The REAL Reason Games Need Loading Screens

[00:00:00]You just installed your new game and launch it for  the first time. A loading screen appears. Have you ever wondered what the game is actually doing in  the background during this screen? In this video, we also made a loading screen, and I'm going to  explain to you what is happening in the background while it's active. Launching a game usually  brings up a loading screen for shadow compiling, a process that mostly happens the very first time  you open it. Basically, this process prepares your hardware to render all the visual effects,  colors, and textures you see in the game. If this process doesn't work right from the start,  you'll experience frequent stutters and freezing, making the game unplayable.

[00:00:40]In Unreal Engine, this system is called a pipeline state object or PSO for short. First of all, to get this working in  our own project, we had to make some modifications to the engine files. Afterwards, we run a cook  process on the project, collect the information for all our shaders. Once we locate the generated  shader files in the project, we copy them into a single file for the build process, and then we  build the game.

[00:01:06]We did all of this, but it didn't completely work for our project.  There were still some visual effects failing to load after the game launch, like the missing  snowflakes you see here. To solve this, we added some code to prevent the game from  starting until all shaders are compiled. And that's how our loading screen was born.

[00:01:24]With the game finally opening, it was time to add an opening cinematic. First, we wanted our character  to enter the scene with a walking animation.

[00:01:36]Once we fixed the problem by  setting up an event trigger, character began to walk correctly.  After that, we continued the animation, added a cinematic camera, and just like  that, our intro cinematic was complete.

[00:01:53]Putting it all together, here  is exactly what players will experience the first time they boot up the game.

[00:02:26]Okay guys, that's it for this video. Don't  forget to mention your thoughts and suggestions about our game in the comments. Subscribe  for the next chapters. Bye.

[00:02:33]We are finally on Steam. Make sure to wishlist the game  to stay updated and support our journey.