Map loading

Background loading

Maps load on a background thread while the game keeps handling window messages, so Windows no longer flags the game as not responding during long loads.

Large maps

Maps up to 2048 MiB can be loaded. The stock engine stops at 384 MiB.

Map subfolders

The maps folder can hold subfolders. Each subfolder is a self-contained map set with its own bitmaps.map, sounds.map and loc.map, so maps built against different resource maps can be installed side by side:

maps
|-- bitmaps.map
|-- sounds.map
|-- loc.map
|-- bloodgulch.map
`-- my_campaign
    |-- bitmaps.map
    |-- sounds.map
    |-- a10_remastered.map
    `-- a30_remastered.map

• Maps are still loaded by their name alone, e.g. map_name a10_remastered.
• A resource map missing from a subfolder is taken from the root of maps.
• When a map with the same name exists at the root and in a subfolder, the root one wins.

Texture preloading

Textures are normally loaded the first time something draws them, which causes stutters during gameplay on maps with many large textures. With preloading, every texture of the map is loaded while the map loads.

It is turned on with Preload textures in the video settings. Until that setting has been changed, Ringworld maps can turn it on from their header.

Faster startup

The game checks every multiplayer map at startup to build the map list. Ringworld caches the result in Documents\My Games\ringworld\maps_index.cache and only checks maps that changed.