Fastest Way to Read in Data

Binary files are much faster than deserializing text files, in most cases just for the simple fact that they are usually smaller because you're specifying what you really need for each piece of data.

Checkout BinaryReader and BinaryWriter.

Creating a format where you can write just bits instead of bytes will make your data a lot smaller as well and therefore load faster. As an example, one generic way of thinking about that is reading and writing 7 bit encoded ints so small numbers take up less space than large ones.

 private BinaryWriter m_writer;
 private BinaryReader m_reader;
 
 protected void write7BitEncodedInt(int value) 
 {
 
     // Write out an int 7 bits at a time. The high bit of the byte,
     // when on, tells reader to continue reading more bytes.
     uint v = (uint) value; // support negative numbers
     while (v >= 0x80) 
     {
         m_writer.Write((byte) (v | 0x80));
         v >>= 7;
     }
     
     m_writer.Write((byte)v);
     
 }
 
 protected int read7BitEncodedInt() 
 {
 
     // Read out an int 7 bits at a time. The high bit
     // of the byte when on means to continue reading more bytes.
     int count = 0;
     int shift = 0;
     byte b;
     do 
     {
         b = m_reader.ReadByte();
         count |= (b & 0x7F) << shift;
         shift += 7;
     } while ((b & 0x80) != 0);
     
     return count;
     
 }

You don't have to take it that far though ... just reading and writing ints, bools, etc with the BinaryReader and BinaryWriter will get you loads of performance improvement over parsing text.