Hi, i thought about picking up this childhood gem for some casual speedrunning, but it seems, that my loading times are way to long, almost tripple compared to the speedruns on the site.

Any idea what the cause might be?

Are you running the game from an actual physical CD? If so, I recommend switching to running without the CD. There's a guide on how to do that in the Guides section. Other than that, I'm not sure what could be causing the issue. There are still lots of things to be discovered about what makes this game tick.

Yeah, i figured it might be the CD, but unfortunaly it is still pretty slow, even without it :D You run the game on some kind of compability options with windows?

I don't run the game with any Windows compatibility options set.

The game stores most of its assets in GRP files, and my theory is that these GRP files are compressed archives. If I'm correct, that means that the game needs to decompress and read the contents of these archives, and that's where the load times come into play. I'm not sure if it decompresses them into memory or some temporary place on the harddrive, so maybe having fast RAM or a fast harddrive/ssd would improve loading times.

It would be great if we could somehow extract all of the assets and have them load locally instead of working with archives, but I don't know if that's possible.

Are you running the game in fullscreen by any chance?

Those GRP files I think are compressed archives, annoyingly no one has figured out the compression method yet.