Comment 48 for bug 1121982

> P.S.: Any word on this loading-spritemaps-on-startup question?

Yes, sorry. I reverted this on purpose. The reason is that I test played a very long game and together with the surface cache (which routinely drops old images) the game is no fun to play when using a normal hd (i.e. not solid state). the cache drops images and the game reloads them resulting in a noticeable lag when moving around the map.

But also for loaded games the feature killed happiness: without dropping frames from the cache (i.e. by making the cache infinite in size) it needed a move over the whole map before the game stopped being choppy - otherwise the game will freeze whenever you visit a place on the map for the first time after loading.

I generally am of the opinion that a longer startup time is less painful than choppy play. The surface cache needs still changing to not drop stuff that is loaded from disk though to really fix this problem. I think it would be ideal to have both - maybe by background loading of the graphics or so.