Speculation on loading time

[GlobalExplorer]

I am programming applications that use huge geospatial data myself, and splitting / organizing data is an absolute must with this kind of data. From that point of view, the 15 maps make more sense. Maybe SHIII was loading the whole campaign data for every mission instead of clipping objects along a simple rectangle which describes the "active world".

Some other observations which might explain the better loading times:

Did you ever wonder why SHIII took 2-3 minutes loading data just to show the main menu, ot to switch to the museum? SHIII would "boot" the whole engine for the main menu, museum and then do it again for the mission, which is of course not efficient. Discarding all data and the starting over with sth like Application.Inititialize() is a common solution you can fall back to when you run out of time during development, because it is very easy to implement.

Reading/parsing the mostly text based data files ate up loads of times, so maybe they have a binary format now.

In general, loading / engine initialization seemed badly implemented in SHIII. So they probably had lots of opportunities for improving load times.

Just look at the strange savegame system and the 80's style organization of the crew management file for some other examples where they had room for improvement.

I am glad it's loading faster now, but hopefully this doesn't mean the data is now all binary - this would suck for modifications!

GE