Preloading files will not magically remove all the ent_create time. The engine loads files very fast and buffers them in a cache anyway, so you won't gain this much time with a preload process.
Creating entities is a very different process than file loading.
Exactly. That's exactly why we can't do this ourselves, and why this discussion is still going on in the Future forum.
You can see such a concept in the infinite terrain demo that creates ten thousands of entities in a second.
Yes, because they're all very simple. The number of the same entity is almost inconsequential. In my tests I used a cube with an enormous texture -- in this specific case it's only the texture that causes the delay, and that'll often be the case as these days one entity will often have many skins. If I change my test to ent_create the same model again after the first one is created, there's no delay for the second entity.
It's this first-time-creating, behind-the-scenes stuff that we can't do anything about that could surely be done in the background with an engine function.
Even if "pre-loading" isn't going to do what we want, I thought the intention of this request was made very clear, if not from my first post then from subsequent responses from everyone else.
Jibb
