Game animations jerky

[Yomar]

I have 2 computers an on both the units attack animations are jerky when I attack an unit, I understood that this happens because the games access to my hd to read the attacking animations, in fact it happens especially when I attack the first time with a certain unit, after it gets better because I think that the computer puts the attack into the ram.
My question is : There is a way to force the game to cache everything before I start playing, I don't mind if I have to wait more.
Actually I remember something like that happening in an older version of BFW, I had to wait kinda a lot, but game was very fluid after loading, but Idk, I had an another computer then, so maybe it was a configuration thing.
Thx.

[Yomar]

Just to know, do I put this question in the right section ?

[Coffee]

What version of Wesnoth are you running (it says on the title screen)?

[Yomar]

Its 1.10.7

[AI]

If your analysis is correct, pre-loading all the animations of every unit the moment it's placed on the map for the first time might be a good idea. I'm not sure how easy this would be to implement though.
For a different game that I used to mod, I wrote a script that took a map (which includes the scenario part in that game) as input and output a list of commands you should include in that file. These commands would create and destroy one of each type of object the map used, thereby ensuring they would all be loaded into memory as the map was loaded. I don't think a similar WML or lua based hack is feasible though, unless running animations in the prestart event works.

[Coffee]

In addition to what AI said, in 1.11(development)/upcoming 1.12 version of Wesnoth there have been several changes. The unit animations should take less RAM and load very slightly differently. Perhaps this will solve your issue?

Another thing is that a spritesheet has been proposed for the upcoming GSoC to significantly speed up image loading times for a future version of Wesnoth. We are aware that sometimes animations are jerky on screen for some people.

If you are running Windows, a defrag of your drive may decrease loading time by placing images next to eachother on the drive and making it easier to load.

[Yomar]

Ok, I will try what you suggested.
Any chance that in future BFW will load everything into ram in the future ? Or at least add the possibility as a cfg option ?
This would solve a lot of user's animations problem.
Anyway after some experimentations I discovered 3 ways of making the game very smooth, they are workarounds, but I will share them here, hoping that they will help someone.

Method 1: Download the freeware utility quetHDD and run it, this keeps the hard drive spinning, so the animations will load on the "fly".

Method 2: Download a Ramdisk utility, create a ramdisk of about 300 or 400 mb (mine is of about 350 mb) and copy the whole Wesnoth folder in it, (I prefer to use the portable version of BFW), but should also work with the standard version, its also possible to create avpermanent folder in the Ramdisk, if you don't want to copy the game everytime you restart the computer.

Method 3: Buy a fast USB Pendrive (3.0 connected on a 3.0 USB port or a Fast SD card or a MicroSD with adapter) then copy the game on it and thennyou can play from there, if the device is too slow, the animations will still be jerky sometimes, at least on my tests that is what happened to me.

Hope this will be useful to someone, bye.