[engine] Making Wesnoth a lot faster

[NeoAmos]

In my experience, Wesnoth can be a rather sluggish game. When you open the game to begin with, it takes forever to load. Then, when you go to create a game, it again takes forever to load. And, when you actually start the game, it once more takes a often horrendous amount of time to load. And the more addons you have, the slower it gets. With all the addons i have, it will often take up to a minute at each stage

So here is my suggestion:

Rather than loading, reading and caching e.v.e.r.y.t.h.i.n.g each time you hit a loading screen, Wesnoth should instead read a single file for each addon/campaign/scenario/map which would contain only the name, a thumbnail, and any other minimal details (such as a description). It would not read the whole source code for that addon and it would not check for errors etc...

And then, when you start the game, THAT'S when Wesnoth should load everything that is needed. But ONLY whats needed for that specific game, and nothing else.

[Elvish_Hunter]

Moved to Ideas' forum, where it belongs.

[em3]

This would make manual/help that is accessible through main menu empty, no?

[zookeeper]

There's at least one feature request for it already. However, it hasn't been done because it's difficult.

[professor_max]

BfW has to check all of the campaigns to ensure that they are valid and can be played. Also, some addons use parts from other addons.

[Iris]

In my experience, Wesnoth can be a rather sluggish game. When you open the game to begin with, it takes forever to load.

I hope this statement is based on 1.9.8 and not 1.8.6. There are some performance improvements for WML loading in the development series (that came with some rather huge costs, e.g. #16571 [Gna.org]).

[Jetrel]

There's at least one feature request for it already. However, it hasn't been done because it's difficult.

Loosely speaking; it requires a ground-up rewrite of how WML is handled by the engine; which in fact has been done in both silvertree, and later, frogatto. These are both gpl, and it could be backported from them... it's just that that's quite hard to do.

Anyone who did would be our hero.

[ancestral]

These comments sound like features in Wesnoth 2.0, when that happens…

[Xudo]

#define Offtop
What is silvertree?
#enddef

[Crendgrim]

It is (or rather was) an open source RPG using the (modified) Wesnoth Engine. However, its website is down now for quite a while, so I don't think it still exists.


Crend

[Iris]

AFAIK it didn’t use any part of the Wesnoth engine. However, its formula language was added to Wesnoth 1.5.x in turn.

[Jetrel]

What shadowmaster said - not using the wesnoth engine at all. Not even remotely; it was a 3d game, for starters. That right there implies tossing the entire engine block out the window, to the use a car metaphor.

Some components were similar, since dave was "rethinking and rebuilding" his previous designs, and some of the design points of previous work (like WML's syntax) were fine and didn't need fixing.

It is (or rather was) an open source RPG using the (modified) Wesnoth Engine. However, its website is down now for quite a while, so I don't think it still exists.

[Crendgrim]

Okay, then I mixed up things there. Sorry.