I hadn't noticed that. Certainly I'm not aware of any particular bottle neck in the current system, so it would be difficult to find something to target to speed it up.

My machine is 2½ years old with -- I think -- an 7200rpm drive. Is that considered slow?

Eew, 2.5 years old? That's almost as bad as mine. 😉
What kind of video card do you have? It's possible that there may be a conflict uploading to it.

Not old enough to explain the loading times you get 😀

Your textures used to load pretty fine on my previous rig (which was four years old at least), at worst it would take about a couple of seconds to load the level and display the textures. What do you call "ages"?

However, I've also noticed the white loading screen on occasions, though it only appears for a second or two. Would be neat if it could be turned black instead.

It's a Geforce MX 4600 Ti Ultra something or other, 128MB ram.

Just did a test at 1280x1024, fullscreen. I selected my caves save game and from pressing enter to select it to the level appearing took 14 seconds. There was a screen mode change somewhere in that lot which added to the delay.

OK, so 14 seconds isn't exactly a long time, but it seems a lot considering there's not much going on and the external textures aren't exaclty massive. Is it because they are PNGs and the decompresison time is taken into acocunt. Would BMPs be better? Bloody hope not after all that....

Yes, but what's the interface?
Also, that card does not exist. For GeForce4 and MX/Ti, choose from the following:

GeForce4 MX 460
GeForce4 MX 440 AGP 8X
GeForce4 MX 440
GeForce4 MX 440-SE
GeForce4 MX 420
GeForce4 Ti 4800
GeForce4 Ti 4800 SE
GeForce4 Ti 4200 AGP 8X
GeForce4 Ti 4600 <-- my dollar bills go here
GeForce4 Ti 4400
GeForce4 Ti 4200

(It will tell you in your Display Properties control panel.)

P.S. Yes, if you have a slow CPU then it will take some time to decompress the PNG files. How large are the files, cumulatively?

The white screen is what a feshly created OpenGL window looks like before anything is drawn on it. I don't think I see it for very long these days. Do you have that nView thing turned on?

Yes, but what's the interface?

What? Do you mean the DX version? It's 9.0c.

The card is a Geforce4 Ti 4600 (The OEM name was Winfast A250 Ultra TD -- I mixed them up).

I have my nView set to Clone, with the extra TV output going to the TV. AA and Anisotropic filtering are both on high. I don't think I have anything else weird set in nView -- I don't use multiple desktops or anything like that.

My CPU is an AMD Athlon 1900XP (actual clock speed 1.60Ghz) -- yes, slow by today's standards!

The textures for the caves come out at 4.75MB as PNGs, 6.1Mb as BMPs.

If it helps, it's pretty instant to load a level when using the internal textures.

Is it any faster if you move your development version of Textures somewhere safe, and install your release ones (which presumably have fewer folders)?

It's not the textures at all! I disabled the background MP3 setting and the level loaded almost instantly....

That's interesting. I wonder what on earth is slowing that down. Glidos just uses DirectShow filters to play mp3. DirectShow is tuned to have mininal latency.