Ways to make RTR load faster

Sure, get a faster machine with more menory.

Sorry, couldn't resist. Actually, I don't know of any other means to get it to load faster.

I have to admit that this whole question got me thinking (now I have a headache but what the heck!) so I did a few small tests. The main operation that slows things downs is reading the files and doing internal memory stuff. Since we can't affect the internals, I focused on file activity. Using a copy of my normal RtR! installation, which has 83 Xli files and a total of 1405 models, I ran the following tests.

Test 1: I removed the otx files, the lampinfo files, the ltex files, and soundsource files. With those removed, the loading of RtR! was about 1.1 seconds faster. Determination: irrelevant.

Test 2: After replacing the removed files, I took all of the non-RtR!-original XLI files and combined them into 9 large XLI files, revalidated them and tried again, comparing the load time to that of my normal RtR! installation. The results in minutes and seconds:

The determination: irrelevant.

Both of the above tests indicated that the number of models is, in fact, the defining factor in load speed. Continuing my thinking I devised a third test based on the idea that the load speed was affected by the opening, reading, and closing of the files and why the speed is impacted by the number of models. With that in mind it occurred to me that the speed impact is probably in reading the X files and the textures. Since the X file count is dependent on the number of unique models, there isn't much we can do with that. However, there is a way to lower the number of textures. Read on, intrepid RtR!ers for here comes magic.

I imagine that most of us have several versions of particular textures, often with different names, in multiple folders in the Scenes hierarchy. I would surmise that if you went through and found them all and edited the various X files (and maybe the XLI files if the model is recolorable) to point to a single instance of the texture, then RtR! might load a bit faster. My assumption is based on the fact that the loader in RtR! is smart enough to know if a texture, by name, has already been loaded it doesn't reload it (peruse the startlog.txt file). But it has no idea that textureA and textureB may be the same texture if they have different names.

Ok, to be totally honest, there are two reasons I'm not about to go do that to my installation. First, it's just too much work. Second, I really don't think that it will save more than a few seconds.

For comparison, I have a 2.8GHz system with 16GB memory. Your mileage may vary based on the capabilities of your machine. So, to refer back to my original answer, if you want it to load faster, get a faster machine. One other limiting factor that we cannot do anything about is that RtR! is a 32-bit application, even if running on a machine capable of 64-bit operation.