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How do you know when to use a loading screen before the game starts? I'm not talking about the splash screen that shows up when you open the app. I'm talking about an actual loading screen (usually with like a loading bar) before the game starts or before the menu options show up? (Examples: Angry birds, Ultimate Briefcase, Clash of Clans) How do you know when you reach the threshold of the number of assets, audio files, etc that need a loading screen? Do you put it in the scene file? or somewhere else?

(This is in context of Xcode / Spritekit)

Sorry for all the questions. Just trying to understand and make my game better. Thanks for the help!

Whirlwind
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Alan Guilfoyle
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    You may want to rethink your questions here and break them up to fit your need. Questions like "When to use a loading screen?" is to broad of a question for SO, however "How to put a loading screen into a scene file?" would be acceptable. – Knight0fDragon Mar 29 '16 at 15:44

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Answer: You shouldn't use a loading screen unless you absolutely have to. Don't use one just for the sake of using one. Use a loading screen if there is a genuine perceivable lag. To determine whether your game lags, benchmark and test your code through the worst scenarios (maximum number of sprites etc.) even if they are unlikely to occur. To understand what constitutes as a lag, the following question will be of great help:

What is the shortest perceivable application response delay?

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Vatsal Manot
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Where and how you should load your assets is entirely up to you. You should decide that based on many factors, but generally it depends on what happens in your game and how do you handle your resources internally (when do you need resources, when do you release them from memory etc).

I remember that in Apple's Adventure example game (not available for download anymore) all of the shared resources was preloaded at the beginning of the game. Still, you don't have to do that. You can preload your resources when it is appropriate for your app, or maybe you want to release the resources while you are in the menu (or in some other scene than a gameplay scene).

There is nothing written (like in the docs or somewhere else) about when you should show loading screen, or even a rule that you must have a loading screen. The point of a loading screen is better user experience.

Personally, if you have to make a user to wait like 10 seconds before the game starts (which is rare actually), I would do two things there:

1) Show loading image (or something animated, like spinning animation)

2) Show hints or interesting facts about the game, like every 3 seconds (or whatever is an acceptable delay in this situation). This way, you introduce a player with the game while he waits, which is better than let them just wait and look at spinning animation.

Whirlwind
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