There's no need to permanently hold buildup animations in RAM as they are not required all of the time - they are only used in special circumstances (i.e. when you build or sell a structure). In other words, because the game only requires them by exception rather than continuously it simply loads them into RAM when needed and gets rid of them again when they have been used. By contrast, animations that are needed frequently/continually or need to be looped to play for example need to reside in RAM permanently.
DemandLoadBuildup=true loads the buildup animation into RAM, FreeBuildup=true clears it from RAM again when its done. Without these tags, the buildup animation would be loaded into RAM and left there permanently as this is what the game does by default, thus wasting memory space.
With modern systems that have lots of RAM, high dedicated graphics card memory and good memory management processes this isnt strictly needed but is good practice and keeps the game flowing quickly without cluttering up RAM and wasting processor cycles, but when TS was wrote it was a good thing to do - like any application, the game has to 'agree' how much RAM it requires with the Operating System and how to use that, and Win98 was notoriously bad at interfering with that process.
It's also a good idea to apply the same principle to infrequent animations/graphics entries in (FS)ART.INI by using the DemandLoad=true and FreeAfterPlaying=true tags that work in the same way. QUICK_EDIT
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demandloadbuildup & freebuildup
