Collection proxy questions

[deckarep]

Can someone help confirm my understanding of loading collections via collection proxies? Here’s my two primary questions:

• When loading a collection using a proxy either with load or async load, does it make sense to show a loading screen? If so, I don’t see a way to get the progress percent during the load since the engine takes care of it.

• Seems like there is no way to fade-in a collection upon the load without either animating a black square in and out over the collection or alternatively I’d have to target all sprites individually in the collection and fade everything in manually? In other words there isn’t a way that I can tell to fade in the collection as a whole container type?

Thanks for any help here!

-Deckarep

[britzl]

@deckarep

When loading a collection using a proxy either with load or async load, does it make sense to show a loading screen? If so, I don’t see a way to get the progress percent during the load since the engine takes care of it.

Loading is usually very very fast, but sure, there’s a bit of loading time for a collection containing a large amount of data (such as big textures). There is currently no way to get progress, that is true, so you need to show an indeterminate progress bar.

@deckarep

Seems like there is no way to fade-in a collection upon the load without either animating a black square in and out over the collection or alternatively I’d have to target all sprites individually in the collection and fade everything in manually? In other words there isn’t a way that I can tell to fade in the collection as a whole container type?

Nope. That is typically the kind of functionality that we do not provide. It is up to the developer to decide how they want to do a fade-in or transition.

[deckarep]

Thank you @britzl for answering questions yet again!

On my second point and to be clear I’m not specifically asking if loading collection proxies supports transitions on load/unload as I know that is something that should be custom per each app/game.

What I meant to say is from an API standpoint I see no way to animate the tint.w of a collection itself right?

In other words I need to think of a container as just a holder of game objects with no visual representation itself other than position, rotation and scale.

If that makes sense.

[Mathias_Westerdahl]

@deckarep

tint.w

The collection is basically just a “container”, it doesn’t know of a “tint”, as it’s specific to certain shaders, and not everything uses shaders (e.g. physics nor sounds)

And example of a “fade in”, using stencil can be found here:

Screen fade using stencil buffers

I wanted to try improve my stencil buffer fades in my game, but thought it’d be easier/better to create a small demo/playground for this. This is nothing new under the sun, I just tried to gather the info from this forum post into a working example. Here is also a video to explain this further. HTML5 Demo (more demos) Source [image] Note that the actual fade screen textures are quite poor, I didn’t spend any time making them nice. If you produce some nice fade texture, feel free to share i…

You can ofc use the same setup with the screen space model (quad.dae), to use the “tint.w” instead.

[deckarep]

Thank you @Mathias_Westerdahl I’ll be looking into the stencil concept.