Sky Render on 27 December 2007
The best way to mask load times (and I've seen a few games do this) is to do a form of pre-emptive loading. You have the program make an educated guess on where the player will go next, and load accordingly as they approach. Alternately, you can have the game pre-load each potential area the player can reach from their current area while they're in said current area. It doesn't eliminate load times entirely, and really doesn't work if the player suddenly turns around and goes back the way they came (unless you use cache loading, which some systems lack the available RAM to do effectively), but it works well enough.
Sky Render - Sanity is for the weak.
