Mods and long load times

Epic suffers from long load times while starting up. I have done a bunch of research on this topic and thought I would share the information.

The problem is that each mod contains a duplicate directory tree of the main resource file. Every time the engine tries to load a file, it much search inside every mod to see if a replacement file exists.

It is all this duplicate searching and reloading that is taking most of the time. There are some things you (as a modder) can do to shorten the load times.

1. Do NOT unpack the resource tree inside your Iwar install. This doubles search for every single file and doubles your load times!

2. Do not duplicate unchanged files. Do not make a copy of all the pog packages, or the whole sim tree, or texture files if you don't use them. This increases the load time.

3. Try to keep the number of times you duplicate the same directory path small. So put all your player ship changes into one mod. If they are scattered into 5 mods, you force the file path to be searched 5 times.

4. Unzip the files. The zipped structure is more compact, but you pay for it during load time. Disks are cheap.

As modders, we could do more if we could precompress the texture files. But I know of no way to do that.

The POG SDK has a nice tool for researching this topic. If your debug keybinds are installed, you can press Ctrl-Alt-p to open a performance display. Toggle through a few screens and you will see the load time performance itemized. Very handy.

This thread has been here for over a week?

Anyway, concerning texture compression... There WILL be a tool available for texture conversion\compression in about 3 weeks. During our ongoing adventures of branching the GUI Geography SDK, we found the compression algorithms used for the textures of the game. The primary stumbling block for non-3D programmers is that the the best\easiest functions to implement the compression requires OpenGL or DirectX.

Over the weekend, we had finally managed to load and expand\decompress the compressed textures into the Geography SDK. Since we finally got the expansion\decompression right we're working on adding the necessary exporters for non-compressed JPG, World-Readable IFF, (and some other formats that do NOT require us to pay a licensing fee to use – Darn Software Patents, IP rights, etc). Actually, those 2 would make life easy enough... But if there becomes a need to add other formats, we can address that at a future date. The next step though, is to get the headers correct for every format that the tool can export so that other programs\editors can be used to manipulate the textures. Right now, we're carefully making sure that it's saving the uncompressed and compressed textures with the correct headers\format for the game. It already has a batch mode, so that's a bonus.

Work is still progressing on the GUI Geography SDK. We're coordinating our vacation schedules, and targeting a release date... I won't say when, (to avoid the curse of running late), but it's safe to say that this one will make it out to the modding community.

I guess I should get back to my real job while I dream about textures and an alternate universe.

Tech2KJason

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