[Vince]

One million objects, wow. I think there are only about 50k objects in the original game (only 20k unique object models). If we assume that each line in the file is about 0.2 kilobyte then everything together is about 200 megabytes in size. That's a lot. It's going to take ages regardless.

I think your best bet is an XML parser. Most high-level languages will have one built in.