Forums Feature Suggestions GIF handling speed

The /drawpic command is a basic image loading command that loads and displays images in windows. It most definitely was not designed to animate images at web browser-level speeds :-) If I remember rightly, the Icon and GIF support was originally added to allow scripters to animate small images in games. It does have a small built-in cache that was designed to allow quick display of previously loaded images but a decision was made long ago not to apply the cache to icons or gifs, since these can have large numbers of frames that fill/overwrite the small cache very quickly. Let's see - this is going to require a bit of time-travel, like your other question about the zero-indexing - the cache cannot be extended because it is bitmap based, which used up memory quickly. Interestingly, looking at the code, it looks like memory was such an issue when /drawpic was added that if there is a memory allocation error during image loading, it will empty the cache one bitmap at a time and retry loading the image again until the cache is completely emptied, before giving up. /drawpic's implementation is a combination of so many design decisions made over decades of adding and extending different features at different times. To implement what you are requesting would actually require a complete rewrite of almost every aspect of /drawpic, including the way GIFs are loaded, the way images are cached, and so on. There are no plans to do this. If you need to display images more quickly, your script will need to cache them itself.