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On the other hand, during playing in one and only one world at a time, you gain the fabulous digital sound tracks streaming directly from DVD into your sound card and on to your valuable ears. Similarly, video-clips may be played as native video formats directly into hardware equipped for playback of MP3 formats or whatever the standard may be.


OK, you are an expert in this field as you say. But experts seem to lose contact to the "real" world (believe me, I am an expert in that!) and tend to forget what was before they created some cool tings.

Means: Haven't you ever played a game from CD by now? Let alone the loading time at the beginning of a "level", especially the sound issue is very annoying. Why annoying you will ask? I don't know what a real expert can do with CDs/DVDs, but my experience with games shows me that there is a significant amount of loading whenever music and sound is involved. DivDiv has different music tracks for different areas for example... RRR might have the same. Then maybe different music tracks for different fight situations... not to forget the speech system... and all of that loading from DVD? I still doubt the fact that this might get as fast as from HDD - and (which is almost more important for me) the drive would have to work all the time. Now, do you know how annoying such a working DVD-Rom can be?
Fact is that personally, I always disabled music whenever it was directly from CD. And I'd rather chop my hands off than doing this with DivDiv's or RRR's music (which will be as good as in DivDiv I hope).


Did I ever say that CDs or DVDs better a HD on access time! Quote me.
The problem in this discussion is that you all seem to be arguing on the wrong issue.
I am one step ahead on solution.
If LOADING time is a problem then we have to get rid of LOADING during RUNTIME.
A good programmer must make the decision of WHAT is necessary and needed versus unnecessary from a time sequence criterion point of view.
Within a world, the graphic ELEMENTS are not that much of a huge chunk of data before assembly.
With fast processors, and Swen announced Pentium III 445 MHZ as a minimal requirement and 128 MB RAM. I think that Larian Studios have already calculated the requirements. Add to that the hint on demanding DX 9.0 compliancy for direct 3D and bingo it is all clear.
So basically speaking they shall LOAD the graphic elements of a world into RAM then assemble the world by executing the code. As for sound and music streams they may be channelled through DMA advanced architecture from DVD or CD to the sound card directly under code instructions without any LOADING
If I am still not clear on this topic please let me know the point on which you may wish for me to expand on.

Kind regards.