Precaching
Ness_FrogKing
Join Date: 2012-10-18 Member: 162628Members
Join Date: 2012-10-18 Member: 162628Members
What precisely does precaching during the loading screen do... and why does it take so long? Before 222/223 I used to be one of the first ones in the RR when the map changed. Now the game has already started by the time I finish loading, and precaching seems to be the culprit.
Comments
I tried disabling my AV as well, since I have it set to be paranoid and scan everything, but that didn't help much, if at all, either. Thanks for the suggestions though :-)
How fast is your HDD/RAM too?
Then it would need to cache textures for every map, which would be incredibly inefficient.
If I don't use texture steaming the game takes forever to load, and if I do, most of the hud elements are transparent for most of the game. I've been playing matches with no crosshair, marine map, ammo clips remaining, and my minimap doesn't load, I also can't see most of the buy menus.
Considering the game loads much faster on your second game than the first, clearly textures and resources are shared enough that some sort of pre-loading could take place.
All I'm saying is that the initial load is seriously long. We live in an age where most games load in seconds not minutes.
No, of course not. The textures, sounds and models for every player class and structure type covers a huge chunk of the loading that needs to be done. You can just start precaching that as soon as you're into the game.
That's right. And even on an SSD it's quite lengthy; much of the stuff it does when joining a server/loading resources is not pure harddrive reads. It starts by negotiating with the server, usually takes some seconds, then there is the appearance of doing nothing for 20 seconds or so(it is probably "compiling" the level, triangulating the polygons, splitting the level into chunks, creating data structures for occlusion culling etc.). Then it gets to loading actual assets; this is pretty quick on an SSD, but it is much slower than the actual read speed of an SSD(Even reading 4k files a typical SSD does ~10-20 MB/s, weighted by size most reading is from larger files, so a typical SSD would do maybe 100-200 MB/s ). It's clearly doing some kind of processing on files that takes longer than raw reads.
<!--quoteo(post=1999046:date=Oct 28 2012, 02:11 PM:name=TimMc)--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE (TimMc @ Oct 28 2012, 02:11 PM) <a href="index.php?act=findpost&pid=1999046"><{POST_SNAPBACK}></a></div><div class='quotemain'><!--quotec-->We live in an age where most games load in seconds not minutes.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
The big flaw is obvious and well known. NS2 is comprised of 8000 files and harddrives take 10-20 MS to move the needle to where it needs to go; more if the drive is in "quiet seek" mode. You could easily be spending a minute in just seek time. The way almost every game since wolfenstein 3D has solved this is by packing files toghether into some kind of lump of files associated files so that as many files can be read sequentially without seeking as is possible. E.g. .bsp, .wad, .pak, .ncf, .gcf...
If you don't defrag your HDD you introduce a lot of unnecessary seeks.
NS2 does a little of this(e.g. all the fade's sounds are in alien_4.fsb, rather than having 10 audio files for fade footsteps, 10 attack sounds, 5 pain sounds etc.).
Perhaps they need to introduce packs such as this then. Separate by resource type and if the file is validated against server version on load, and then give us a packing-unpacking tool.
As nice as it is to have all the game files just sitting there, its causing problems. Also having packs such as .bsp allows for hierarchies of which file gets loaded - so users can install mods without overwriting the original games files. I'm not sure how mod installation works with NS2, I've only joined modded servers but never modded my actual game.
I'd really hate having to pack files into some arbitrary format for the game when modding.
<!--quoteo(post=1999103:date=Oct 28 2012, 04:54 PM:name=Dghelneshi)--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE (Dghelneshi @ Oct 28 2012, 04:54 PM) <a href="index.php?act=findpost&pid=1999103"><{POST_SNAPBACK}></a></div><div class='quotemain'><!--quotec-->I'd really hate having to pack files into some arbitrary format for the game when modding.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Wouldn't necessarily be necessary. I think Morrowind, for example, had the base files in a pack, but mod files could be left loose in a directory and would overwrite the base files.
In-game the performance is "ok"... With everything on low I get 20-30fps usually but it's not a steady framerate. I know the problem is my graphics card, but my GTX 260 has stability issues. With the 260, I get roughly 50 FPS with most settings on high... I don't remember what the load time was with that card, though.
Now it takes 6 or more seconds at least and textures appear while in the game.
There must have been some significant changes to the underlying system to make it so much slower/worse.
If I don't use texture steaming the game takes forever to load, and if I do, most of the hud elements are transparent for most of the game. I've been playing matches with no crosshair, marine map, ammo clips remaining, and my minimap doesn't load, I also can't see most of the buy menus.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Screenshots, please! (f12)
TY
edit: and specs / driver info