Very long loading times

[Nico A.]

I have an issue when starting a mission...

 

The time to load a mission takes extremely long for me. For the Tears of Saint Lucia mission, it took about six minutes every time I loaded the mission or a saved state. I have a ATI Mobility Radeon HD 5165 graphics card and tried the suggestions in the FAQ. After these fixes the loading times for the two missions were:

 

Winter Harvest: 1'58'' (after closing Dark Mod and starting the mission again: 1'18'')

Tears of Saint Lucia: 2'11'' (after closing Dark Mod and starting the mission again: 2'20'')

 

When loading my own attempt at Dark Radiant (two rooms, a door, two AIs, few small things) it takes 30-40 seconds, which is, I guess, still kinda long.

 

Has anyone an idea what I could do to reduce the loading time even further?

[Sotha]

1) Edit your darkmod.cfg and use the following:

 

seta image_downSizeBump "1"

seta image_downSizeBumpLimit "256"

 

You get a very mild, almost undetectable blurring of textures. My loading time of LQD mission went down 20 s with these settings. Memory impact will be reduced.

[jaxa]

*fail*

Edited August 14, 2013 by jaxa

[nbohr1more]

nope...

 

there are 3 things you can 'downsize"

 

1) Images (textures)

2) Bump (normal maps)

3) Specular

 

each has it's own cvar pair

[zergrush]

I'd like to take this opportunity to ask both developers and testers how much has performance increased (if any) in 2.0. Better loading times would be wonderful for low-end pcs.

[Springheel]

Loading times were not part of the plan for 2.0 (well, at one point there was hope we were going to be able to convert normalmaps to .dds, which would presumably help, but that didn't materialize).

[zergrush]

What about in-game performance? My machine is a bit old, but it still astounds me how badly some TDM maps perform, especially considering Doom 3 runs perfectly smooth. Now granted, the Doom 3 engine is optimized to tight, claustrophobic level design, whereas TDM features a lot of open areas, but the improved lighting system of TDM seems to bring performance down a lot, in certain areas. Are any performance upgrades expected in the long run? Because quite fairly, it would be nice to see TDM running on low-end devices, especially now that the standalone version is near completion.

[grayman]

I'm going to try to find some time after 2.00 is released, to look at loading times. I can't guarantee any improvements, though. Or in-game performance improvements.

[New Horizon]

What about in-game performance? My machine is a bit old, but it still astounds me how badly some TDM maps perform, especially considering Doom 3 runs perfectly smooth. Now granted, the Doom 3 engine is optimized to tight, claustrophobic level design, whereas TDM features a lot of open areas, but the improved lighting system of TDM seems to bring performance down a lot, in certain areas. Are any performance upgrades expected in the long run? Because quite fairly, it would be nice to see TDM running on low-end devices, especially now that the standalone version is near completion.

 

I don't think we could squeeze that much more out of the engine without finding a way to add multi-core support, without breaking everything, as well as a complete rewrite of the renderer.

 

People make the 'but doom 3 runs smooth' comparison a lot but the TDM engine is so different at this stage. Also, people only tend to think of graphics enhancement as a bottleneck, but there are a ton of improvements over the original D3 engine that really add up. Sound prop, competent AI, light gem calculations, more complicated physics than D3, higher res textures, higher poly models.

 

Maybe for 2.01 someone will have a chance to port some mult-core functionality into TDM but until then I highly doubt it could be optimized much more.

[zergrush]

Appreciated, but my real question is more "is there anything that could be done?" and not "when it will be done?". I understand that time is a serious constraint for the team and due to that, patience has already become an inherent quality of most community members. But what I would really like to know here is whether we've scrapped the bottom of what the D3 engine is capable of, or if there are still ways of vastly optimizing what we already have.

 

*EDIT*

 

Oops, New Horizon pretty much answered all of my questions. Thanks.

Edited August 20, 2013 by zergrush

[PranQster]

Believe it or not, map load times and dmap times as well can be dramatically reduced if you disable 'vertical sync' in the game settings as well as your OS graphics driver options.