Comment 9 for bug 895938

Irrespective of whether this is solved for you or not, I'll still regard this issue as erratic behavior. It truly takes the best of the best programmers and designers in the world to cache all needed files on the faster hard drive instead of letting them reside on the much slower compact disc - and then, against all odds and expectations, have this masterpiece afterwards load slower rather than faster. And maybe they should have added something like a -DRIVE switch to also remove the requirement of having a CD drive when in No-CD mode.

Ok, enough sarcasm for today. A little story: As a coder I start YR quite often, almost always together with Ares. After some time one goes blind about certain facts. Even though I noted YR took quite some time to start a match / campaign mission, I put the blame on the added Ares code. But it turned out the game is loading much faster when the -CD switch is off. It turned out two days ago - only after months of waiting, gazing at the loading screen(*).

Then I looked into this weird drive requirement. After I commented out an Ares hook concerning the search for the correct disc the game loaded as fast as vanilla YR, but only as long as there was a disc (any disc) in at least one of the drives - otherwise it would load slowly again. Only the TFD version. The original version stopped working with that hook removed, asking for the YR disc. Fixing one broke the other. I could get both versions to fail at the same time, but that didn't help either. There must be some kind of logic to that, some reason behind the obvious... If you know, please call me.

I added some new code. For me it saves some seconds of loading time for every match started. If you don't experience the problems described in this issue, you should not notice any difference. For the others this better be helpful...

Testing should thus focus on the issues mentioned above (this is what the story is for). Namely, the TFD/Standalone difference, the enabled/disabled -CD parameter with/without discs in drives. And no drives at all (in Windows you can disable the CD drives in the Device Manager). All in all, that's twelve different cases. Have fun!

(* not continuously, mandatory breaks apply)