Hadn't it been quite irritating when you had started a fresh game with D2X-XL, or had loaded a savegame, and the very moment you turned around or opened a door to continue to play, the game started to lag like hell, making you easy prey for the robots lurking there for you? Well, it definitely irritated me.

Actually, this had been a long standing issue, always in the back of my head, but it never made it to the front due to other, more important or more interesting stuff. As I had started to grab some videos for a new D2X-XL clip, this problem grew from a nuisance to a major pain in the neck. Everytime I reloaded a savegame and opened the door to the next room, hoping to catch some really great flight and battling action of mine, the ship froze, just for fractions of a second, but enough to throw me off course and make me an easy target for the robots there.

So I fired up my trusty debugger once again and started to look into the issue. There had been some texture pre-caching, right? Oh, the comment says something about 'crude texture pre-caching'. It took me two iterations and a few hours of gnashing my teeth in frustration and impatience, but it looks like I finally managed to turn 'crude' into 'more or less complete'. So here you are: No more laggy gameplay due to mid-game texture loads.

I am happy.