Does anybody know the maximum amount of text you can display on a loading screen? We're creating new loading screens and are wondering how much text we can add.

I'm not sure exactly, but I guess just don't try to pile as much info as possible into one loading screen. Keep it short, say 1 to 2 lines. People wouldn't like an essay about the functions on telekenesis.

Yeah I know that. But it's hard to tell what will yield "one or two lines" on the screen. The maximum size I've seen of the vanilla phrases is 180 characters. I was just wondering if anyone knew what the limit is...

The CS may impose a lower cap on string length, but from a technical standpoint, the esp/esm file format enforces an absolute maximum of either 65,534 or 4,294,967,294 characters on any string depending on whether the XXXX record modifier is used. I don't know if the XXXX modifier is actually allowed for strings, it's rarely used by the CS. In both cases, that's more than would fit comfortably on a loading screen.

Like I mentioned though, the CS may choose to limit the string to a smaller length. The only way to find out would be to test.

Yeah, it doesn't look like there's a hard limit - it seems to be more of a practical one I loaded in a quote that was 402 characters long. On my widescreen monitor with Darn UI, it fit just fine. However I had to turn into super duper speed reader to read it all before the cell finished loading

I'd say that practically, you're looking at 200 characters or so. You're only going to have a few seconds to read the quote (even though it feels like an eternity) and you have to consider how many lines that will consume with the vanilla UI.

Thanks for the responses guys!