Horde3D

Does each material cause the shaders associated with it to be compiled even if they have already been compiled for a different material?

No, shaders are separated resources that are just referenced by materials.

Ok, thanks. Our reason for asking is that we recently added HUD UI and menu graphics and it seems to have increased our load times by around 30 seconds taking us up to between 50 and 70 seconds load time between each level. The game is due to go on display on Sunday so this load time is not really ideal when we're trying to hold the attention of young children which is why we're concerned.

It's a bit of a stab in the dark but does anyone have any ideas why we may be getting this increase in load time when we seem to have added very little?

Please check the engine log to see what is eating up most of the time. I know there is a bug in some older NVidia drivers where shader linking suddenly takes much longer than expected (20 seconds per shader or something like that).

We got it fixed

There was a slight mis-communication over texture sizes, that was all
We didn't notice this as the actual file sizes were quite small, and wasn't till we opened the images up ourselves that we noticed the resolutions of them, hehe