Load all resources into RAM option

[bk3000]

I feel that the forced pausing that occurs when loading another area while traveling is rather immersion breaking at worst, and highly annoying at best. With that in mind I had made a thread telling people how to load the game into a RAMdrive and run it from there to eliminate loading times between areas.
http://www.lofigames.com/phpBB3/viewtop ... f=5&t=7510

But I got to thinking that this would be more efficient (cutting out ramdisk emulation overhead and RAM-to-RAM copying) if the game itself simply loaded all assets (including the whole map) into it's own allocated RAM and so never needed to access the HD after initial load (except when saving and loading save games). I don't think it would involve too much coding either. Instead of loading your assets as needed from the HD, you point to whatever memory address.

Obviously not everyone has the RAM to spare for this sort of thing, so it should be an option (probably not enabled by default). But for those who do, this would be a great boon.

[PnzrNorm]

This won't be an option when the new world map releases.
Also, the bigger drain on performance would be the number of character models displayed at once as well as running all of their animations.

[BloodyNex]

This won't be an option when the new world map releases.
Also, the bigger drain on performance would be the number of character models displayed at once as well as running all of their animations.

Actually, the models wouldn't need to be displayed (they should still be cut off by the view settings). bk3000's just talking about having all the map and building data and such loaded at once so that when it's needed the slow part is already taken care of. It's really a trade-off between initial loading times and in-game loading times.

[PnzrNorm]

Actually, the models wouldn't need to be displayed (they should still be cut off by the view settings). bk3000's just talking about having all the map and building data and such loaded at once so that when it's needed the slow part is already taken care of. It's really a trade-off between initial loading times and in-game loading times.

Even if it is just an initial load time affected by this, the new world map is going to be incredibly huge, making the initial load time at least 10 minutes, which nobody would ever wish that upon another, not even if they were forced to use 56k modems.