PreloadGenStart

[WaterKnight]

Since I am not so sure if this is known and I still do not know the purpose of all Preload natives:

I always thought files created by PreloadGenEnd spat some random number in their last PreloadEnd line because they were quite arbitrary. It's simply that PreloadGenStart marks the starting point of some async timer that runs across different games and even considers the gap of wc3 being closed.

Therefore you can use this to benchmark any action in a map: call PreloadGenStart, do your stuff, call PreloadGenEnd.

though I know of no possibility to retrieve the value from inside wc3.

 

[PurgeandFire]

That's interesting.

Although, is the number returned relatively consistent each time? i.e. if you run PreloadGenStart on the same script for the same map 3 times, will the file show similar results? I'm just wondering whether this will be suitable as a benchmarking tool. Hopefully it doesn't vary too much.

 

[WaterKnight]

For me, it was quite consistent. It's not that the number is imprecise (although it shows only one decimal place), but the real execution time might not always be exactly the same. Anyway, of course you should repeat the action a big multiple of times in order to obtain some significance.

 

[WaterKnight]

Ever wondered what file paths wc3 reads from on map init? Call PreloadGenStart(), restart the map without closing wc3, then call PreloadGenEnd(<path>) and open the generated file.