Making LoE load instantly...

[The Great Sephiroth]

I am not sure what the playerbase uses for storage, but it is fairly common knowledge that HDDs are slowest but most reliable, SSDs are a hair faster, and M.2 NVME is by a wide margin, the fastest storage. However, there IS a storage medium that is faster than NVME and you have it in every computer out there. RAM. Your memory is much faster than any storage medium, but the contents are lost when you power down, unlike data stored on HDD, SSD, or M.2 NVME.

A trick we had back in the days of DOS and Windows 9X for those of us with copious amounts of memory was to create a disk in memory, referred to as a RAM disk. We would then put games or slow-loading programs into the RAM disk and run them form there. This resulted in the games loading nearly instantly since memory was far faster than any IDE HDD back then. Due to this, I did a test with LoE and thought I would share the results. First, my system!

Core i7-6950X
128Gb Quad-Channel DDR4
RTX 2080 Ti 11GB
Creative Ae5
1TB WD Blue HDD (SATA3) for OS (Win 7 Pro 64bit)
4 x 1TB WD Black HDD (SATA3) in RAID10 for normal games like LoE
1TB M.2 NVME for big games like Ark Survival Evolved

LoE resides on my BTRFS RAID10 array and has great loading times normally, but I decided to take 8GiB (8192MiB) of my RAM and make a RAM disk. I then copied LoE into the disk, which was formatted as NTFS, and my goodness the loading screens are non-existent. I used ImDisk to create the RAM disk. It is free to use and works in about everything since XP. If you have 12GB or more memory in your computer, this is a way for even the slowest PC to really perform better.

LoE uses over 5GB of storage, so you would need a 6GiB RAM disk minimum. After you create the disk, just copy LoE over and run the file there. Hope it helps somebody out who may not be able to afford a fancy new M.2 stick but has some RAM to spare!

6GiB = 6144MB
8GiB = 8192MB

The RAM disk:
https://imgur.com/gallery/Sa513bT