2DA Caching for Script Lookups

(Rich Taylor gives us a peek into 2da caching)

Our lead scripter, Charles Mead, informed me that we did not cache 2DAs that were being queried by script. This resulted in ridiculous seek time for looping over large 2DAs.

He indicated that Bioware had fixed that in the 1.64 code, so I referenced the 1.67 code drop that we had and saw that they had implemented a system whereby the most recent 2 2DAs that were queried were cached.

I took that a bit further and made it so that the # of 2DAs that are cached is a changeable value. The default is 10, but in nwnplayer.ini, an entry of:

2DA Cache Size=

under

[server Options]

will allow users to modify that cache size to suit their needs. There should never be a need to go lower than 10, but someone may want to increase the cache if they are querying a ton of different 2DAs quite frequently.

In addition, the function:

Clear2DACache() can be used to purge the in-memory 2DA cache. This will force the 2DA to be loaded from disk the next time a script tries to look anything up from it.

This change is scheduled for 1.05.