Speed up load time?

[Jack Schitt]

How do you speed up load times, if it's possible?
And how do you load the admin menu to teleport to other locations / blocks / items / ships / stations?

Refresh me, please!

I'm attempting to return from a 6 month hiatus from the game and don't remember all of the tricks. I've made an attempt at searching Google, the inaccurate landfill (formerly the information highway) is so full of garbage anymore I'm reluctant to dig through all the trash to find the info I'm looking for.

[ShadedMJ]

Well, for load times I did have one game that was loading slower than I wanted. This was a creative style game, so I used admin tools and removed most of the asteroids. I think it cut load time in half.

For teleport : Have spectator enabled in game settings, start play, press F8 for spectator, use alt-scroll to change movement speed, get to where you want to be, ctrl-space to teleport to that location, F6 to change your view to that location.

[Jack Schitt]

Thanks! Admin tools is ALT+F10?? I think what I'm missing is where/how to enable it. The menu where you could change the time of day and select items in the world and teleport to them, other than using ctrl+space as you shared. The same menu that can be used to remove "trash".
Maybe a bunch of random debris in the game is effecting the load time, that makes sense. But the world I'm attempting to load does have quite a few stations on it that I built a far distance from each other. I did remember to keep them powered. Keeping grids powered used to be a way to cause the game to not delete them after getting a specific distance away from them. I hope they didn't change that! Or all that time I spent on the projects I'm playing again to bring further to completion are kaput because they're gone.

[Jel]

Press ALT+F10 to bring up SpaceMaster Menu. This shall give you all possible power you need.

[Buzzard]

Trash Removal is what you're looking for to keep them from being removed for no-power, etc. It's in the Admin Menu. Admin Menu will only work for worlds you run yourself (single player) or worlds that you administrate or have been given powers over. You won't have admin abilities for a world you have just joined, unless the admins have done something very, very foolish.

[Dan2D3D]

OP : "How do you speed up load times, if it's possible?"

By using a lower Graphic and FOV setting, try all the Default ones so Low, Medium and Default High 70 FOV to find the one that loads your world faster.

Also some gained speed on loading save after deleting the content of the ShaderCache folders, follow #4 in the "Forums Workaround(s)" :

https://steamcommunity.com/app/244850/discussions/0/2440336020748966737/

[Jack Schitt]

Thanks for the replies! I didn't forget that it was ALT+F10 but I didn't go to the drop down selection menu at the top, that's the part I was forgetting among a lot of other things. If cloud saves also save your graphics settings it should already be the best performance for the pc I'm using since I still have the same machine.

The thing I'm curious about is in Splitsies videos his load times are quite fast, just a few seconds and mine are several minutes when loading any game. Is he cutting his load times out or are they really that fast? He uses a ton of mods almost all of the time. I assume he most likely is shortening the load screens in his videos. No need for viewers to watch load screens. I'll ask him about it in comments and see if he answers.

[Buzzard]

Load times depend on how much is getting loaded, as well as the hardware loading it. A slower machine just won't load as fast. A SSD will speed up load times over a traditional HDD. More RAM allows the computer to keep everything in memory without having to resort to virtual memory swapfiles (temp storage of memory on the drive).
And mods... all add to load time, of course. A pure vanilla world will generally load faster than one modded to hell and back. A world with a lot of grids will take longer.

[Dan2D3D]

My worlds load in a few seconds (20 sec.) but takes more time when I set the Graphics on default High and/or Extreme.

__

Note

The "cloud" part = I don't undestand.

The in-game cloud form the main game menu in Options is not may to save but for players having 2 PCs with same Steam account to transfer their new created world to their second PC and will give problems if enabled for no reason.

[Jack Schitt]

Originally posted by Buzzard:

Load times depend on how much is getting loaded, as well as the hardware loading it. A slower machine just won't load as fast. A SSD will speed up load times over a traditional HDD. More RAM allows the computer to keep everything in memory without having to resort to virtual memory swapfiles (temp storage of memory on the drive).
And mods... all add to load time, of course. A pure vanilla world will generally load faster than one modded to hell and back. A world with a lot of grids will take longer.

This is the computer I use:
https://www.msi.com/Desktop/Trident-3/Specification
It's decent, and has an SS drive. GTX1050 graphics.

Solid State Drives don't make that huge of a difference in speed. My other desktop that has HDD's loads this game a bit faster. Similar specs but a slightly better processor.

Originally posted by Dan2D3D:

My worlds load in a few seconds (20 sec.) but takes more time when I set the Graphics on default High and/or Extreme.

__

Note

The "cloud" part = I don't undestand.

The in-game cloud form the main game menu in Options is not may to save but for players having 2 PCs with same Steam account to transfer their new created world to their second PC and will give problems if enabled for no reason.

If I can get my load times down to under a minute I would be extremely happy. The menu screens are slower than I've seen them be in videos as well.

Cloud saves also save settings remotely, Dan.

[Jack Schitt]

Splitsie did answer and replied that he doesn't always edit the load screens out, they're really that fast, and he thinks the reason is that he runs the game on an NVME m2 SSD. The PC I primarily use is capable of 32gb memory (RAM) and it does have both one SSD and an HDD in it, so I'm now contemplating doing some hardware upgrades but there is a phrase that comes to mind: Speed Kills. (haha!)

I have yet to launch the game again after doing the workarounds so I haven't checked how my graphics are set and therefore obviously haven't played around with the gfx settings so I'll give that a try, too, and see how it goes. Waiting several minutes for the game to get to the main menu and then having to wait another several minutes to load a game is brutally discouraging. I lose interest in wanting to play in half the time it takes to get in to a game. I can only imagine the load times some people with less-capable computers are going through.

