Yesterday, I''ve play to Shenmue on Dreamcast. I was impressed by the number of details, textures and the speed of the loading (Dreamcast have only a 8x cdrom). Actually, I''m writing an aeroplane game and I need to load a lot of data (heightmap, colormap, textures, object, mp3, wav sound...): approximately 16mo for each level. What is the best way to speed up loading time? What is the fastest image format? How do I have to use archive (zip? rar? ace?) ?

I''m pretty sure that by "fastest way to load" you mean "fastest way to get to the rendering." For this, streaming is fastest, IE load only a bit at a time, and continue doing so until all you need loaded is loaded. Start by loading only what will be visible, then continually load more while rendering what''s visible. i think.

Good idea, but not applicable to my engine (the game world is not so big).

Well, then you''re kinda stuck. You could investigate generate the data on the fly, with fractals or something, but if you need to load it all from the disk then that''s as fast as it''ll get.