Based on the changelog for 0.5.20a, it'll make the game take more time to load images. If the only change was to load them as 100x100 then, before:
- Load image
Now:
- Load image
- Resize to 100x100
Workload has been increased, so it's doing more for every image it loads. It however will use less memory so on systems with less memory that before would crash, it will at least finish, it'll just take forever.
I wrote a mod that stops the loading until they appear in the scroll list. Maybe they attempted to do something similar in 0.5.20a? No mention of it in the log and I haven't looked at the source yet. My delayed load mod will probably need updating as it replaces how that loading works. It might just work with 0.5.20a though, and basically rip out the 100x100 resizing and instead have it load on-demand.