Custom HUDs and load times.

[chompers]

A couple of people have mentioned that levels load faster when you are running a custom HUD. After a bit of testing, it certainly seems to be the case on my PC. On many of the larger levels the load sort of hangs for a few seconds at 60%, but with a custom HUD this pause goes away or is at least greatly reduced. On smaller levels like ATCS it won't make much difference, but on levels like transit and nexus there's a distinct load time advantage.

If you're easily able to disable and re-enable custom HUDs, please test it out and see for yourself, and post your results. Any devs or otherwise code savvy people have an idea why this might happen?

[PHREAK]

As you know, pk3's are zip files and as such are compressed.
To load the hud, the game has to access the hud files inside the pk3, uncompress, compile, render.
You skip a step if the HUD is outside of the pk3.
Here's what you can do to test it.
Create a pk3 with your hud files in your base/UI folder and point trem to it and you will see that it will takes as long as it does when using the stock HUD.

I might be wrong about the reason why it takes longer but this has been my experience with the Q2 and Q3 engines.
Correct me if I'm wrong.

[chompers]

Yeah, that might account for a few milliseconds, but the difference is several seconds. I'm guessing that stepping out of the pk3 halfway through to load some arbitrary files, then stepping back into the pk3 decompression routine clears up some cached memory or something which lets the 2nd half of the pk3 load faster.

Something like that anyway, it's all very curious.

edit: It would be interesting to see system specs of those who find it makes a huge difference and those (if any) who find it makes no noticable difference.

[BeerBastard]

One less file to check on a pure server?  Pure servers check the pk3, if you move the hud outside of it, Its not being checked by the server. I dont know much about it but maybe this accounts for the rest of the time.  It talks with the server to get the checksums.