> Note: Not for GDevelop itself, I mean for the standalone PC games exes that it compiles.
Larger games take longer to load. On web theres a loading bar so player always feel safe and informed that everything is still working and not frozen/crashed.
But on the PC, after the player has decided to run the standalone game.exe there is a noticable long awkward period of delay where the player gets no visible feedback to know if the app is running or not.
The game window just appears out of nowhere after 2-5 minutes of waiting with no splash screen or anything to anticipate it. This feels awful and had me wonder if the game.exe even booted up at all or if it silently crashed. If you ever have experienced unresponsive apps or apps with long operations but lacking visual feedback to show progress, you know how it bad it feels.
All I’m asking for is a good ol’ simple splash screen - common in larger software that take longer to load, like Microsoft Word, 3DSMax, Maya, Blender, Photoshop etc etc.
I’m making a large PC game (non-web), so this is very important for me to not lose customers because they thought the game failed to load and prematurely refunded due to lack of interface feedback.
> Note: Not for GDevelop itself, I mean for the standalone PC games exes that it compiles.
There is always a loading splashscreen on launching a gdevelop game exe unless you disabled it or started from using an example that has it disabled
You can enable it and customize the look by editing your project properties. It is the second tab in the project properties window.
If you mean the window doesn’t load at all, there is something odd going on with your build or pc.
Even the largest game Ive tested with, with over 1gb of assets, still shows the window and splash screen instantly.
Edit: it also occurred to me that you could be running into issues with an antivirus application sandbox-testing your game. Games exported locally won’t have a signing certificate at all (unless you provide one), and all games exported locally or using the online build server will not be registered in systems like Microsoft SmartScreen or other similar services since you’re literally the first person who has launched it. (Smart screen needs something like 200k+ valid unique launches before it considers an app safe, or you buy a Certificate from Microsoft directly)
So your AV may be spending time testing the app before it allows it to launch. This isn’t actually exclusive to GDevelop, but may be more apparent.
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Oh the external splashscreen already exist?
I thought the splashscreen in those settings were only for after the window had appeared - being more akin to a built in extra scene before the game itself starts. Kind of like those intro screens common in large budget games - not an external one.
I had been playing 2 large games with GDevelop and neither of them had a pre-window splashscreen, but allegedly those were made with GDevelop 4 (an older version), so perhaps that feature is new in GDevelop 5 hence why those games were absent with a splashscreen.
Sorry, no external splashscreen, I wasn’t sure which you were looking for, hence the second half of my post. That all said, however, even the largest GDevelop 5 games open instantly as far as the window itself is concerned.
I’ve tested games with hundreds of event sheets, and games with near 2gb of asset. In all cases they open instantly from exe (to show the in-window splashscreen), even on my ancient windows tablet. If you’re seeing minutes to open an exe game, something else would be going on with your PC configuration or something very unusual with the game you’re testing with.
Ah bummer, the external splashscreen is exactly what I’m asking for.
Do you have the game Hyperspace Dogfights? That’s the game that takes quite a while to load for me.
Worth mentioning that my computer is somewhat old (no SSD, mid-tier gfx card, 8gb ram, okay processor), so either GDevelop-compiled apps are optimized better for newer hardware or your machines are simply better/more modern than mine.
Hmmm…Hyperspace Dogfights is a GD4 game, I think. I’m unclear if it loads differently because of that.
GDevelop 4 is in fact a completely different renderer and a lot different backend. No way for me to say for sure if that is impactful or not.
Thanks. Can confirm that HDog is made in GD4, author told me so.
Interesting to know that GD4 >> GD5 was a major change, so perhaps it made a difference. Do you know any large/complex game made in GDevelop 5 I could test on my machine to see how it loads?
If you want an easy one to test with that’s complex, load up the Game Feel demo, also by Sleeper Games. The main scene logic is already immense. Duplicate the main scene a bunch of times (say…20?) and then export that and see how it proceeds.
That should have quite a bit more code than any of the other examples currently in the engine, as far as I Know.
You could even just add some video objects to increase the filesize with any video file, whether it be a downloaded mp4 from Youtube (and copy/pasted with a new name a few times) or just a bloated file made in any video gamer. Conceptually it would be the same as a larger project.
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Thank you, I’l give it a try.
EDIT:
Ok so I tried it (duplicated the main scene 21 times) and it booted up fairly fast - almost instantly.
However, I’m not fully convinced that this is a good benchmark considering it doesn’t pack a lot of graphics files, sound effect files, large music/ambient tracks, extensive scene object lists nor any other extras of a proper fully featured large game with a lot of content. Though atleast I got to see how a smaller project would be fine. Not sure how a proper larger project would fare by comparison.
Happy to have discovered that particular demo project though, it has plenty of excellent learning material for me to read through.
I’m still concerned that I’m going to run into the start-up window delay problem later in development and will have to ask about this feature again.
If you are concerned about assets impacting load time (it shouldn’t, as assets are loaded after the game launches, during the GDevelop splash screen with a loading bar), I would again recommend doing what I mentioned above to test.
Grab a large video file, make a bunch of copies with different names, then add them as video objects. Note that you’ll need to compile the game locally after doing so.
The external build server has a max of 100-200mb project size.
