I noticed that the sectors load faster if i visit them a second time.
My idea is that the user specifys the amount of memory he whould like to spend for preloading sectors/textures. And that vendetta loads as much as possible at the startup. This could decrease the travel time for almost everyone.

I strongly agree with this idea.

It was a problem in the old vendetta and now it's even worse. When I'm traveling I spend about 80% of my time staring at a 'Loading' dialouge. Not an encouraging way to start a game. It sometimes gets so tedious that I just quit. That's not what you want happening to your customers.

hehe. it takes me a few minutes to load (I only trade between sectors now :D)... some people would think I logged off midwarp, if my account weren't on the active player's list!
at least if anyone were to pirate me, they'd be quite annoyed...
I think stations are loading very slowly too; staring at the black screen makes me wonder if I've crashed the game.

80% of your time spent loading?!? What processor are you using?

For me it takes 10-15 seconds max between any 2 sectors, using an 800mHz iMac.

Load time is heavily influenced by connection speed... maybe he's just on dial-up...

Yow. My loading bar whips by in a matter of a few seconds. I have DSL and a 2gHz processor - not too fancy.

some sectors dont whip by in a few seconds though :(.

Mostly the ones that have abundant amounts of textures like roids and stuff

cheers

Yeah, sometimes on an empty sector, I don't even *see* the loading screen :)

I have a p4 2,8 ghz 2gig of ram and a 2mbit line (latency 110ms to guild).

But sometimes it takes ~90 seconds to load a sector. But yeah there are also sectors which load within 5 seconds. Jumping from system to system always takes more then 30 seconds.

Time to measure, to get some more accurate values. I will post them here.

Don't confuse poor players with technical details. Maybe start to preload in the background once someone has selected a sector. Store the data between games and only transmit the differences. But I bet you know best how to solve this.

Just jumped a bit around, here are the results. Less then 90s on all jumps (:)). But it shows that there is a possibilty to save some seconds.

40s - Initial Load Odia M-14
10s - B6
26s - J14
6s - B6
27s - M14
22s - J14
6s - B6
6s - Sedina
7s - Odia (b-6)
4s - Sedina
6s - Odia (b-6)
27s - M14
16s - J10
1s - P1
16s - J10

<edit> Those values dont look that bad. But those seconds take forever.