How do you get rid of the mission briefing screen that shows up as you load an sp level? It’s fine for what it was intended for but it kind of ruins the mood for the opening text crawl of a custom map.
Good question. I pondered the very same question for a while, then I just replaced the whole loading screen thing (took away the frames and everything) with one full screen image presenting the level name and text: Loading - Please wait.
Yeah, I have a nice (in my own opinion anyway) logo roq in the very beginning, followed by the Star Wars and text scroll. I didn't want anything technical looking stuff to ruin the finely tuned artistical feeling of the level launch.
I guess the key to the whole issue is:
uiScript startgame
This is a line you can find in saber.menu. I believe it launches the original game without the mission loading screen. However, I don't know what is uiscript startgame. Can you edit uiscripts somehow? Or do they belong to the integral SP code?
Do you think there's a line in the menu files that would indicate what map to load?
Who can say? Since the definition of an uiscript is like this:
"These are game-specific internal actions that cannot be effected by .menu text alone. These are actions carried out in the mod's C code, but triggered from the menus. In a way, they are like hooks for actions into the mod from the menus. Mod makers can create their own uiScript components; the pattern is in ui/ui_main.c, UI_RunMenuScript()."
They can do pretty much anything. Maybe the startgame does indeed read somewhere what actions to take, and what map to load without the loading (briefing) screen. On the other hand, it might very well be an internal function to load the first yavin map.
I messed around with the loadscreen.menu and took away all references to the graphics displayed in the briefing screen, except for the levelshot of course, and it works like in JK2. Is that what you did lassev?
That's indeed how I did it. It's a satisfactory solution. Of course if you have a multi-level campaign, you don't anymore have the standard, briefing containing screen even between the levels. But on the other hand... Who really needs such?
Which reminds me that I haven't yet edited mission objectives for my level, although the whole thing is starting to be ready otherwise...