Fast Mod Audio Load

This mod reduces load times for mods that provide additional music or many sounds.

Description

The effect of this mod differs depending on the platform. On Linux the effect is larger than on WIndows. The situation on other platform is not known.

Common

Loading of many small audio files is somewhat inefficient in RimWorld and can take several seconds for sound mod packs with hundreds of sounds. The audio loading changes in this mod appear to save up to one half of the loading time of such mods. This applies to both Linux and Windows.

Linux

When RimWorld loads audio files from mods, it loads them all during startup. On Linux, due to a mistake in RimWorld's code for Linux, they are decoded and loaded entirely. If using mods such as P-Music and Actually Vanilla Music Expansion, this can easily add about 20 seconds to game startup time (measured on AMD 8600G, Samsung 970 EVO Plus SSD). This also wastes a lot of memory, about 2.5GiB RAM for the two mods mentioned.

This mod switches loading of larger audio files from mods to streaming. Such audio files will be loaded later on demand.

Windows

The cost of loading audio from mods on Windows is relatively small (P-Music loads in ~1 second), as the Windows version of RimWorld uses different code to handle audio than Linux. It still appears this mod makes loading about 4-5x faster with music mods, so this might make a diference if they are large enough or several of them. In the comments a user reported reducing time spent loading audio files from 7.2 to to 3.9 seconds.

The only known downside to using this mod on Windows is losing support for mp3 and aiff formats. Mods should not use such formats, as that would prevent them from working on all platforms (only ogg and wav are supported everywhere).

Notes

Audio loaded using the Custom Music mod is not affected, as it uses the same streaming method.

RimWorld has built-in functionality to find out what costs the most during start. It may be useful to help you find out how to reduce you start time. See here.

GitHub: https://github.com/llunak/rimworld-fastmodaudioload