Does a lot of code or the size of the game, mean a long initial load time? I would assume it does on the one hand and not on the other and I have no way of checking that I am aware of, until my game is officially published. I just know my game seems to be taking longer and longer to get into the "editing" part of it.

A part of me wants to say it wont be noticeably long, because the person is only playing the game one "page" or "room" at a time. While I am editing I have to have the full game up to view all code/scripts/rooms/objects, etc at once. But then again I assume the player has all that too, but is only seeing it room by room, because the game still needed to be downloaded in full.

Does anyone know? I do not play a lot of IF games and the ones I have seemed to of been small in nature, but I have only played a handful. I do not want players to have to sit there waiting for the game to load and yet I know my game(s) will be rather large in size. Thank you.

The loading time for the game will depend on the size, because the player (the program which is used to play games) needs to parse the XML tree on startup, load it into memory, and index all the objects so that it can look them up when needed wither by name or by parent.

However, an XML parser is not a particularly complex piece of code. On a modern computer, I wouldn't expect you to notice any delay unless your game has thousands of objects. Where people have noticed odd lag in games, the cases I have seen appear to be caused by the amount of text on the screen. After about a thousand output sections, addText starts to have a small delay each time it is called.