What's up with the hideous load time?

[Stungun]

I've noticed that in the latest ZC builds, the player takes almost a minute just to get to the Armageddon Games screen. After loading the title screen things run pretty smoothly... but I don't remember ZC ever taking this long to load in the past.

Why is this? Is anyone else having a long program load time, or is it just me?

[Plissken]

I get a little delay (about 10 seconds) before the armageddon logo comes up.

[DarkDragon]

The template quest, and all custom quests, are loaded at that time. Thus, the more custom quests you have registered, the longer the load time; also, because the template quest is now larger, loading it takes longer.

[Stungun]

Wait, all custom quests? But you can find, and load, quests outside of your ZC directory... I don't think ZC sweeps your entire computer looking for custom quests, or it'd just give you a list when you made a file and selected 'Custom Quest'.

[pkmnfrk]

No no, he means all the quests for which you have save files.

[Nicholas Steel]

yes, this behavior i hate, it should simply check the save file then check if the path to the quest exists and thats it.

upon choosing a quest to play, it will then go and load the quest. (once a quest is loaded it is cached in memory during that ZC session.) so, now if you ran a quest, then ran another, then went back to the first, the first one would load rather uickly due to it being cached for the session.

[pkmnfrk]

I think it loads it for the explicit purpose of loading the icon. Since they're encrypted and compressed, it has to load the whole thing for that one picture.

Maybe it would be possible to optimize this a bit by embedding the proper icon in the save file...