Minigame at loading.

[tetryds]

I remember when playing old DBZ Budokai games, which offered minigames during loading, and it wasnt boring at all.

With the alt+tab during (main) loading causing issues if playing fullscreen the game loading is very boring.

What if we had a small 2d jeb sit on a booster spinning around on the screen?

And maybe have to escape from the Kranken, or seek it.

[sal_vager]

I think this idea is still patented sadly

[tetryds]

Wait, having any sort of interactiveness at the loading screens is patented?

Some patents make absolute no sense.

It's like patenting a button.

[Serratus]

So for example YouTube actually had to pay money to have right to give us that snake thing? And it was probably in millions too. I second what tetryds wrote :/

[tetryds]

http://www.google.com/patents/US5718632

Well, that ****.

We won't be seeing jeb trying to hit kranken with a rocket during loading

[Rowsdower]

I can't believe that's actually patented. Next thing you know it, someone will earn the rights to the word "candy."

[Serratus]

I can't believe that's actually patented. Next thing you know it, someone will earn the rights to the word "candy."

Close. Mojang had to engage in a legal battle with Bethesda over "Scrolls" just last year. We're slowly running out of words...

Edit: HEY!!! You're not Capt'n Skunky! MOOOM! Some stranger is impersonating my Community Manager

Edited February 6, 2014 by Serratus

[ravener]

one would imagine ways around this. have the minigame always loaded as a part of the engine (just put that **** in the background ) and make ksp transparrent while loading. now you arent loading a minigame for the loading screen, you are just accessing it at a convenient time. basically, you sneak past the rules by implementing it in a suboptimal way. if you could in theory access it at any time it isnt a part of the loading screen.

EDIT: i am not a law professor or anything, this might be utter bollocks.

Edited February 6, 2014 by ravener

[J.Random]

I don't get the logic of this suggestion. The game loads too slow, so let's add some stupid minigame to waste resources and make the game load even slower?

[AlamoVampire]

What about just some new pictures?

[problemecium]

We could have a series of "comics", at least 1-panel things anyway, for loading backgrounds. Kinda like those photos lying around in the IVAs, they could depict important milestones in Kerbal history such as the day the Kraken was discovered, etc.

[lammatt]

I don't get the logic of this suggestion. The game loads too slow, so let's add some stupid minigame to waste resources and make the game load even slower?

not really

the game loads slowly because it's reading from the HDD, it's nothing about the proccessing power of your computer...

if you realize, a minigame can be in a scale of a couple hundred kb, and uses not many CPU cycles anyways.

adding a minigame there wouldnt hurt much.

but yes, perhaps this idea is patented and isnt worth the money.

[Nuke]

Close. Mojang had to engage in a legal battle with Bethesda over "Scrolls" just last year. We're slowly running out of words...

Edit: HEY!!! You're not Capt'n Skunky! MOOOM! Some stranger is impersonating my Community Manager

i thought they were gonna settle that over a game of quake 3 arena?

[thereaverofdarkness]

Minigames at startup isn't patented. What is patented is the specific method youtube uses to implement them. It's an absurdly broad patent which should have never passed the patent house, but it's still very possible to add a minigame at startup without violating the patent rights. For instance, the patent specifies that the mini-game code is somehow separate from the main game code. Lets not even start with just how difficult that is to define. Simply put some code into the program which runs at startup. KSP already has code in the game that runs at startup, it's the loading screen. Why not adjust the loading screen into something interactive? There's no rules against what parts of the game can or cannot be interactive.

I'm thinking a 2-D moon lander game would be cool, something like the minigame that's featured in the PDA in Lucasart's The Dig.

[Whirligig Girl]

Minigames at startup isn't patented. What is patented is the specific method youtube uses to implement them. It's an absurdly broad patent which should have never passed the patent house, but it's still very possible to add a minigame at startup without violating the patent rights. For instance, the patent specifies that the mini-game code is somehow separate from the main game code. Lets not even start with just how difficult that is to define. Simply put some code into the program which runs at startup. KSP already has code in the game that runs at startup, it's the loading screen. Why not adjust the loading screen into something interactive? There's no rules against what parts of the game can or cannot be interactive.

I'm thinking a 2-D moon lander game would be cool, something like the minigame that's featured in the PDA in Lucasart's The Dig.

Yeah, think about the seeking game in The Sims 3.

[Ravenchant]

How about a "Picture of the day" upon loading? Set up a voting system on Spaceport, and add a toggleable option in the launcher to download and use it (and possible delete it the next day) automatically. Then again, I have no idea how difficult this would be to implement...

[Serratus]

Or just random strips from KerbalComics? And then just update it with new strips every update.

[Dunbaratu]

not really

the game loads slowly because it's reading from the HDD, it's nothing about the proccessing power of your computer.

I thought it was slow because it's parsing syntax from ascii files on the HDD. That's very different from merely reading the bytes of a binary dump of data, and puts the task back into the realm of being CPU bound instead of I/O bound.

[tetryds]

Ok now I decided to patent this multi-shaped instrument made out of any material that you use to pick food, cut and/or eat it.

Meanwhile I'll finish this device that does anything, then patent it too!

I don't think it's safe nor worth to try to make a minigame with a workaround on the patent.

Better just never buy any Namco games.

[JimmyAgent007]

How about loading screens taken from the NASA website?

[tetryds]

How about loading screens taken from the NASA website?

Hey, I like the idea of more screens.

They could be voted by the comunity and doesn't need to have only one source.

NASA pictures can fit well too (even better now with the mission pack thing).

So we would sometimes have a NASA pic and other times some artwork.

The time to load the pictures would be the time the monkey shows up so slow internet wouldn't bother.

[Serratus]

Are we completely sure that using pictures as background for loading screens hasn't been patented yet? Just saying...

[tetryds]

Are we completely sure that using pictures as background for loading screens hasn't been patented yet? Just saying...

Oh crap.

Anyway, i saw once that patents were created to give the tech developers a step ahead on the distribution of the technology, and that ALL of them had a deadline and had to be broken at a point.

But then they figured out that it gives a lot of profit and that if some US patents were opened other countries could start to freely develop the techs, so they decided to remove that deadline thing.

But let's not start a discussion about patents here.

I couldn't find "images at loading" patents anywhere so I guess it's fine.

[Anton P. Nym]

Loading a minigame couldn't be patented by anybody recently... I remember playing an arcade game back in the early '90s (vector graphics, rotor for control) that had a "Breakout" minigame between levels to mask loading times. Demonstrating prior art would be trivial, and proving that it's an obvious consequence wouldn't be much harder.

I wouldn't mind a "Lunar Lander" minigame at the start, myself, but I don't have much load time given that I play all-stock (no added parts to load) and put KSP on a solid-state drive.

-- Steve

[Dunbaratu]

Loading a minigame couldn't be patented by anybody recently... I remember playing an arcade game back in the early '90s (vector graphics, rotor for control) that had a "Breakout" minigame between levels to mask loading times. Demonstrating prior art would be trivial, and proving that it's an obvious consequence wouldn't be much harder.

In general one of the problems (in US law anyway) with how legal claims are argued in court is that it's not sufficient to be in the right - you also have to be willing to shell out big bucks to argue the point. A company CEO thinking "this patent is clearly bogus" has to weigh the cost of a court battle against the cost of just paying the price the patent holder is demanding to use the idea. Thus bogus patents that are undeserved still remain on the books a long time if the company that holds the patent is savvy enough to set the licensing costs at just barely below the cost they think a company would have to spend on lawyers to fight it.