Long Game Load time

[Colin]

Hi Guy's I have this problem but I'm not sure that it's in the game or if it's my computer. When I go to play a game it takes something about a minute to load the actual "Load Game" screen. After that everything runs fine, it loads the game at normal rate and runs the game ok.

[prissi]

That happens, when there is a complex game to delete. There could be a delete game screen to, but so far I refrained from it. Would be not too difficult to add, though.

[Colin]

Hi Prissi,

Thanks for that. It happens when I click on the menu to save a game too, but not if I use Shift+S, this may be just a coincidence though as I noticed in the start up sequence, as shown in the GDI version, that it says "World Destroyed" or Destroying World".

Last night it took two minutes plus to put up 'Save Game'. if I clicked on anywhere on the Simutrans screen it report, 'Simutrans Not Responding'. Leave it alone for a minute longer and the 'Save Game' would open.

[Dwachs]

Before simutrans shows the save (or load) window, it reads all the savegames that are in your savegame directory to extract pak info. If you have lots of savegames there then it can happen that you have to wait a little bit.

[Colin]

Before simutrans shows the save (or load) window, it reads all the savegames that are in your savegame directory to extract pak info. If you have lots of savegames there then it can happen that you have to wait a little bit.

Thanks Dwachs, I'll delete all the unnecessary ones.

Edit: Terrific it's cured the problem.

[prissi]

If you are not interested in pak info or so, parsing could be much faster, but would only show the date. I can add a feature, if needed.

[Dwachs]

I have a half-way finished patch that caches the information in the savegame window. This should acelerate the parsing process. I will post this patch later this week.

[prissi]

Windows does a very good job at caching. For me, only first run takes this long, all other are very fast.

[Colin]

One of the problems with my save games is, if there are say 10-15 sve's most of them will be around 7-8mbs. After I removed all but the current one the game loaded fine, but I have since found out that more than one sve is enough to bring the loading process almost to a standstill. I don't think that this used to happen but hey! my memory ain't what it used to be.

[prissi]

Actually only the first 100 bytes or so are loaded during parsing. But with bzip2 compression, you need to read some kb to achieve this. You can try to use the old zip compression (add the line "saveformat = zipped") to your simuconf.tab, this should read faster.

[Colin]

Actually only the first 100 bytes or so are loaded during parsing. But with bzip2 compression, you need to read some kb to achieve this. You can try to use the old zip compression (add the line "saveformat = zipped") to your simuconf.tab, this should read faster.

D*A*M*N*!!! I never noticed that it had been changed. I just zoomed down to the 'Autosave Every='.

I've just changed it I'll let you now what happens.

[Dwachs]

From r4423 on, some information will be cached in save/_cached.xml to speed up opening the dialog.