Load time troubleshooting

[specterdragon]

Hey all,

I've just discovered Horizons last weekend and so far, I'm really enjoying it! (Thanks to those that have helped me.) At any rate, the only real issue I have is with the time it takes to load the game and travel through gates. I easily spend up to 10 minutes (no exaduation) waiting on the game to load. I get the same timing when I recall... so death really does have its downside for me.

(As a potentially related side note, when I'm running the game, I cant ALT TAB out of it and work with other programs at the same time. The game completely takes over all resources of the computer.)

My rig looks like this:
ATI Radion 8600 w/ 256MB VRAM (not shared with RAM)
1.25 GB PC2700 RAM (yes that's a "G")
2.4 GHtz Intell processor

Does anyone have any tips for increasing my load time? I'd hate to have this drive me crazy when I want to play!!

[mindlor]

ok couple of things.....

the vid card is very dated but should not result in these delays.....

lets focus on your hard disk...have you defragged it lately?

Assuming all is well with your rig..... there is a setting called maximum view distance under options....tinker with this and see if it helps.....

also, how are you connecting to the internet?

all all of your drivers current?

[specterdragon]

Check and recheck... Even with the vid card, it shouldn't be THAT bad! LOL
But all the drivers are up-to-date and although I haven't defragged in awhile, there's more then enough room on the HD to handle any temp files (though I may let it run through the 100+GB on the drive tomorrow just to be sure).

I did extend the view distance, butthe load timewas like this even before I did.

I did change one other setting in the config file for sharing the shaders... not sure if that helped any or not. Nothing noticible if it did.

[specterdragon]

(looks like my edit to the previous post didnt take)

Aparently my finger slipped! LOL... It's a Radeon 9600 not 8600!!

[mindlor]

9600 is good.

ok so first defrag......

next check the world cache setting under options. there is an option for clear world cache on exit I believe...you dont want to clear world cache each time you log off......

one thing to do is to go in to the game directory and look under the directory for your character....there you should see a subdir called world cache or something like that....

delete the entire directory and then log into the game....

places will load slower the first time but each subsequent trip should be better as the objects are then cached.....

also if any other memory hog programs are running in background try to get rid of as many as you can.....

keep us posted on progress

[specterdragon]

Looking at the character folder, I do not see anything in there for the cashe, and my option setting was to NOT purge the cashe (by default I think... either that or I changed it shortly after I started the game and do not remember it)

Whatever I was tweaking around with, the teleport gate time is faster (a minute or two) but recall and initial game load (and of course death/recall) are still pretty bad. *shrug*

So far, not much luck. I still havent done he defrag (I'll eb setting that up to run overnight). So, here's to hoping!

[specterdragon]

mindlor
keep us posted on progress

Well, I think I found it. I discovered that my AGP settings were changed long ago for a galaxy far far away because it increased my runtime performance for another game. So I turned on the AGP settings again, set it to 8xAGP with all the fast read/write settings on and suddenly my load times ar 50-75% faster and my recal time has been as short as 30 seconds (from 5 minutes, that aint bad).