DashLoader (Unofficial Continuation)

DashLoader (Unofficial Continuation)

An unofficial continuation of DashLoader by AlphaQ. The original stopped at Minecraft 1.21.4; everything for 1.21.5 and newer lives here. Same LGPL-3.0-only licence, full credit to AlphaQ and all contributors.

What it does

Tired of watching the loading screen while every block model, texture, sprite and font glyph gets parsed from scratch, on every single launch?

DashLoader is a client-side cache for the resource reload. The first time you start the game it does its normal work and writes the result to disk. Every launch after that reads the cache back instead, so the world loads dramatically faster. The effect is largest on big modpacks.

No gameplay changes. No server-side component. Nothing to configure: install it, launch twice, and judge the difference yourself.

How it works

1. First launch - DashLoader lets the normal resource reload happen and writes the result into dashloader-cache next to your instance. A toast tells you when it is done.
2. Every launch after that - the cached models, sprites and fonts are read back instead of being baked again.
3. It invalidates itself - the cache key is derived from your mod list, the mod versions and your enabled resource packs, so adding a mod or swapping a pack produces a fresh cache on its own.

Press F3 + T to force a rebuild while you are iterating on assets.

Supported versions

Every Minecraft version has its own branch in the repository, so pick the download that matches your version exactly. A jar built for one Minecraft version will not load on another.

Things worth knowing

• The first launch is the slow one. That is when the cache gets written. Every launch after that is the fast one.
• Uncacheable assets are skipped, not fatal. A mod asset that cannot be represented is logged with a warning and then loaded the vanilla way, so one broken mod does not take the whole cache down with it.
• GPU-side caches are gone on 1.21.5 and newer. Mojang removed the hooks DashLoader used for stitched atlases and shader caches there. Model, sprite, font and translation caching still applies.
• The Forge 1.16.5 build is a skeleton. It shares no code with the other ports and does not include any of the fixes listed below. Use Fabric or NeoForge on 1.21.4 or newer.

What 5.1.0-beta.9.7 and 5.1.0-beta.9.8 fixed

• A native memory leak in the serialization path. The per-fragment buffer was a direct buffer that nothing ever freed, and because all fragments are written in parallel the peak was the entire uncompressed cache. On a large modpack this could surface as OutOfMemoryError: Direct buffer memory while the Java heap still looked empty.
• A cache write that could be interrupted. The save ran on a non-daemon thread and wrote straight into the cache directory, so closing the game mid-save left a half written directory that the next launch would try and fail to load. The cache is now written to a temp directory and moved into place, and the thread is a daemon.
• A progress bar that could stall below 100%. The fragment counter was updated from several threads at once, so increments were lost.
• A data race in the cache publication. The load status could become visible before the payload it refers to, which made a module silently fall back to vanilla instead of using the cache.
• Every quad of a block model being registered twice during cache creation, and a quadratic scan over block states.
• The cache toast sometimes vanishing instantly instead of showing its result.

Reporting issues

Please include your Minecraft version, your loader, the full mod list, and the relevant part of latest.log. If the cache is involved, the dashloader-cache folder from your instance is worth attaching too.

Repository: https://github.com/Malionaro/DashLoader