Loadscreen text colours

[DCoder]

I've been fixing the implementation of side specific loadscreen text colours yesterday. Then I stumbled upon a stupid problem - singleplayer loadscreens are drawn before the rules are read! So I had to move the whole rules loading to an earlier point in the process, which introduced a chicken-and-egg problem - I can't draw the loadscreen until I have parsed the rules, and rules' parsing takes a noticeable amount of time, waiting that long without a loadscreen looks wrong and broken. Unfortunately, the game draws the entire loadscreen in one burst and then just updates the progressbars afterwards. If I want to update it to, say, load the background and stuff first, then parse the rules and draw the text in the right colour, I need to do some serious recoding. Not to mention that would also be unfamiliar to ordinary users...

Putting up additional status messages like "Reading rules...", "Reading scenario...", "Loading AI...", "Placing objects on map..." during the load is easy, actually, as long as I don't make too many of them - vertical space is limited.

So, thoughts on what I should do about the loadscreens?

Oh, and here's a sample of what the status messages look like - I'm running a new testing country so background/strings don't make much sense, w/e.

[Tempest]

Wouldn' it be possible to make the game load a separate ini file, smaller in size, and hence faster to parse? That file should only contain the needed rules.. It would still take time to parse, but only around 1/500 of that of rulesmd.ini..

Think it's possible? (I'm no programmer, so i don't really know...yet!)

[pd]

The countries are loaded for the skirmish menu, from the rules.
So there should be a way to load sides and countries only before the loading screen shows up?

[DCoder]

Yeah, after looking a little closer I found a way to do that. So now the loadscreens use the right colour. Weee.

But. If you haven't seen yet, check out this stupid bug that Westwood left in the game and which I'll have to fix later - right now all SP loadscreens are interpreted as owned by ThirdSide.

Edit: Shiny.

[Blade]

Nice, I noticed that side load colours were ignored in the old RP and NP when I implemented ThridLoad and every sides text became purple.