went back to original loading screen code, for the most part. tried to optimize and consolidate different methods for fading scenes. still feel like i am loosing frames during the loading process, at this point i no clue which code has better performance. additive loading seemed to give me more progress updates, but mayhap it is just in my head. there are only three fade animators now: menu, loading and level; map counts as menu. did away with the separate methods for loading and just went back to the old way. i kept the old code around in case i run into app size issues later and have to procedurally generated the geometry after all. it turns out the fix was even easier than saving the texture out to disk and reassigning it, all i needed was to reload the colors so to speak in the start method. i added like 3-4 lines of code to make it happen seamlessly. a weeks worth of work undone and redone in one day. hopefully I’m heading in the right direction now and with more solid footing.