we are developing a special purpose game, consisting of only one huge level, with almost no geometry, mostly models. we are running it on an athlon 3000+ with 1gb ram and a 256mb geforce6600.
the level loads fine, but when playing, every now and then there's a big slowdown, maybe 1 second freeze. i checked the statistics, and in the ms/frame column, the ent value goes up a lot when that happens, and there's also a lot of disk activity. also the usedmem value goes up, so i'm guessing it's loading new entities from disk. the second time i run through the level it doesn't happen nearly as much, if at all.
the question is, is there a way to have them all load beforehand so that there won't be slowdowns? they are all level entities, put into wed, so according to the manual they should already be preloaded.
as i said it's a special purpose game, so i don't care about system requeriments, so i could add more ram, but maybe that won't fix the problem.
any insights?
thanks!