Loadtimes!

This topic has been posted before, but no satifactory answer was given.

Every time I start up empires, the first map to load take ENORMOUS amounts of time. I timed it in fact, 7 minutes 11 seconds 82 nanoseconds. At map change, it takes a regular amount of time to load. The loading takes longest at retrieving server info and sending client info.

Anyone have a solution to this? Is it going to be fixed in 1.06?

This bug is major to me. It is a strong detterent to playing Empires, because if the game crashes, WHOOHOO! Another 7 minute wait! I could be playing another game, maybe even halfway through a round in that time.

 

i suggest, sata hard drives... its doesnt take me but about 10+ seconds

 

Sata, what's that?

 

having one doesnt mean shit since mine is just as good as my IDE

 

My load time is like 5 minutes with high details and 1-2 minutes with low/med details. I didn't defragment my disk lately.

Valve is storing their games in one big .gcf files because it helps to keep it unfragmented (FS tries to store one file in one piece). But if you have many files hanging around it (game data as a whole) gets quickly fragmented. Game updates make it even more fragmented. So in the end you can get huge load times.

 

Serial ATA:
I will spare myself from having to type some stuff out when a man could simply go to the all knowing god...the wiki ^_^
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SATA

Ditch the IDE and get newer technology, trust me you will love it

Load times for me are about 3 minutes tops and ONLY for the fact that I have to keep redownloading these damn /manimod/ files...on ANY server I go to.

 

Afaik Empires has long loading times because of the amount of textures being loaded.

Only thing people can do atm. is reduce texture usage or buy faster disks.

Additionally from an engine perspective the general map-design is very taxing. Pretty much everything 10000 units in front of you has to be loaded and rendered.

I get load times of about 0.5 - 2 Minutes.
Heighest detail textures, no shaders at all.
Using one IDE 100 disk.

~60-80% of the loading times are specular and normal maps.

The problem get's worse with low and slow RAM and VRAM (<1GB RAM; <256MB VRAM), making highest resolution textures almost impossible to use performance wise.

 

I wonder if there'd be a way to hardcode it to use your RAM as a hard disk on the server motherboards where 32GB's and up are supported

Just think that EVERYTHING needed for that game was already preloaded into RAM :D

And on a secondary note, people shouldnt be playing mods for HL2 if their computer wont even meet the min specs for HL2 itself

 

Windows 98/ME/2000/XP
1,2GHz CPU
256MB RAM
DX7 Graphics Card
4,5GB HD space
DVD-Rom drive

Hard to not meet these specs, dude ;P

But i know you're not really serious
The problem is the detail .. nobody wants to play on all minimum settings.
And oh well.. HL2 is like the GOD of scalability.

 

My problem is that the FIRST map I load takes 7 minutes, all the others take around 45 seconds - 1 minute.

EDIT: I've got twice the minimum system specs (Kinda)

Windows XP
2.4GHz CPU
512MB RAM
DX 9 Video card
160GB HD space
DVD-rom drive

 

Loading maps don't seem to be the problem. Joing servers seem to take forever =/

 

Yeah that's what I mean, joining/loading the first server/map takes ENORMOUS amounts of time.

It's really weird when I notice that none of my other source games do this. The first join takes as long as the second join (Which is short).

Well, I don't really thinking it's the joining of the server because some people have joined one server, got on, then left the server, and got on another server and have their loadtimes be short.

I heard something about cacheing the sound files fixed it somewhat...

 

My loadtimes aren't nearly as bad as yours comrade.

2.66GHZ
512MB RAM
DX8 videocard

I don't know what it could be.

OH and phaser8, I recognized only the guitar player from Rammstein. I had no idea that those were the rest of the band members I think in another thread I asked if the one second from left was the guitar player from Rammstein........DOH

 

Wow, I have almost the same specs as Comm Regulus. I have a 2.27ghz Intel Celeron, and a FX5200, with 300+gb of storage... Also, does anyone know why my FX5200 seems to over heat often?

-Sheepe
Getting 1gb ram soon! YAY!

 

My load times are 3-4 minutes

120GB SATA
AMD64 3200
1gb ram
nvidia 6800gt

 

Are you talking about the first map, or all the maps? Because, what seems odd to me is that all the other loadings are only about 1 minute besides for the first one.

I wish a dev could explain to us why this happens

 

even i can explain

the first map the map, all the buildings, all the textures and models need to be loaded, the next map they are allready loaded exept for some (occasionally) new textures, and the new map


you see?

 

what sata drives do you guys have?

i have a 3.2 gig hrtz something.. i dont know what it is.. im lame at computers and only just remembered not to say a 3.2 pentium.. since what the hell, pentium is a processor, duh me!!!

 

I have the same thing... It takes 3 minutes to join/whatever the first time, but after that the map change load takes about 30 seconds.

 

Aren't they all cached? If not, it might help to do so... Not sure if cache is the right word but in garry's mod, when you put new models in, it loads them the next time you load the game and after that, they don't need to be "loaded" again =o