[CCIP]

Well, as for your comments regarding cropping the image files and video - those account for a very negligible amount of data that any modern PC that can run SHIII will really be unaffected. 99.9% of the data SHIII loads during the loading phase is things such as 'building' the 3D gameworld, generating traffic, and pre-loading objects - things that are associated with the CPU and RAM. Anything relating to textures and other real-time graphics is related to the GPU and have negligible effect on the CPU/RAM loads if you have a modern video card. If textures were too large, they would sooner start affecting your frame-rate in game than the loading times as such.

Again, the real answer to maximizing loading efficiency lies in what the game's developers did for SHIV. If you have SHIV, take a look in the campaign folder - you'll see that the campaign is split up into dozens of smaller files which are loaded selectively based on date (and also I believe location) each time the game starts up. In SHIII, on the other hand, you have only 3 files accounting for the entire campaign which always have to be loaded, with one of the files (Campaign_RND.mis) accounting for the vast majority of the traffic you see in the game. It's an incredibly complex file of nearly 5mb of text entries containing information on each randomly-generated waypoint and unit in the game. All of these units and waypoints have associated probabilities of appearance and random radii of appearance. So think of it as the program parsing 5,000 pages of text line by line during loading, and for each line generating a set of ships or convoys, determining their formation and route, resolving conflicts, spacing them properly based on the variables set by the scenario etc. etc. It's a really complex operation, and there is no way around it in SHIII, unless you simply cut off parts of the campaign.