How did they do it? - Cinematics during Loading Screen

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Howdy folks,

Recently I came across a game where they played queued animations during the loading screen.
I’m specifically talking about Gran Turismo Sport. Before you get into the track, you’ll need to select a car and yes you guessed it. The game shows cool close ups during the loading screen of the car you selected. :sunglasses:

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So now I’m wondering how they did that. Well, I know Unity3D supports loading screens with a couple of functions to preload stuff before you actually get into the next scene.
However, there’s one problem with this. Considering Unity3D is heavily loading all the stuff, I think it will cause frame drops a lot when animations are being played.

So basically I’m asking if there’s any workaround for this. Thanks in advance.

Cheers,
-JJ3

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At least you can load scenes additively in the background,
or maybe it loads other external data/asset bundles there…

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Here’s what i suspect is going on:

You’re in Scene A, perhaps your car selection scene. You pick your vehicle.
You are then transitioned into the “loading screen” which is really just a different scene (Scene B), showing either a pre-rendered video or a real-time rending. During that time, the game is background loading the scene you actually want, Scene C, and sends you over there once it’s ready.

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Sorry for the late reply but thanks for the pointers guys!

@fetish - reminded me of an old project back in 3.x. Sophie Houlden managed to merge a Menu Scene (GUI stuff) with a Visual Scene (Character and 3D models as background).
I think I know what to look for now. I might come back if I have any questions.

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All you need is to load your scene and assets Asynch. One Solution is to make a simple GUI scene that only shows loading progress and whatever you want to show there and load the scene in the background. That GUI then is simply always above everything until loading is complete.

Sometimes in games you can hear sounds starting to paly in the background, this is maybe because some of the game logic is already running, e.g. when objects hit the ground then a sound plays. This is true when you go beyond simple scene loading, e.g. when you have scripts that start to generate the level frame by frame. In that case you need that extra overlay UI.