Game Loading Troubles

[Kealla]

I love this game, but unless someone can help me with my game loading troubles, I may have to say farewell to Istaria.

I have a 6 year old XP machine. So this is not a Vista issue. The game takes at least 10 minutes to start, and forget about porting between towns, that takes just as long and sometimes longer. I have 1 GB of RAM and a 256 MB Nvidia 6800 GS video card. My 80 GB hard drive is only 50% full. I tried setting the preference /setpref UseLoadingScreen false. That worked for a while, but then graphic loading became a problem with only partial world loading and a lot of end of world type of issues.

One more thing, both my firewall and antivirus are turned off when this is happening.

I welcome any and all suggestions as I really don't want to pack my trunks and leave Istaria.

Thanks

[Steelclaw]

When was the last time you defragged your hard disk?

[Eisdrache]

Do you have a soundblaster audigy? There is an issue with a new driver. I had the same problems that you describe (on a fully new installed partition and the same machine i played HZ for years without problems).

See:

http://community.istaria.com/forum/s...ad.php?t=14150

[Creme]

You could check your virtual memory settings. I'm sure someone here can advise you on what size you should set it to.

Also, I did have some loading problems that were solved by deleting my graphics pref file and downloading a new one.

I think also maybe deleting your world cache could help, it will be slow initially as you port to different locations and have to download them again, but you could have a bad file somewhere.

[Kealla]

When was the last time you defragged your hard disk?

Hard disk is defragged, I run Diskeeper in the background when I am not gaming.

[Kealla]

Do you have a soundblaster audigy? There is an issue with a new driver. I had the same problems that you describe (on a fully new installed partition and the same machine i played HZ for years without problems).

See:

http://community.istaria.com/forum/s...ad.php?t=14150

I was able to play the game around Xmas time, although slow, without much difficulty. I do have an Audigy 1 card, but haven't messed with the drivers in over a year. I will check them and see if I can go to an earlier version.

[Kealla]

You could check your virtual memory settings. I'm sure someone here can advise you on what size you should set it to.

Also, I did have some loading problems that were solved by deleting my graphics pref file and downloading a new one.

I think also maybe deleting your world cache could help, it will be slow initially as you port to different locations and have to download them again, but you could have a bad file somewhere.

I will try deleting the world cache tonight when I try again.

[gopher65]

I will try deleting the world cache tonight when I try again.

If you read my post in the other thread on this subject in the forums, you'll see that I had the same problems, and I had that same soundcard. I don't know if this is your problem or not, but try disabling the soundcard temporarily (it won't hurt it). Go to (crud... I don't quite remember the path in XP... hehe) Control Panel, System, Device Manager, (or something very similar to that) and find your soundcard on the list. Double click it and select "Disable this device" from the droplist at the bottom of the window that pops up. You may have to restart (sometimes it asks you to, sometimes it doesn't).

Then run HZ. If your soundcard is screwed up your problem will go away. If your problems with the game are still there, then the soundcard isn't your problem. Follow the above steps and re-enable your soundcard.

[Kealla]

Thank you all ever so much for your help. Upon checking my Creative drivers for my Audigy 1 card I discovered that I had the 2006 drivers. I must have updated them in the past year. I then used the function to roll back the drivers to the prior version. This took the drivers back to the 2004 versions. Guess what, HZ now runs fantastically prior to before. About a 2 minute initial game load time and about 30 seconds at the most to port or recall. It is amazing to think that a sound driver could cause so many problems.

I tried to remember why I updated the drivers in the first place. Must have been one of those "get all the latest drivers" moment. I am even more of the mind now "if it isn't broken, don't fix it".

I also tested the other games I play on this machine and they are no worse for wear having the driver rolled back.

Again, thanks to you all for your time and input. This is one happy gamer.

[gopher65]

I must have updated them in the past year. I then used the function to roll back the drivers to the prior version. This took the drivers back to the 2004 versions. Guess what, HZ now runs fantastically prior to before. About a 2 minute initial game load time and about 30 seconds at the most to port or recall. It is amazing to think that a sound driver could cause so many problems.

Sweet. I will never buy another creative soundcard again.

[Spirit]

Sweet. I will never buy another creative soundcard again.

I still maintain that personally I never had one problem with Horizons and my audigy 2. It could have been one particular driver release... perhaps you should try the latest one?

I'm using a Xi-fi right now with no issues... and my ex-laptop had a pcmcia laptop audigy 2 zs. I've never had this problem.

Barring any software issues, I must say that I'm always blown away by sound kicked out by creative stuff. I used to have a Terratec pci Xlerate card; that had great midi and pretty good game sound. Ac-97... nuff said... could be anything from crap to pretty good depending on the exact implementation. Laptop has a Realtek HD Audio. It's actually very good, but it doesn't have Eax ... most games support it, and no one has really cloned it... until someone does I can't see me ditching Creative personally. I know that, if all else fails, I can plug the nastiest head phones into it and get pretty good sound direct from the card.

Rakku

[Tzael]

Kealla please see this post for a solution that doesn't involve disabling your audio hardware!

http://community.istaria.com/forum/s...266#post194266