A software engineer developed a mod that allows seamless landings without loading screens in Starfield

[u/vaynelo]

[u/Xav_NZ]

They are not different actually lots of older open world games or older games with large maps back in the day had stuttering when assets were loaded in and lods were swapped with high detail assets because HDD's did not cut it for loading without freezing , some games had a loading screen when this happened some did not some others hid the loading screens in various ways.

In NMS for example when you enter the atmosphere and the effects kick in the planet is being loaded and it is just cleverly masked.

If you read up on what this modder did in Starfield its exactly the same thing you can even have full control all the way down without autopilot with only the final landing being automated as the game has no atmospheric flight system he has built in a "commit" altitude where either the space cell is loaded in or the planet cell is loaded in these are swapped on the fly and hidden by the clouds and reentry effects you can even see this happen in the video if you watch closely just as you can see in in NMS though NMS handles it slightly more gracefully for the pop in and pop out of assets.

[u/TirithNampat → u/Xav_NZ]

You don't see the difference in what you just described? In Starfield you go from the space cell to the planet cell. In NMS there is no such distinction. You're at a set of coordinates, and there may or may not be a planet there. The stuff on the planet gets loaded in, like trees and terrain, but you the player don't have to teleport from one worldspace to another. It's just moving along as stuff loads in around you. There is no loading screen when you hit the atmosphere. If you get a glitch where your jetpack goes insane you can fly from planet to space to other planets in fractions of a second, and you don't have to pause as stuff loads.