Old backer...first time player :) Load times?

Discussion in 'General Discussion' started by Rerednaw, May 13, 2019.

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  1. Rerednaw

    Rerednaw Avatar

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    Well forgot I had this in my collection so finally installed it. Had a few hiccups with installation and the character creator (visuals)....just went through the first tutorial (Anais) and already with the intro video I am strolling down Ultima memory lane. That said I was wondering.

    How may I speed up loading times?

    If I play offline the speed goes up tremendously.

    But when online even when hopping from the moon to the first town (solace bridge) the game won’t utilize local assets but seems to download it all.

    I am running an older i7 quad core Win 8.1 computer 256 SSD 16 GB Ram nVidia 860 4GB. Most other games (mmos, fps) run fine...but the map loading on this game is reminding me of switching floppies :)

    20 minutes as of this post and still transitioning to Solace bridge.
    If offline it loads in about 30 seconds...anyway to change the setting so the game will load common assets via local drive?

    Edit: Internet is 100 Meg latency ~10-30 ms. Good enough for Destiny 2, Battlefield, WoW, etc...
     
    Last edited: May 13, 2019
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  2. Vladamir Begemot

    Vladamir Begemot Avatar

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    You've got some other problem if it's taking 20 minutes.

    I've got an ssd (highly recommended for everything, not just Shroud) and my load times are about 15 seconds, across the board. The first load into the game might be a bit longer.

    But even if you have an old school HD, 20 minutes means you've crashed or something.
     
  3. Scanphor

    Scanphor Avatar

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    Yeah not sure what's going on but most scenes should be loading in <15 secs with those specs and the game on an SSD
     
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  4. Titania Xylia

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    After you have loaded Solace Bridge once, have you tried leaving and reloading it again? I know there is some first-time only shader stuff that gets compiled as an extra step that might be hurting you.

    Also, are you sure you didn't crash? Load times were pretty awful at one point, but I never thought any load took more than a couple of minutes. Vlad is right. Today it's a much different story with relatively very fast load times
     
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  5. jschoice

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    One thing to consider with this game compared to other MMO and FPS is every item in game is a single asset so in large scenes such as the outskirts and cities you are loading 10,000+ individual deco items and dynamic lighting sources. The first time loading the scenes are the slowest but never 20 mins long. I am at about 10 secs but I have 32 gigs of RAM and a 1080 video card. I have a lower machine closer to your specs and scenes load about 15 to 20 seconds
     
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  6. Alleine Dragonfyre

    Alleine Dragonfyre Avatar

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    1. How much free space is on your hard drive?
    2. Are you running platter drives or SSD?
    3. How much RAM do you have? How much Video RAM?
    4. What kind of processor do you have?
    5. What is your connection speed to the Internet?
    6. Where are you physically located in the world?
    7. How much system resources (RAM, CPU etc) is taken without running SoTA?
    Actually, please post your DXDiag here while you're at it. We need more info to help you.
     
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  7. Browncoat Jayson

    Browncoat Jayson Legend of the Hearth

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    The map is horribly inefficient; I can crash the game easily trying to utilize it. It is in the backlog to be replaced, but if you don't open that window you shouldn't lag much outside of a large, multiplayer scene with many others in the same instance. Unfortunately, the Outskirts zones (which are some of the first you encounter) are forced multiplayer, and are some of the largest adventure scenes, so those CAN be quite laggy.

    Try leaving the Outskirts (or using the Start on World Map option), and go to another scene (East Perennial Trail is nearby) and see if it is better. You might try switching to Private, aka Single Player Online, to see if that helps as well.

    As mentioned, 20 minutes is an absurdly long time to load. I'd be interested in seeing the export file Alleine asked for, to see if we can help troubleshoot it.
     
  8. Alleine Dragonfyre

    Alleine Dragonfyre Avatar

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    Ugh, all that processing power to load a map that isn't even accurate :( or even exist....
     
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  9. majoria70

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    Welcome @Rerednaw . Sorry you are having problems getting into the game. As mentioned you must be having some kind of problem and really you can't compare this game to all others such as wow since we have many player assets and deco's to load that most games do not. So if you can provide a little more info for us I'm sure players can help you work through this. I am Majoria in the game once you get in that is if I can help.
     
