Portalborn — Faster Startup — Portalborn News

Hello everyone!

A small technical update this time, and one I want to explain properly rather than bury in a list.

The game opens about a third of a second sooner

Back in June, when some players — mostly in China — were seeing genuine black screens and couldn't get the game to load at all, part of what I put in place was a cover over the window during startup, so that the various loading and connection messages didn't flash past in an unreadable jumble while the game sorted itself out.

The underlying causes were fixed in that same round of work: the game no longer makes any network requests at all while it starts. So the cover has outlived its purpose, and it was costing more than it gave — a brief black flash on a normal launch, a couple of seconds of black on a slow one, and on a genuine failure it hid the error message for several seconds.

It's gone now. The window appears as soon as there's something to read: the game itself, the loading screen, or an error message if something failed. Measured across 100 launches, the character screen arrives roughly a third of a second sooner, with no black frame at all.

One thing you'll notice: where you used to get a brief black frame, you may now catch a glimpse of the game's own loading screen instead — "PORTALBORN is loading…" — for a moment before the character screen appears. That's intentional, and it's the point of the change. On a slow start, that screen is what you'd rather be looking at.

I also moved Steam's startup to begin after the window appears rather than before. On a slow machine with a slow Steam client, it was previously possible for the window never to appear at all. That can't happen now.

If this causes any problem at all, please tell me

This touches the very first thing that happens when you launch the game, so I've tested it more heavily than anything I've shipped — including with the Steam client running, in both languages, on the packaged build. But I can only test on my own machine.

If the game fails to open, shows a black screen, or gets stuck loading, please post in the discussions or message me on Discord. I have the previous build ready to restore immediately, and I'd rather roll back for a day than leave anyone unable to play. Nothing about this change touches your saves or characters.

Thank you, as always, for your patience with a game built by one person.

This announcement was written and published by the developers/publisher of Portalborn on Steam; it is mirrored here unedited for readability, with full credit and a link to the original above. © the respective rights holders. Rights holder and want it removed? Email us — we take it down promptly.