The Harvest Moon Consortium

the loadscreens.2da, as provided by Bioware, up to and including 1.68 patch level has a max cap of 255 loadscreens that can be displayed in the 'random' or 'full' listing.

You CAN have more than that total limit, but the max that can be displayed is 255. Period. The game will also not use any image above the 255 max cap number for a 'Random' loadscreen.

What this means, is that you could, theoretically, have up to 255 loadscreens for EACH tileset, but you could not display those as choices by using the 'random' option. You could only choose and use those by specifying the 'tileset' specific images and manually choosing one.

The actual line number max for the 2da is something on the order of 64k lines. But the game can only actually use those lines in bunches of 255 at a time. In Random mode, it stops reading at line 255, so anything past that line never gets used as a random choice, and can only be displayed or picked, when using Tileset Specific choices while building the area.

Bioware is hoping to fix this issue with 1.69 patch, but is NOT making any promises that this will, in fact, be fixed.

So, what happens when you use a line beyond the 255 limit? The game CAN display it for a specific area, and you can choose that line number while picking the loadscreen for that area, but ONLY if you use the option for 'Tileset Specific'.

Bioware has warned that lines above that number, may actually wrap around on you as well. Meaning line 256 or line 378 may end up being line 1 when it goes to do a random scan. They just have NO coding in place to currently handle line numbers above 255 and warn that the behaviour in game is totally unpredictable.

What happens if you overwrite a line used by a default Bioware tileset?
That loadscreen would show up in any area that had defined that line number for it's loadscreen. Most times this would not be an issue, BUT, in a large mod, with specific loadscreens chosen for a specific area, if you choose to overwrite the default Bioware lines, you run the risk of breaking the feel the builder originally chose.


Basically this means that you can add up to 64,000 loadscreens to a mod if you so choose. You can only get to those in groups of 255 at a time, and those groups MUST be tied to a specific tileset to work.

if you choose tileset specific and make a .hak with a loadscreens.2da within it and add it to the top of your hak list or above every other loadscreens.2da file will the load screens you selected as tileset specific still display the proper loading you selected at creation if:

if a patch from bioware was applied recently would this mess up your hakpack .2da file?

if you put a loadscreens.2da in your over ride folder will this over ride the hak resource?

does the magic 255 display number apply to loadscreen.2da files that have lines in the .2da that do not have associated load screens in any hak or over ride? this is a great way to plan your upgrades.

Sharona Curves wrote:if you choose tileset specific and make a .hak with a loadscreens.2da within it and add it to the top of your hak list or above every other loadscreens.2da file will the load screens you selected as tileset specific still display the proper loading you selected at creation if:

if a patch from bioware was applied recently would this mess up your hakpack .2da file?

Any Hak overrides any bioware default settings that apply.

if you put a loadscreens.2da in your over ride folder will this over ride the hak resource?

It used to, but the darn PW managers decided that they wanted more control, so now, haks override the override... which means the override simply doesn't really override any mod built using haks, UNLESS the stuff in override is not also included in a hak.

does the magic 255 display number apply to loadscreen.2da files that have lines in the .2da that do not have associated load screens in any hak or over ride? this is a great way to plan your upgrades.

255 is the cap on display. You can have 500 in the loadscreens.2da, but you can only see 256 upwards when you use tileset specific loadscreens and with that, you will only see those associated with the specific tileset for the area you are working with by default. However, you can pick and choose which tileset group of screens to pick from. So, at least you CAN get to them, just takes more work to find them all.

Bannor Bloodfist wrote:255 is the cap on display. You can have 500 in the loadscreens.2da, but you can only see 256 upwards when you use tileset specific loadscreens and with that, you will only see those associated with the specific tileset for the area you are working with by default. However, you can pick and choose which tileset group of screens to pick from. So, at least you CAN get to them, just takes more work to find them all.

but what if you have say 370 total load screen lines and only 250 load screen files total? in other words you padded your .2da with files that reference nothing. would you still be limited to seeing only the first 255 lines in random selection?

loadsceens.2da is read by line number. you can have blank lines (well, not really, there has to be information in them) but you can have lines that reference missing files. If you have that, then the random display will probably show a blank white loadscreen.

so, 200 blank lines, 100 bioware lines, and whatever lines you add, ALL count towards the 255 limit for the random display or for any specific tileset choices.

I have not opened the file for confimation on this. But I hope all the lines are being used at this point. We don't need to respect Bioware's reserved lines after the 1.29 patch. That is Game end so we should be free to take any remaining bioware lines.

Christopher wrote:I have not opened the file for confimation on this. But I hope all the lines are being used at this point. We don't need to respect Bioware's reserved lines after the 1.29 patch. That is Game end so we should be free to take any remaining bioware lines.

1.29 or 1.69?