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  10. Anpu

    Anpu Avatar

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    https://www.shroudoftheavatar.com/forum/index.php?threads/minimum-system-requirements.55790/

    WINDOWS

    Minimum:
    • OS: Windows 7 64 bit or newer
    • Processor: Quad Core 2.4 GHz or faster
    • Memory: 8 GB RAM
    • Graphics: DirectX 11 Compatible NVIDIA 960 / AMD 560
    • Network: Broadband Internet connection (Not required for Offline Mode)
    • Hard Drive: 22 GB available space
    Recommended:
    • Processor: Quad Core 2.8 GHz or faster
    • Memory: 12 GB RAM
    • Graphics: DirectX 11 Compatible NVIDIA GTX 1070 / ATI Radeon HD 5870
    • Hard Drive: SSD
    Mac OS X

    Minimum
    :
    • OS: 10.8.5 (Mountain Lion) or newer
    • Processor: Quad Core 2.4 GHz or faster
    • Memory: 8 GB RAM
    • Graphics: DirectX 11 Compatible NVIDIA 960 / AMD 560
    • Network: Broadband Internet connection (Not required for Offline Mode)
    • Hard Drive: 22 GB available space
    Recommended:
    • Processor: Quad Core 2.8 GHz or faster
    • Memory: 12 GB RAM
    • Graphics: DirectX 11 Compatible NVIDIA GTX 1070 / ATI Radeon HD 5870
    • Hard Drive: SSD
    SteamOS + LINUX

    Minimum:
    • OS: Ubuntu 10.10 or newer officially but most linux flavors supported
    • Processor: Quad Core 2.4 GHz or faster
    • Memory: 8 GB RAM
    • Graphics: DirectX 11 Compatible NVIDIA 960 / AMD 560
    • Network: Broadband Internet connection (Not required for Offline Mode)
    • Hard Drive: 22 GB available space
    Recommended:
    • Processor: Quad Core 2.8 GHz or faster
    • Memory: 12 GB RAM
    • Graphics: DirectX 11 Compatible NVIDIA GTX 1070 / ATI Radeon HD 5870
    • Hard Drive: SSD
    Besides the system specification to run the game, the following firewall ports must be open for the Launcher and Game Client to run properly.

    Launcher:
    • TCP 5074
    • UDP 3544
    • UDP 6881
    Game Service:
    • UDP 5054
    • UDP 5055
    • UDP 5056
    • UDP 5057
    • UDP 5058
    • UDP 5059
     
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  11. Astirian

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    Hmm that's interesting, I'm on an SSD too and getting 30 seconds (was 45 before R63)...
     
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  12. Vladamir Begemot

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    Very interesting indeed. I was timing my town, Resolute, Novia and I think Mount Midir. I could be wrong about the last though.

    I don't bother timing the first load into the game, I know that is supposed to be longer.
     
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  13. rebbieforever

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    I get 50-60 seconds with Intel i3, 8gb ram, 240gb ssd, 2gb vram and being far from the server(europe) so logically there is some other problem. It doesnt matter a lot on SSD but you could try defrag disk too. I suppose first time you ever load a scene may be downloading some assets of the scene layout though so its possible if you try it again it will be far better.
     
  14. Korim Rackham

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    I just want to say welcome to SOTA where Load Times take up 60% of your play time since nov 2014. Sounds like some people do get decent laod times. I can say when i played and its been a while i played from California and felt like i was trying to connect from a remote island off antartica or something. Then when finally got everything updated, and in game i encountered a load screen every 15 min or so unless standing still or staying in same zone.
     
  15. Feeyo

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    Loading is pretty good in SotA to be honest, 20 minutes for a loading screen is not right and you should check what is bugging your client. Firewall(s) maybe?
     
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  16. Jason_M

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    My wife gets similar loading times as you with same RAM and similar VRAM. On the same network connection, I can beat her into a scene by 10-20 seconds. The difference: I have 16GB of RAM and 4GB VRAM.

    I regularly use 10 GB total RAM while playing. 8GB is definitely playable, but I think that using part of your disk for loading scenes when the RAM runs out really slows things down.

    This might not be too relevant, but I've noticed that SOTA is eerily well optimized for multi-threading. When I check my resource monitor, all 8 threads are nearly equally stressed while playing and any part of my CPU rarely goes over 60% utilization unless something really hairy is going on.

    Perhaps the resource monitor is fibbing, but I'm quite certain that the powers that be have been really working on the performance of the engine every month since at least release when I first started playing.
     
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  17. rebbieforever

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    Yes you just need Fast(what I use) or Fastest detail level and you cant multitask much with memory hog browsers like Chrome. Game was a lot slower on same setup when I started though - it improved a lot over time on that field
     
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