Animated Main Menu

Could we please have an animated main menu? Where we can see bots having battles on a very small portion of a planet (so that it doesn't make loading times too long) while on the menu screen? Also I hope that we can get a simple menu screen such as the old TF2 menu but with bigger text.

Please?

Please, no. Just a lobby (outside the game), and then launch directly into the game. Maybe keep portions of the game in the background (think how EA's origin does it with Battlefield) so it loads faster the second time.

The Supreme Commander Menu was a nightmare. the Forged Alliance menu was worse. And the Supreme Commander 2 Menu was... even worse.

Plain, functional menus please. And no animation riffraff that you cannot skip or that eats a second or more of your precious life away everytime the menu opens.

i would like it like ta.

I can agree with no extra menu animations when switching screens, but why no background stuff going on? I loved seeing mass chaos, even if it was a looping video, and I never thought it detracted from the menu's usability.

But to reiterate, I totally agree on menu pauses. Dungeon Defenders actually annoys me a lot, as it can take multiple seconds to switch between different menus because of stupid fancy slide-in animations. Ridiculous.

But the TA menu was great. :mrgreen: No animations, please. Animations are in the game. :mrgreen:

Well, I was talking about a menu like Age of Mithology (animation wise).

You could also have the option of enabling it only after you'd load the game. When you'd first start the game no animated menus would be there unless you wanted it.

I was watching some video of SMNC last night, and I really like the way the menus animate. I could take or leave the background battles. Unless they're randomly generated, I really don't care, as they'll get old fast. And wasting CPU cycles on building random background battles is an awful idea.

But transition animations can go a long way to making a product feel polished these days.

I enjoyed the CnC Generals menu with the US fighting off the GLA with ingame graphics. I like th idea

I was okay with the FA-Style Menu with a single Exception: The flickering animations were annoying. There is a little mod (called "speedmenu", I think) that disabled the flickering.
That way you could actually click your way through the menus very quickly.

Oh? I'll have to look that up. Slow menus always irk me.

Dont look it up, here it is. Unzip and put it into your gamedata-directory.

I think it'd be fun to have the ability to play videos in the background, but the menu selections themselves being very rapid. Perhaps it could use an intro video or a replay of a game you played recently.

I also liked the Mechcommander 2 "static but animated" menu background. It was basically just a planet and stars:
http://youtu.be/naoQxaHQnQY?t=1m58s

Also note that it shows the menu option for selecting the player's primary and secondary colors, on a unit shown with the game engine, which I thought was a nice touch.

Lastly, having hotkeys like the TA menu did was also very nice. If you knew what buttons to hit, you could start the game and be in a skirmish in under 30 seconds.

Having a really plain and simple menu tends to reduce the time it takes to get things launched and a game started. Which is something I've always liked when games are set up so I can go from shortcut to loading the game level within just a few seconds.

Granted, I also really loved the FA background with units running around in the background.

Much appreciated. I didn't play FA for a while, and so I missed the big shift to community-run and mod-heavy play.

didn't have TA animation at the buttons? ( I liked that and hope it gets again)

Yes, also like Warcraft 3 o Starcraft 2, static menus with a "simple" background animation.

See dawn of war II as well. Replace the specific dow avatar with a PA commander and boom, I'd be happy with that.

I like my menu informative, well organized and efficient.
Having flashy animations and stuff won't increase the usability (probably more the opposite) and doesn't increase my opinion of a game.
A fitting color scheme and background would be enough for a menu.

Some games are configured/started from regular windows applications, fine with me.

I like seeing a nice looking menu, but if I want to skip through it as quickly as possible, I want to be able to memorize clicking patterns / keyboard shortcuts so I can nearly instantly get into starting a game.

With TA, s-s brought me straight to the skirmish menu, less than a second into the game. That's what I want.

Also, the background videos always seemed awesome at first, when you were in awe of the big things shooting lasers, but then lost value as you became accustomed to them, after which they just got annoying (there was an option to turn off, but that didn't speed up the menus... btw thanks for the link Cola_Colin)

TA speed, with a simple dynamic background would be nice. Perhaps a solar system model of the last game you played. No units, just the planets/star/rocks/etc.

Okay, now I know people are hating on SC2 because it was SC2. The SC2 menus were leagues better than FA or SC in terms of latency and visual stuff going on...

Also, @op: /singed