Loading Game Resources after Map select

[Bearjcc]

UX: Opening the game only loads the resources necessary to run the menu; loading the game happens when you open a map.

Now that the developers have a really good idea of what the game is like they are looking at developing a unified User Experience. There are few things more frustrating in User Experience then forcing an application to close, or it closing with no warning. I think that at the very minimum the game should notify you when it is about the restart, but I think it is completely unnecessary to do this at all because you can delay loading in all of the resources until the User has picked their mod and map settings: now, entering a map has a wait time, but this is normal for multiplayer anyways.

When you open the game it should open quickly to a menu only loading things into memory that are absolutely necessary for the user to navigate around the menu (and possibly music and animation). Now the user can change the graphics settings on the their computer and within the game without having to wait for a 5-10 minute wait time for each change. From here you can browse single and multiplayer maps and campaigns, and manage your mods. Disabling, deleting, updating or downloading new mods should not restart the game at this point because there are no in-game resources loaded in at this point. Syncing mods with single or multiplayer maps should confirm with the user all of the required mods, and ask about optional mods. For a single player game, an optional mod could be something that only changes the UI, and not something that is going to delete recipes, structures, etc.

[Rseding91]

You don't seem to understand that all of the menu graphics, the settings, the options in the map generator GUI are all defined by mods and you have to process the mods before the game starts to have all of that information available.