Factorio Forums

TL;DR

Make the game load assets (mods, sprites, ect.) in the background.

What ?

Prioritize loading (and displaying) the main menu and essential assets first, before loading all the other game assets, and if you want to get into a world before the game has finished its loading, finish the game loading before loading the world. A game loading could be in a corner similar to when transferring a world for multiplayer. If this is something not everyone wants, it could be a setting in the options menu to enable background loading.

Why ?

I suggest this because I feel that it could make the game feel smoother to launch, as you have one less loading screen to sit through. With just the menus loaded, you could still check/edit your settings/mods/savegames. All at a pretty low price of not being able to jump into your world instantly after the game loads the menu, but it's not like you have to wait any longer total.

+1

Might be an engine limitation or similar that prevents this, but if feasible it would be a nice addition.

If this isn't feasible I'd at least like the ability to alt-tab out of the game during the load screen. Right now the game seems to be stuck full screen until the loading completes, and Factorio takes a surprisingly long time to load for a 2D game, even on an SSD.

Ajedi32 wrote: ↑Mon Aug 03, 2020 2:27 pm If this isn't feasible I'd at least like the ability to alt-tab out of the game during the load screen. Right now the game seems to be stuck full screen until the loading completes, and Factorio takes a surprisingly long time to load for a 2D game, even on an SSD.

Interestingly, Factorio always loads in a window for me and I then maximize it when I'm ready to play. I don't remember whether it's always been this way. Perhaps there's a setting in the configuration which affects this? I play on macOS, FWIW.

It seems the loading screen now takes ages with Space Age expansion. And kicker is it should give you at least something useful to do (or interesting to see, or somehow fake it). Even Cyberpunk loads faster than Factorio now, it seems - well they probably hide their loading by showing the credits, and warnings, and etc etc. Factorio could also do that.

Mods can change what is shown in the menus, as well as how world generation works, so I don't know how much we could actually do prior to loading.