The Loading Screen That Only Appears When It Has To

Dead Signal used to put you in a lift. Pick a station, the cabin doors close, a floor counter ticks, and 1.15 seconds of door animation later you are standing in the map. It looked good. It was also lying.

I measured what happened behind the doors on an Ultra warm map switch at 3440x1440, using a headed Edge probe that parks every map at the title first and then picks through the real path. The run itself started fast: 51 ms on Kestrel, 597 on Foundry. Then it hitched for 2-3 seconds. The wall-buy gun LODs streamed in after the start, six 2K maps each uploaded back to back in 20-50 ms frames. The chalk atlas re-traced itself cell by cell as each arrived, 150-230 ms a frame. On Foundry and Tranquility the first frame alone cost 330-760 ms in program links and texture uploads. Settled time, meaning the last frame over twice the median: 3357 ms on Foundry, 2095 on Kestrel.

The lift was covering all of that with a cabin, and adding about half a second of settle frames and the door animation on top.

So lift.ts, arrival.ts and its tests are gone. pickMap became deploy(): with simulation stopped, load the level (a parked GPU pack from the title or a fresh build), the surfaces at the chosen quality, the equipment models, precompile the shaders, run a warm frame, then four settled frames so lighting, TAA history and exposure are stable at the spawn. When that finishes, the run starts on its own. No fixed wait, and it never times out into unfinished gameplay.

The interesting decision was the screen. INSTANT_MS is 800 ms: if preparation finishes inside that window, nothing is shown at all, the menu just stays up and then you are in. A warm Ultra switch is 0.15-0.75 s, so most picks never see a loading screen. If the load outlasts the window, or a co-op squad is holding, or a texture fetch fails, the deploy screen comes up: the station's own floor plan, the same drawing the map-select thumbnails use, lights from the spawn outwards with the real progress. Once shown it stays at least 600 ms before fading, because a screen that flashes for 90 ms is worse than no screen.

After: run start 728 ms Foundry, 141 Kestrel, 414 Orpheum, 444 Tranquility. Settled 729 and 479 on Foundry and Orpheum. Kestrel and Tranquility still show one 21-25 ms frame about two seconds in, a single texture upload I have not identified yet. That is one bad frame, not three seconds of them.

The lesson is the one I keep paying for: a loading screen that always shows is a place to hide work you should have moved. Measure the settle, not the start.