Yeah I know its not long anyway…but its 2018 and on a CPU this speed, why is it not virtually instant?
I just multithreaded the steam app_init so that stuff is effectively ‘free’ now, and its time to see where the rest of the startup time is going. My current measurements from AQTime:
Drilling into this it looks like the easy wins will be inside the Main Menu constructor, as the init3d stuff probably cannot be multithreaded, and involves a lot of disk-bound stuff while I load textures, which is really tough to speed up (I could turn on my pak file code, but I’ll probably only do that just before final release).
Sadly almost all of the main menu constructor code looks like its the loading in of a big png file for my menu background. This is a 2560×1440 png file that is 7.5MB on disk. This is big, but I load in WAY more graphics than that when I do the pre-load textures on all the cars, which are in dds format. I’ll experiment with shifting it to a DDS file. This *should* be way faster, as a png has to be converted whereas a DDS file effectively *is* in the memory format used internally by directx, so its just a straight dump into memory…
That *dopes* actually drop it down to 17.2% (from 21.73%). I suspect there is a further optimisation in that this is currently not a power of two texture, so changing it to be one (as a test) yields…
OMG. its now 1.54%. Resizing that texture seems to take insane amounts of time, and this change knocks 0.5 seconds off my startup time. The next candidate is my sound engine. Multithreading its startup code completely takes it out of the picture too.
MainMenu initialise goes from 116ms to 4ms just by converting a non pow-2 png to a pow2 dds file, and now things look like this:
Total startup time has shrunk from 2.5 seconds to 1.9 seconds. Nothing anybody will consciously notice, but it makes me happier :D. Plus I *do* think that subconsciously people do feel the difference. Snappy start-up times are great for games when you want to have a quick blast, and the perceived responsiveness is bound to make people feel happier about their experience with the game. Plus it means less CPU draw and less battery drain on laptops.
This is for my car factory simulation game Production Line, currently in early access.