I know my machine is no supercomputer, but it takes several seconds between when I press "Start Game" in the universe generation screen and it actually telling me it's doing something. Since during that time the controls are locked, a different "generating galaxy" screen (or at least a pop-up) would be highly appreciated, and it probably isn't even that hard to code.

NullVoid wrote:Since during that time the controls are locked, a different "generating galaxy" screen (or at least a pop-up) would be highly appreciated, and it probably isn't even that hard to code.

"Pop-up" is an interesting possibility. To get a bit technical about it: trying to get the main rendering engine to do something other than loading textures, when it needs to load lots of texture, has proven to cause all kinds of trouble on certain AMD cards. (This seems to be a core drawback of the choice to use OpenGL, rather than DirectX, as our rendering API.) And so I've learned to be wary of adding features that involve multi-threaded rendering.

But, as you suggest, we probably could show some sort of overlay... Loading screens of various flavors are common enough. At this point, SiS has no loading screens, but, galaxy generation is one place where we probably should add one in.