It's possible and relatively easy to add a custom LOADING lump that'll be displayed at startup when loading HPack. It's just like the ENDOOM screen, except it's shown during initialization.

There are, however, limitations because some content is unavoidable, so it constrains a bit what we can do with it (contrarily to ENDOOM screens). And of course, the canvas remains 80x25 ANSI characters in 16 colors maximum.

To illustrate these constraints, here's the outcome of a LOADING screen that is totally black originally, though with white as the foreground color:



The 3 can be hidden if at this spot the background and foreground colors are the same. The rest is hardcoded to be white on cyan and green respectively, and cannot be changed or hidden in any way.

If you want a crappy example of what it could look like, there's a LOADING.lmp in /incoming. Slap it in the pk3, or load it alongside it, and watch. If anybody wants to try creating something better, I recommend PabloDraw as it is the simplest ANSI editor for Windows. Just download, extract the exe (ignore the .msi, it's useless) and play.

So, what do you think? Cool or tacky? I'll admit that ANSI screens give a early 90s feel to a mod, which is not exactly the goal of HPack.

Does ZDoom Doom also have those sliding bars and '3' forced on the screen? If not, maybe it's a bug.

Of course it's not a bug. All this stuff is clearly explained in the source code, see the comments in st_start.cpp.

Ah... now I got it :) I'd say "yes, go for it" and let's do something fitting :)

sad that you cant make a Hexen/Strife like loading screen, which was pretty awesome.

Technically, you can. For Hexen or Strife.

Also, for Hexen, you'll first have to write your own image conversion software because nothing exists for the weird format that Raven used.
Yay documentation!

Oh yes, thats cool :) So anyone doing something for this?

So, any progress on this one? :)

Now that we are at it again, are you still interested in taking a closer look at this Gez? Or has anything happened lately to the engine that makes it even more customizable?

I'm not much of an ASCII artist and I have been thinking about a feature to make this more awesome (using GAMEINFO to specify start-up screen type, then we could use the Hexen type which'd allow to use an actual picture).