What's up with the loading times?

[pookpunk]

Seriously, my PC can pretty much handle Doom III and even the recent Tomb Raider at medium settings. When loading missions I have some MAJOR lags and hangs. However, once the mission loads the game runs fine. I've tried searching on here for solutions and have attempted the various config changes by changing the values, but still this does NOT work. If I can't resolve this issue I am just going to remove The Dark Mod from my PC because honestly the loading times really hamper the experience. If my computer can run modern games at medium settings with better loading I don't see why it shouldn't be able to handle a MOD based on the Doom III engine. My pc isn't that old!

[Sotha]

TDM has longer loading times than what is usual in modern games, but still a typical mission loads in few minutes.

 

Downsizing bumpmaps is known to make the loading slightly faster.

http://wiki.thedarkmod.com/index.php?title=FAQ#Getting_.22Malloc_Failure_for_.23.23.23.23.23.23.23.22_crash-to-desktop

 

Could you please specify in detail what you mean by "When loading missions I have some MAJOR lags and hangs."

[lost_soul]

I wonder if you've got a 5400RPM hard drive. The PC manufacturers are still trying to shove those things down consumers' throats, even though they're pathetically slow. I went to buy a drive the other day and those were all they had... pffft

 

Anyway, I don't think there is a lot you can do to shorten load times. Exit any other programs that are running before playing TDM, including Itunes, Skype, and the like. How much RAM do you have? I think turning texture compression off can speed up load times, but you need a video card with lots of RAM. Even my 1 GB card was choking on the mission "Requiem" with texture compression turned off because it was such a large map with lots of different architecture and textures.

 

Have you defragmented since you started playing TDM?

[Lux]

After the loading bar completes, the game is still situating things for a while afterward. Many times it will take longer than the actual loading bar took.

 

Doesn't having vertical sync off make loading go much faster or is that just dmap? I think some have even bound vertical sync to a keyboard key (there's a forum post that explains how though the post is for in-game performance). So you could start the game with vertical sync off and then enable it once in game.

[Sotha]

Doesn't having vertical sync off make loading go much faster or is that just dmap? I think some have even bound vertical sync to a keyboard key (there's a forum post that explains how though the post is for in-game performance). So you could start the game with vertical sync off and then enable it once in game.

 

vsync affects only dmap, IMHO.

Please test effect on normal loading and report back.

 

If it affects normal loading, something needs to be done.

[Lux]

Yep, just tested with "breaking out the fence", and you're correct, Sotha. Vertical sync does not affect level load time. Actually it was 1 second longer with Vert sync OFF but that's negligable.

[Obsttorte]

The long loading times are only when you load a mission the first time. After that reloading it (by for example reloading a quicksave) does normally take less then a second. And yes, there are no lags while loading. The loading bar orientates on a counter. If it reaches one the bar is drawn full. But depending on the level the number can go up to four or more.

 

My approach is to start the mission, go smoking while it is loading, and than I play. As reloading is pretty fast I don't see how this could affect the gameplay experience.

 

If I can't resolve this issue I am just going to remove The Dark Mod from my PC ...

Can't tell you how much I love such statements.

[Airship Ballet]

honestly the loading times really hamper the experience.

 

Somebody strap you to your chair and hold your eyes open with toothpicks once you start loading a map?

 

If I can't resolve this issue I am just going to remove The Dark Mod from my PC

 

Edited April 12, 2014 by Airship Ballet

[nbohr1more]

Doom 3 was designed such that in-game performance would not be affected by asset streaming in real time. As such the entire map is loaded at once while other engines load part of the map then stream in the rest depending on your location. When Doom 3 was released it was taxing enough on systems that they couldn't afford to have a background streaming task. The other reasons for long load times are that the engine has poor support for Normal Map compression and that the map and materials are text based rather than binary. The Doom 3 BFG engine fixes all those things and perhaps some day a coder will come along and port some of those changes. That said, a nice SSD would also solve your problem.

[Briareos H]

Recommending a SSD is not a definitive solution in my experience. On my computer, the loading times appear to be mostly CPU-bound: since I got a SSD, the first part of loading ("Mission Loading") is very quick (10-15 seconds) but the second part ("Preparing mission") is many times slower than that, ie. up to several minutes, and doesn't seem very different from when I used a regular hard drive. I have no idea what the engine does during that time but I suspect it's mostly calculations. I can't believe that with the bandwidth available it would take such a long time to move even one gigabyte of textures from main memory to VRAM.

Edited April 11, 2014 by Briareos H

[Lux]

My test with "Breaking the Fence", which I don't think is that big of a mission (I haven't played it yet) was that it was 15second for the load bar to finish and then about 23sec afterward. That is on 840pro 400-500MB/s SSD. So 38 seconds total. With those read speeds that would be around ...19GB of data roughly? Clearly its not just loading the mission/textures/audio, etc. because the mission isn't even over 100MB compressed.

[Springheel]

The engine preloads all the textures, doesn't it? I thought that was the major stumbling block.

[New Horizon]

I think there was mention of a bunch of redundant checks on the textures and other assets too. Maybe something that could be streamlined. I think the formats not being binary tends to slow things down quite a lot. When I tried Doom 3 BFG edition and compared the loading times to original doom 3, it was considerably faster. Probably cut the time in half.

[demagogue]

If it's any consolation, in the past it was even longer and there have been some optimizations that have made it shorter. It's not like the problem has been ignored.

 

And our maps at least have the advantage that objects and textures don't pop in like you see in streaming engines like Rage or NuTheif.

[Goldwell]

I don't know much about the technical details but my personal favorite game/engine is Rage.. That game ran absolutely beautifully on my old crappy laptop and it really impressed me with how nice it looked even when the hardware wasn't there.

 

Also I never noticed textures popping in whilst playing Rage.

 

And as for TDM yeah it takes a while to load a mission but as others have said once you do that, thats it there's no constant waiting screens which is pretty good if you ask me.

[SirGen]

With how few good games there are these days, I'd still play TDM even if I had to wait an hour for each mission to load!