Speed up cave transitions

[Uncrushed]

I'm sure you've heard this a million times.  I can see that these transitions are single-CPU intensive, so can buy better hardware that cuts this time in half.  I don't know what it's doing to judge how much can be done in parallel, or cached, or compressed, or whatever, but it would be great to do one or more of those things.  I know I'm a suggestion machine, but this might be my #1 priority.

[goodguythatguy]

This was actually improved in an update maybe 1 or 2 years ago. It used to take even longer. I don't know if this can or will be improved again, but it's something Klei has focused on improving, so that's a good thing. 

[Uncrushed]

Possible solution: Put the caves and the surface world on the same level, just as you did with the ruins and the caves.  If your Binary Space Partitioning algorithm isn't good enough to handle that, put an if/then in front of it: if on the left side of the map, don't calculate the right, and vice-versa.  Ditto when to show the map to characters.  Would you still run separate servers to calculate and update off-screen activity separately?

[bloopah]

@Uncrushed I don't think it's gonna work like that. How would the game know to keep one part of the shard in complete darkness during the day while also keeping the other part bright? How would it know where to generate the Caves without having to rewrite the entire code for the generation of the Caves? Sure, you could code it, but at a huge cost of manpower, processing time and therefore... loading times, due to the game having to recognize where the player is at all times.

Optimizing the present code would be easier and more cost-efficient, rather than writing new code the equivelant of a hamster tube maze.