Loading Screen, benefits?

In most of the games I've coded on Unity I've never seen the benefit to making a load screen as the game loads the files pretty quickly to even need one. Though I've been thinking about adding one in but I'm not sure the best way to go about it, would a Scene be better to use or to create a Class script that loads the level through that?

 

I also haven't made anything big enough to justify it, but I can see where it would be useful if you did have a lot of stuff to buffer or connect and did not want to lag the game at the start or stream it.

Kind of curious myself, I hope some with first hand experience expound on this.

 

Our game is a single scene where we instantiate and destroy things to build our skirmish maps.

We have a pretty in-depth UI solution that uses XML markup to dynamically build meshes for UI screens. Our loading screens are just full screen meshes that block user input. With the new UI system you could build all of your screens as children of a common Canvas object and just turn them on/off as needed.

 

See I was thinking of doing the same Kelso, using a GUITexture or something to cover the entire screen but at the same time though I have a lot of code and objects spawning currently it's not exactly needed to be honest, I always thought it was because Unity being fast or something but I guess once you get a lot of scenery and things spawning it may be needed.

 

Our maps can take 30-45 seconds to load. We didn't have loading screens until we made a "real" map and quickly realized that the object density required it.

Not to mention the fact that we have to wait for networked multiplayer players to indicate that they've loaded the map and are ready to play.