For what it's worth, when I tried 0.9.19 on Windows XP 32-bit, it also felt like it took longer to start up than 0.9.18 did.

If it doesn't take up too much memory I guess you could launch it and then keep it open.

Thank you guys for reporting this.

I'm sad to hear that start-up time got even worse :/
We'll try to investigate and tweak that for the next release

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For anyone w/ slow startup times, try renaming the Data dir to Data.bak in your local hedgewars config - that is - it might be for people who have a huge number of maps from bender's repo installed, and physfs problems.

If that works... it would be interesting to test with those maps packed as an hwp file - if anyone is up for trying that. Lemme know the result. Basically, zip up everything under Data, oh, datatest.zip, then rename that to datatest.hwp then put *that* file under a new Data dir in your profile.

BTW, if it is fast w/ no Data but still slow w/ the .hwp as described above, I'd love for someone to bisect the size to find out about where it starts struggling.

I didn't have any custom maps when i observed the problem, so removing the Data folder from the ...\mydocuments\Hedgewars in my case did nothing unfortunately.

I would add that once in the main menu, there's absolutely no more loading time problem when i start a battle between my team and the AI ones, it seems to be only the launch time of 0.9.19 that is getting that strange "more 1 minute" loading time instead of a simple +/- 10 seconds that is the case with 0.9.18 to which i went back.

0.9.19 loads in a couple of seconds for me.
Something particular to the Windows builds?

Something to do with the new splash screen, perhaps?

Huh. There's a splash screen?

What revision was that committed in?

If it can help to find the source of this Windows problem (as i guess it's OS specific if nemo has the game loading as fast as 0.9.18 was), i saw on the main website that there were a few beta builds, so i downloaded the only one still available :
http://www.hedgewars.org/node/5289

Installed it and noticed there was a debug console, during the launch it displayed quite a lot of message :

After that a few of those libpng warning continued to appear.

Then no more and there was an insane spam of "unknown property overflow" for several seconds

(the splash screen is putting itself on top of the dos console window)

Then after a while this spam stopped and there was the 2 [PHYSFS] lines that appeared about some path failing to open.

And after a few seconds, back to the insane spam of "unknown property overflow", until the menu started to appear, and new messages about SDL_Net appeared

From there the game was running normally.

The major amount of loading time during the launch was spent during the "unknown property overflow" spamming.

I think I got those too, but my install seems to load fine.
64 bit windows 7, here.

Same here with Windows 8 Pro 64bit. Doesn't take more than 1 or 2 seconds to jump from splash screen to the frontend.

You're actually getting all these problems with revision 9063 too right Fizanko?

I'll try launching the new edition on a Windows XP VM as soon as I get them working again as a curiosity too.

Fizanko, could you back up your hedgewars config to a new directory? (the whole thing)
If it is fine w/ a blank config, would be very interested in seeing if what is going on with your config can be reproduced under linux.

Perhaps you could share it with me privately?

I think i found at least one of the source of the problem, can't say if it's the only one, but it makes a really big difference :

I remembered a problem i observed with Gimp 2.8.4 :
the window 32 installer linked by the official GIMP website had the program responding fast and smoothly, while the portable version (of the same Gimp 2.8.4) offered by some people on their own websites had the interface and brush extremely slow and delayed.

looking around the web, i found a gimp forum in which some people were mentionning the same thing, and it appeared that the whole source of the problem was the Cairo library used by Gimp : the version of Cairo the guys that were making the portable Gimp 2.8.4 were using was recent and apparently badly broken on window 32 bits, while the guy compilling the window installer was using another version of the Cairo library that actually worked great on 32 bits.

And then simply swapping the corresponding DLL from the installed version to replace the DLL from the portable version simply fixed the slow and delay entirely from those portable version.

So i decided to give a try with Hedgewars in case it was one of those compilled libraries that could have a similar responsability in the problem, i backed up all the dll from 0.9.18 and installed 0.9.19 , backed up the dll of that version too, and started to compare and replace the dll that were different.

Some (the SDL dll) made so the program couldn't run after reaching the menu.
But a lot more interesting, the libavwrapper.dll
When i replaced the 0.9.19 libavwrapper.dll by the one from 0.9.18, oh boy.
From a bit more than 1 minute of launching time, it's roughly 15 seconds .

I re-replaced the dll so the original 0.9.19 libavwrapper.dll was back in place, launched Hedgewars ... and back to more than 1 minute.

So whatever is generating the launching time trouble on my window XP 32 bits is that libavwrapper.dll , as if i replace it by the 0.9.18 version, Hedgewars 0.9.19 launches nearly as fast as 0.9.18. Quite a difference 15 seconds instead of a bit more than 1 minute launch time.

So far i played a few matches with the AI in 0.9.19 , while using the 0.9.18 libavwrapper.dll and it seems to work without noticable side effect.

windows 8 64-bit also here and launching game 1 or 2 secs splash appears and then maye 5 - 7 seconds to be in the main menu, so for me it is not so long, the splash is a nice idea btw

So it looks like it's either only window XP or only with 32 bits, as all of you not having the launch time problem with 0.9.19 are on 64 bits (and not on XP).

From having played then a bit more since my last post, it seems to confirm that the culprit of the much longer loading time is indeed the 0.9.19 version of the file libavwrapper.dll

As i have been using the 0.9.18 version of this dll in my 0.9.19 install and having relaunched many time the game, it has never gone over 15 seconds of launching time.

I'm not sure what is giving so much problem to winXP (or 32 bits) with the 0.9.19 version of libavwrapper.dll , but it's a very noticable difference on my system (more than 1 minute launch time with the 0.9.19 version of that dll)

So for me all is good again, i can enjoy 0.9.19 while having fast launch time, as long as i replace the original 0.9.19 libavwrapper.dll by the 0.9.18 version

As i don't play online i have no idea if it can generate some sync problems due to file differences, but offline with the AI i have not got a single bug from this dll replacement.

libavwrapper is only for recording videos, so it's fine for playing games in online or offline mode, don't worry

Thanks, all is good then