Finally a REAL developer journal. 
In game development, one of the most important polish points is making sure that the game is always responsive to the user. It’s better to take 1 second longer than to stutter or hang for frames.
Unfortunately, it often gets very expensive in engineering hours to meet that objective.
In Elemental, we have two areas that are particularly problematic in that area before you even get into the game:
#1 When you first launch the game.
and
#2 Waiting for the game to start (i.e. the time after you start the game and you actually get to the map).
In both cases, the delay is due to parsing in XML. It’s completely a CPU bound issue.
Elemental is designed to support multi-core but we also support single core processors too. And when you first launch the game, that’s where the guy with the quad core is going to notice the biggest difference versus the guy with a single core CPU.
THIS…
BECOMES…
Which has to be parsed…
…
Anyway…
The “stuff” that has to be loaded before you even see the title screen is in the \english directory. All the other XML gets loaded after. The problem is, there’s a lot of stuff in that english directory.
Thankfully, tile designs don’t have to go in there. But UNITS do and “GoodieHuts” and anything you would expect to encounter while setting up the game.
As of now (1:43am on Wednesday, August 11) there is 3.31 MEGABYTES of XML (that’s just text mind you) that has to be read in and parsed. Heck, there's 65K of hats that have to be parsed (I mean literally, hats as in things to put on your guy’s head).
But by far, it’s the units that are the biggest chunk of it. And we’re adding more creatures every day. So this is something we’ll have to find a way to deal with between now and release otherwise, the first impression will be crummy for people with slower machines.
Either we have to find a way to move the unit parsing into a background thread (not as easy as it sounds) or we need to find a way so that we don’t have so many units being loaded up front.
…
Now, the other issue, which there really is no way around, is the time it takes after you hit “Start game” and you get to the map. All those wonderful tiles have to be loaded and parsed. There’s 11 megabytes of XML there. It’s the nature of the beast unfortunately and one that I think most would agree is worth it. But you can bet, many of us are looking forward to going through all 770 tiles we have as of tonight and seeing which ones we could get rid of.
