[d1x 0.58.1 windows 8] Saved game loading times are increasing as you play

[miv]

1. run d1x fullscreen. No addons, no jukebox, just original Descent 1 data.
   
2. load saved game:  "PREPARE FOR DESCENT..." screen is visible for 5 seconds
   
3. play the game, save and load your position
   
4. after some 15 minutes of playing and 10 loaded saved games, "PREPARE FOR DESCENT..." screen is always displayed for 10 seconds
   
5. after some 80 minutes of playing and 40 loaded saved games, "PREPARE FOR DESCENT..." screen is always displayed for 20 seconds
   
6. game loading times never decrease, only increase
   
7. if you press Alt+Tab, screen goes BLACK for few seconds – the longer loading times were, the more seconds is black screen visible. Then d1x switches back to standard OS desktop. After switching from desktop back to fullscreen d1x, next saved game loading time is 5 secods again. (Now go to Step 2.)
   

• To me this looks like some resource consolidation issue, resources are consolidated (garbage collected?) in step 7 and then everything goes to normal.
  
• Before I learned Alt+Tab trick (step 7), my loading times were reaching up to 35 seconds after some time of playing.
  
• On some levels, this is less visible, on some more. If I remember correcly, I've found that something is wrong when I reached levels 8 and 9.
  
• Running game with "-notitles" parameter has no effect.
  
• No CD music is set up, I'm actually keeping music volume at 0.
  
• Machine has Intel i7, 8GB RAM, SSD drive. D1x is usually running at 140-200 FPS @ 1600×900 with dashboard OFF. I don't see any obvious hardware bottlenecks.
  

[Kp]

The "Prepare for Descent" screen is very brief for me, both on first load and after repeated loads.  Does windowed mode behave differently?  What graphics drivers are you using?  Can you reproduce the problem on any other operating system?

[zico]

The "Prepare for Descent" messageox has a timer delay of one second in the release build. So this is something we may check out as well, kp.

[miv]

The issue got resolved without any actions from my side. It still appears in about 5% of launches of the EXE. In rest 95% the issue is not appearing.  Anyway, Alt+Tab workaround (see point 7 in original post) suffices. Perhaps we can close this one for now.