A tip for loading times reduction

[TDuvefjard]

As most of the kenshi stuff is very ram demanding and everyone know that ram aint the most well managed resource in a computer.

But there is a solution on steam there is a program you can buy called dimmdrive (maybe there is some free program to do the same work) which creates a so called ramdisk which means that aslong as you got enought memory you can put whole games on the memory directly taking away all the transfer speed to and from memory.

The whole game is about 12 gb i got 8 so i cant put all the files in there but most of them and it has reduced my loading times by alot, and if you want to higher the diffrent settings like population i would say it will help you even more.

Hope this helps someone

[Erei]

Loading is related to the HD. You can use a SSD and cut the loading time considerably.

The fact that the game is ram demanding wouldn't matter in the case of a ramdisk, it's just for games that are HD demanding, like this one. You essentially make a slightly better SSD doing like that.

[Scoob]

There's actually a "guide" about this somewhere, basically using a RamDrive to speed up the game. However, I've used Ramdrives quite a lot and it doesn't work quite as expected. Sure, loading times can be a bit quicker, but that's more about how windows caches data.

The problem is, Steams built-in DRM. Sure, you can copy the game folder to a RamDrive, and even launch it from there if Steam is running. However, it won't actually read the data from the RamDrive quite how you'd expect. I used some system diagnostic tools to check exactly where the game was loading its data from, after first loading the game into a RamDrive and running it from that location. While the game was launched from the RamDrive, Steam's built-in DRM was consistently reading data from the Steam install folder not from the RamDrive. This was easy to check as the RamDrive had a separate drive letter, so it was obvious.

The thing is, when you're copying a lot of files in Windows, it caches a lot of data in RAM, if you have a lot of RAM. So, it was this "buffered" cache data that would appear to speed up the access times. As a controlled test, I copied the game folder to a RamDrive, then deleted said RamDrive and ran the game and it felt like it was loading more quickly.

I have actually been thinking of revisiting this one, as my last tests were performed likely couple of years ago now. So, if something's changed with how Kenshi uses Steam's built-in DRM, then it might work. Or, like before, Steam might still be forcing the data to be accessed from the source folder, not the RamDrive, but Windows caching is actually helping.

Note: for some games this works 100% fine. Games bought through GoG for example have ZERO DRM, so work great from a RamDrive. Also, certain developers release "Steam-Free" versions of their .exe's when a game is a little older (Egosoft do this, for example) so their games, once patched with this replacement .exe, work perfectly from a RamDrive. Also, some games appear to just check that Steam is running, and the game will run and use files from the RamDrive just fine. It's sort of hit or miss, Kenshi was a miss when I tested this a couple of years ago.

When games don't work, there IS a way you can set up a RamDrive that creates the drive and data on boot - or when run - then you can install Steam games to it as normal. You just have to ensure that the drive is mounted before you run Steam, else it'll get confused. It's sorta like using and external USB drive. You can add it as a Steam game folder, but if you forget to plug it in and launch Steam, it'll get confused.

Not wanting to dismiss you efforts here @TDuvefjard, but I did do a LOT of testing on this a while back, and use RamDrives a lot for many older / DRM-free titles. I could also see exactly where Windows was accessing the game data from.

Note 2: I've not used DIMMDrive for ages, much preferring "ImDisk" and all my game scripts are set up to use that.

Scoob.