Skipping the Intro video

[CaptainPatch]

I followed the advice for how to bypass the opening video when first starting the game, believing that if PC resources aren't being diverted to play a video, the game would load faster. Hah! Same amount of time to start, but instead of watching the video, I'm watching a black screen. [sarcasm]What an improvement![/sarcasm]

 

[Augwich]

The reason you are watching a black screen is because the game is still loading - for lower-end machines this can take some time. When you first start up the game, the game loads the intro movie first, then lets you watch that while it finishes loading the game - that's why you can't click past the intro in the beginning. By turning off the intro, you're just making it so that when it is finished loading, the game goes directly to the main menu.

 

[WeaselSlapper]

I have a low end system, so maybe with my system the resources to play the video are more significant and slow down the system more. If it doesn't speed up the loading on your system that's probably why they buried it in the XML files and didn't have it as an option.

 

[CaptainPatch]

The reason you are watching a black screen is because the game is still loading - for lower-end machines this can take some time.

My point is that you really don't gain anything by skipping the into. You could start the game and hit Esc and you would go to the Start panel at pretty much the same amount of time as if you had skipped the video. The only difference is between you are looking at a black screen or part of a video for that amount of time. At least with the partial video you can sit there appreciating the really great artwork -- again -- whereas with the black screen you can meditate on the lint in your navel. In essence, why bother skipping at all?

 

[Quboid]

I have the intro set to be skipped. It means I get the blank loading screen instead for about 20 seconds, rather than watching 20 seconds of video and it then letting me skip the rest. It'll be ever so slightly faster as it doesn't need to load the video. Also, it goes to the main menu (well, the online play warning) immediately, rather than needing me to press anything. It's a minor improvement. The delay annoyed me until I realised that it was loading so that's fair enough - more games should load things in the background while playing intro videos.

 

[WeaselSlapper]

I don't have a dual core so on my single core machine the video was very choppy at best and eliminating the video did save me some time during loading. Apparently the results aren't the same for everyone.