Kerbal Space Program

The problem is that while we have to wait on scenes to load, we may want to Alt-Tab (Windows) to look at other documents we have open, such as spreadsheets and text notes we might be managing on the game, or looking up information on the web to help us understand something. As a career game progresses, more and more data is stored in the save data and every scene changes involves a quick save to persistent, taking up a lot of time. Never mind the fact that this data is uncompressed text, the process of writing data needs to be improved.

In many programming languages, there are ways to give the system more thread time to run other processes. In my recent learning about Unity, Coroutines are often used to allow the game engine to process other events while stepping through a long task, especially when there are occasions to have to wait. Sometimes, these waits are just to slow down animation or movement, but other times (and I think it to be in this case), the program is waiting on buffered data streams to be written to the hard drive. Even SSD drives don't save as fast as memory, so we need to treat every I/O stream like it could be bottle-necked by something outside of the game.

This request is to find points in the loading screen process to give resources back to the operating system so system commands like Alt-Tab or the Windows key can be processed quickly to allow focus to shift away from KSP to other applications that are already running. I think this request shouldn't be that difficult, unlike completely changing the way data is stored in the first place.