Better Transitions - NVSE Mod

What?

While I was testing my other 5352787202 yet-to-be-released mods, I was forced to - you know - actually play the game.

It was a traumatic experience that left me mentally scarred, but anyway, the point is - holy crap the doors suck! (Yea, yea, I'm a wall guy myself).

You click on them, and game goes "poof", loading screen. It's so abrupt and ugly, really ruins the immersion.

I started thinking, and my mind wandered to the past, back when I was playing good games, like Skyrim.

"Yooooooooooo" I thought, reminded about Creation Engine's handling of doors...

And that's how this mod came to be.

What is this mod doing?

Well, Stewie added fade-in, so I decided to add fade-out, crazy.

I wanted to put it into Tweaks originally, since it was a pretty simple mod. The story would have ended here.

Buuuut...

Then I proceeded to use my brain once again, and thought "Well, I can't just add a fade - that'd mean the wait time is LONGER! 0.2 seconds, wasted on watching the screen turn black!". Indeed. It looked pretty but was wasteful - who wants longer loading screens?

So, I decided to think even more (insane) - "How about I preload some cell data during the fade? Also, I could keep player's animation still playing. Hmm, maybe I could also find a way to play door's animation while that all happens?"

So, I did that. Required some hacking and jank, but in the end it works:

- References now start loading during the fade

- Player keeps animating

- Doors... well, they kinda open.

I can't open doors fully - assets are not built for that - buildings don't have door cutouts in walls or have void, so usually doors would end up disappearing into walls.

What did I do then?

Doors play at 1/4th speed and pause after a brief time - enough to produce some movement without breaking anything. I wish it could have been more, but sadly without reworking tons of models - it's not. (I considered doing various rendering tricks to add a void etc. but it'd be an overkill and not worth it)

So that's it, mod is done!

...

And then I thought (geez, again?) - I wonder if the code I made is compatible with fast travel...

It does! Nice, what now. Back to the original problem - game spends doing nothing while fade happens.

Fast travel loading, just like interior loading, is single threaded in vanilla - so I had to intervene once again.

And I did - same story, cells load during the fade. To my surprise, on my PC, it halved the actual loading screen in half. Nice.

By the way, let me know if you want me to add an option to nuke loading screen textures completely.

Or maybe make the loading wheel fade-in... (tried, the code for it is kinda messy because game actually requests multiple loading screens - hence why they can flash sometimes. But hey, if there's demand...)

Wall, you talk too much

Fine, fine, here are videos:

Yup! That's all, this is what I have wasted your time on - you are welcome.

Source Code

GitHub