[BTS] How to fix really slow mod loading times

[Sword_Of_Geddon]

Loading my mod takes awile. I have looked at the possible culprits behind this, units and new civilizations. I think its unitart. Normally that would be solved with packing it as a FPK file, but the unit art isn't all in the art/units foldier.

On my own computer the mod takes seven minutes to load but others are reporting much longer. Any ideas? Thanks in advance.

 

[Nightinggale]

Not really. Based on what I can tell, the exe tries to index all files in the mod prior to loading the DLL file. This means there is no magic code to make it faster as the modded code isn't even loaded yet. This also makes the cache in the DLL for faster startup rather pointless. I can save max a second if that and the cache comes with the risk of being out of date, hence causing bugs.

The only thing you can do is keeping the amount of files as low as possible. FPK files can help reducing the amount of files, but be aware that FPK can come with their own problems, including increased memory usage as the entire FPK file is read into memory, including files, which aren't currently used.

I recall something about movie files always being read from the disk even if loaded into memory from a FPK. That's really a waste of memory. Memory is a concern as it's a 32 bit application and it can run out of memory addresses long before a modern 64 bit computer runs out of memory.