Hi,
I am unsure about this, maybe you can shed some light. Seems, that I am somehow blind on this one...

I made a cave model and stored it as MDL with a tiled texture and a lightmap (incl. 2nd UV set). Ingame, I set preload_mode to 7 and explicitely create it once, do ent_preload and remove it again, just to make it 100% sure that it is preloaded (I generate the filenames procedurally, so, this is necessary).

Later, I infinitely ent_create the model several times and ptr_remove instances after a while. In fact - apart from the entity creation, which is blazing fast, because I preloaded everything - I have -no- feelable delay.

Now, I loaded the same model (without lightmap) into WED as static mesh and lightmapped it. The rest is unchanged, preload_mode is still = 7 and I explicitely preload it like I said above. But, I get a small feelable delay -each time- the map entity is ent_create'd (in comparison with the model variant), even though I preloaded it! It is "feelable" because camera moves slowly on a fps of 300 and than it drops shortly while the cave is ent_create'd...

What do you think could cause this?
What am I making wrong?

Map entities are not preloaded at all. Preloading is only implemented for sprites and models, as map entities are normally supposed to be loaded at the begin of the level only.

I see. Nevertheless, would you mind to add a "+" parameter for preload_mode to enforce this?

I'll look into that. Map entities are just containers, so it should be not too hard to implement.

That would be really, really great!