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.

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