Kerbal Space Program

This is even worse in 1.2.x as Alt-F9 now opens the same slow dialog.

Basically, the dialog is currently loading the complete game state from every save just to work out a few things for the load dialog. It is doing this because the info it uses is currently spread through the file. Caching the values for each file would be one option but it would still need to do the work the first time and would need to be careful to detect changes to the files. I think it would be better to modify the save format to include a copy of all the required info in a new node near the start of the file (e.g. a SAVEINFO node as the first child node of the GAME node) and then extract it for the dialog using an optimised routine. This would also remove the huge amount of garbage churn that occurs. The whole file is currently loaded into a string[] and then processed into a List<string[]> and then that's used to build the tree of ConfigNode objects, each of which contains a List<ConfigNode> containing the child nodes and a List<ConfigNode.Value> that contains an object for every value in the node. This is a lot of objects/memory even for a single save file, but when repeated for a couple of hundred files it must be enormous.

The new routine would only ever need to load a small chunk of the start of the file (1 or 2k would be more than enough for the data that's currently needed even including all the values in the GAME node) and it could also reuse the same buffer for each file. It could search the buffer for the SAVEINFO and then for the closing brace at the end of it and pass just that part to a ConfigNode for parsing. An alternative could be to put the values directly in the GAME node and search the buffer for the PARAMETERS node and terminate the GAME node at that point for fast parsing.

This should be fixed in 1.2.2. Please test.