Author Topic: Game seems to have increased loading times/blank spots for icons  (Read 2575 times)

Offline Aklyon

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Not sure if its my computer or AI War, but it didn't seem like this was supposed to work like this currently.

So, I opened up a game on 8.001, and while I didn't notice anything like the title in the menu, I did when generating maps. Unlike its rather quick switch between maps in 7.058 and earlier, it felt like it took ages to make a new map. Not terrible, but certainly a couple seconds per map. Got into the game, clicked on my lab, and the lab window was entirely blank for a couple seconds until it loaded all the tech icons, while it took so little before I had to be looking at the tech window for me to notice the flicker. It took the same lengthy-seeming amount for each of the tech tabs, and the command station build tabs, and slightly less for the sidebar icons when hovered over (they went completely blank until it redrew with the grey box instead of the green or orange ones, making command groups produced a blank box until it loaded also, and looking at a planet besides my own lead to a big block of blank spots for a couple seconds along with a missing planet for the same length of time), the galaxy map had all its map dots and lines and names properly loaded but not the background (which was black).

However, once it had a particular ship or thing's icon loaded (whether in a window, far zoom, or can-see-the-art-zoom), I didn't have anything like the above happen again, except for mapgen with bonus ships I hadn't seen yet, until I closed the game and reopened it.

Offline keith.lamothe

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Re: Game seems to have increased loading times/blank spots for icons
« Reply #1 on: August 24, 2014, 06:52:00 pm »
Not sure if its my computer or AI War, but it didn't seem like this was supposed to work like this currently.

So, I opened up a game on 8.001, and while I didn't notice anything like the title in the menu, I did when generating maps. Unlike its rather quick switch between maps in 7.058 and earlier, it felt like it took ages to make a new map.
If you do it enough times that it gets all the bonus ship types (this may be easier to test by toggling the expansions off), does the map-change speed up?  If so then it's probably an image-load-time thing.

Overall what you're mentioning sounds a lot like what we encountered when we initially tried Unity version 4 for the first time during AVWW's development, though only on specific machines and not on others: it loads batches of images in similar amounts of time, but a single batch could take 3+ seconds, even if it was just one file.  That's why we didn't try to upgrade the engine at the time.  Since then it seemed as if that problem had gone away, since Bionic and TLF both seemed to do fine with it.
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Offline Aklyon

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Re: Game seems to have increased loading times/blank spots for icons
« Reply #2 on: August 24, 2014, 07:08:54 pm »
Not sure if its my computer or AI War, but it didn't seem like this was supposed to work like this currently.

So, I opened up a game on 8.001, and while I didn't notice anything like the title in the menu, I did when generating maps. Unlike its rather quick switch between maps in 7.058 and earlier, it felt like it took ages to make a new map.
If you do it enough times that it gets all the bonus ship types (this may be easier to test by toggling the expansions off), does the map-change speed up?  If so then it's probably an image-load-time thing.
It does, and for a moment I thought there was a gui bug off to the side until I remembered dual-AIs is an expansion thing and there would infact be blank space there otherwise, heh. :)

Offline keith.lamothe

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Re: Game seems to have increased loading times/blank spots for icons
« Reply #3 on: August 24, 2014, 07:23:44 pm »
Hmm, pity, I'd thought we'd left this particular issue behind.

Specific hardware/OS setup may be helpful in comparing with others that encounter this; it's very doubtful we can actually solve the problem but identifying it is always preferable.
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Offline Aklyon

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Re: Game seems to have increased loading times/blank spots for icons
« Reply #4 on: August 24, 2014, 07:36:40 pm »
Windows 7 64-bit, 12GB RAM in two slots, AMD Radeon R7 270 series graphics card, AMD Athlon X4 750k Quad-core CPU. I attached a dxdiag as well, but it is odd. 7.058 or a version very close to it worked fine in both SP and MP last sunday without any of those issues, and thats numerous (tiny and incremental) updates past the big Unity update one but before DoW/8.0 was released.

Offline doctorfrog

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Re: Game seems to have increased loading times/blank spots for icons
« Reply #5 on: August 25, 2014, 03:56:05 am »
I'm getting this also, to the point where I have to quickly pause the game after I load it, go to several planets, and let all the little individual graphics load. And even then, of course, anything "new" that shows up is invisible until it loads as well. Before 8.001, I probably hadn't fired up AI War for about three months, and haven't seen this issue before.

This doesn't happen on a basic laptop, but does happen on my quite-a-bit-better gaming machine.

I first noticed this happen when beta testing The Last Federation. I haven't fired that up for a little while, so I'm not sure if it's still an issue there.

Here's me:

Summary
      Operating System
         Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit SP1
      CPU
         Intel Core i5 4570 @ 3.20GHz   33 °C
         Haswell 22nm Technology
      RAM
         8.00GB Dual-Channel DDR3 @ 799MHz (9-9-9-24)
      Motherboard
         ASRock B85M Pro4 (CPUSocket)   36 °C
      Graphics
         DELL U2311H (1920x1080@60Hz)
         2047MB NVIDIA GeForce GTX 660 (ASUStek Computer Inc)   32 °C
      Storage
         931GB Western Digital WDC WD10EZEX-00ZF5A0 SCSI Disk Device (SATA)   35 °C
         931GB Western Digital WD My Passport 0820 USB Device (USB (SATA))   29 °C
      Optical Drives
         No optical disk drives detected
      Audio
         Realtek High Definition Audio
« Last Edit: August 25, 2014, 04:00:28 am by doctorfrog »

Offline x4000

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Re: Game seems to have increased loading times/blank spots for icons
« Reply #6 on: August 25, 2014, 07:41:33 am »
Doctorfrog, can you check TLF and see if it still happens there?
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Offline x4000

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Re: Game seems to have increased loading times/blank spots for icons
« Reply #7 on: August 25, 2014, 09:02:27 am »
Okay, these first two things will let you work around it, but I also have more coming:

* A new settings option has been added to the graphics tab that allows for players to preload all images rather than having them load as the game progresses.

* A new Max Loading Threads settings option ahs been added to the graphics tab.
** Default 200.  Setting this to progressively higher values will make more images/etc try to load from disk simultaneously.  On some operating systems (like OSX), there are hard limits on how many threads can be running at a time.  In those cases the limit is often 256, so going above 220 is probably not a great idea.  For other operating systems, you may be able to crank this up and have better concurrent loading speeds.
** Previously the default was 140, but 200 should be safe for all OSes.
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Offline Aklyon

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Re: Game seems to have increased loading times/blank spots for icons
« Reply #8 on: August 25, 2014, 09:04:49 am »
Sounds good! :)

Offline x4000

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Offline doctorfrog

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Re: Game seems to have increased loading times/blank spots for icons
« Reply #10 on: August 25, 2014, 12:42:27 pm »
Will check both AIW and TLF by tonight, thanks for the quick turnaround, x4!

Offline x4000

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Re: Game seems to have increased loading times/blank spots for icons
« Reply #11 on: August 25, 2014, 01:16:01 pm »
Np!
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