than me, so I'm sure it'll turn out okay, just curious.
When you want to build a ship, you certainly want a full list of parts, but loading a parts list is much faster than loading the parts! You only need the parts fully loaded when you're actively trying to put them on a ship.
That said, most of the time you'll be using similar parts to parts you've already used on other ships, and therefore those catalogs will already be fully loaded.
so your loading couple of KBs of data for a part you want to use, instead of several GBs of data of all the parts that go along with that one part? I think The division is doing something like this with there "no loading screens". where as you load up once and as you walk around the world it loads that sector you are in and caces the one you left. The only issues I have had with this are falling through the ground and 8 bit graphics for about 10 secs while everything calibrates.