I apparently did not upload the blueprints of the machines I'm after to finish to my account so if they're not still there in the game because the cloud included them they're gone. And that would suck. We'll see!

Thanks for the replies!

[Jack Schitt]

I did play around with the graphics settings as suggested after deleting ShaderCache contents and the config file. Neither low, medium, high, or ultra default settings made any difference at all in load times or screen changes between option menus. Even a brand new empty world takes 2 minutes and 23 seconds to load every time I load it - not just the initial load. All of the load times are that long, or longer.

Any other suggestions, other than upgrading to a faster PC? I'm not sure installing more RAM memory is going to make that much of a difference but I'll give it a shot if someone with credible knowledge of the game says it definitely will.

Oddly, and this is the honest truth whether you believe it or not, when I max out my other pc's RAM with 32gb everything on that computer is actually slower with the same exact ram sticks. When I remove 2 of them and drop back down to 16gb everything is faster than it is with 32gb.
I don't get it but that's what happens with that computer.

[Kimmaz]

Odd how you get the same load times every try. I tested my speeds just for fun, and I got a much faster load time the second time I started the game/loaded the save. I started by powering off the computer first.

Windows Startup: 46sec (from pressing button)
Click Start in Steam: Intro Movie 59 sec, Menu 1min 6 seconds(total).
Load singleplayer game: 1min 47 seconds. 79MB save file if that matters.

2nd try after power on computer:
Click Start in Steam: Intro Movie 19 sec, Menu 22 seconds(total).
Load singleplayer game: 34 seconds. Same savefile.

Windows installed on a old SSD. (850 evo)
Appdata/save game is on SSD.
Space engineers installed on my 4tb HDD.

Computer: amd-fx8350, 16gb ddr3 ram, geforce gtx 1070,
https://imgur.com/a/FhLHu

Edit: I saw the specs on the Trident-3, it seem to use a laptop HDD (2.5"). It might be 5400RPM. thats a lot slower than a 7200RPM disk. try crystalmark (benchmark) and see how fast it is. Here is my disk speeds:
Disk: Samsung 850 EVO 500GB (SSD)
[Read]
Sequential 1MiB (Q= 8, T= 1): 555.721 MB/s [ 530.0 IOPS] < 15065.69 us>
Sequential 1MiB (Q= 1, T= 1): 513.039 MB/s [ 489.3 IOPS] < 2041.95 us>
Random 4KiB (Q= 32, T=16): 242.022 MB/s [ 59087.4 IOPS] < 7984.23 us>
Random 4KiB (Q= 1, T= 1): 39.737 MB/s [ 9701.4 IOPS] < 102.74 us>

[Write]
Sequential 1MiB (Q= 8, T= 1): 506.811 MB/s [ 483.3 IOPS] < 16482.79 us>
Sequential 1MiB (Q= 1, T= 1): 476.190 MB/s [ 454.1 IOPS] < 2199.45 us>
Random 4KiB (Q= 32, T=16): 229.252 MB/s [ 55969.7 IOPS] < 9118.02 us>
Random 4KiB (Q= 1, T= 1): 79.086 MB/s [ 19308.1 IOPS] < 51.47 us>
---------------------------
Disk: Seagate Barracuda 4TB (HDD)
[Read]
Sequential 1MiB (Q= 8, T= 1): 133.774 MB/s [ 127.6 IOPS] < 62329.38 us>
Sequential 1MiB (Q= 1, T= 1): 133.390 MB/s [ 127.2 IOPS] < 7855.17 us>
Random 4KiB (Q= 32, T=16): 0.806 MB/s [ 196.8 IOPS] <757485.71 us>
Random 4KiB (Q= 1, T= 1): 0.357 MB/s [ 87.2 IOPS] < 11432.44 us>

[Write]
Sequential 1MiB (Q= 8, T= 1): 127.484 MB/s [ 121.6 IOPS] < 65413.95 us>
Sequential 1MiB (Q= 1, T= 1): 118.297 MB/s [ 112.8 IOPS] < 8850.48 us>
Random 4KiB (Q= 32, T=16): 0.886 MB/s [ 216.3 IOPS] <615623.54 us>
Random 4KiB (Q= 1, T= 1): 0.927 MB/s [ 226.3 IOPS] < 4410.47 us>

[Jack Schitt]

I didn't break it down like that. Maybe I should? I know for a fact there really isn't much that goes on between clicking the game title in the list and the intro movie because I've disabled the intro movie before. You can do that simply by renaming the intro movie's file so the game doesn't find it. If the game doesn't find it it just doesn't load it. There most likely is stuff that has to pre-load between the end of the intro movie and the main menu. Like the background movies (they're .bik files, I think I remember hunting them down a while ago) .bik files are Bink Video files. Bink has been around since the late 90s.

I also didn't shut the computer down between launches. I do shut my computer down several times a day, when I'm not going to be using it for a length of time. I haven't ever timed how long it takes to boot but I do know it's never the same amount of time. Sometimes it's super quick, other times it's takes about a minute or 2.

My computer really isn't that old or horribly under-powered for this game. Dan2D3D and my computer are very similar and as you see he reports much faster speeds. Do you also only have SSD's in yours, Dan? Mine has both an SDD and an HDD. I don't know for sure what's stored on which one but at a guess I would assume windows is on the HDD and the SDD is everything else. Maybe that's the problem; I'm saving stuff backwards putting games and software that needs speed to load fast on the HDD and dumb stuff that only needs storage space on the SDD. If that's the case that means windows is on the SDD.

I'll check disk management.