Continuous loading from hardrive while playing

[Sjarken]

The hardrive is loading at all times during play, the game only takes around 2gb of memory and i have more then 4gb memory free after game is launched. Still the game is loading at a steady 3mb/sec at all times. Why?

[Sufferin' Pup]

It is streaming in the world as you walk around, it is an open world game like Skyrim, GTA, etc.

[Sjarken]

It seems strange, even if i dont move it keeps loading. Wouldnt it be better to just load the world/sector your in, instead of slowly loading? Skyrim does not load at 3mb/sec, it just loads the sector at full speed, and i dont even notice that. But always loading at 3mb/sec will wear down my harddrive and reduce the lifetime of my disk. I understand that this game dont like to consume alot of ram like skyrim does, but i would love a option to consume more ram and keep the loading time to a minimum. I run this game on 2 old school spin disks in raid0, so the wear is actually not only on one disk, but 2 disks. And the raid stripe have a read speed close to 200mb/sec.

Thanks for answer. cudos from me.

[Sufferin' Pup]

Actually we'd love to use more ram, but we started developing the engine a very long time ago (I think around 2010?) so it is a 32 bit app, which means we are limited to 2GB ram. :( We never had the opportunity during development to convert to 64 bit.

The game does stop loading if you stop moving tho, after a few seconds everything around you will finish loading and the hard drive activity stops. We do load slower than maximum speed because the engine we used (Ogre) seems to have issues with background loading, which causes hitches during gameplay no matter how good the PC is. So we load a bit slower than max speed in order to provide a smoother experience.

I was a programmer on a the engine so I know all about this stuff and loving talking about it. If you have any other technical questions I'd love to answer them. :)

[Sjarken]

I had some problems running the game in fullscreen, as i was getting alot of laggs, no matter what resolution i used. But it's not really a issue, as the laggs go away when i use maximized window. Also the framerate is a little low, but that might be cause of my cpu, i dont know.

Love the game, it feels like a really old school tactical rpg. Really refreshing in todays graphical loot box and microtransaction mania.

Other then low fps and continuous harddrive loading i have no objections.

[Midnight Meows]

Out of curiosity, from which directories is the data streamed? I'm asking because I could (even if temporarily) MKLINK /D some of the most frequently loaded directories into my RAMDisk.

I'm guessing Ember\World and \media\textures , \media\soundbanks

I could probably fit one or two of these into the RAMDisk and would of course prioritize the most frequently accessed data in terms of how much space on that 'disk' to use.

I use the RAMDisk for the Windows temp folder and to hold Firefox and its cache.

[Sufferin' Pup]

The thing that is streaming 90% of the time are the textures, those are all in media/textures. If you could symlink those to a ramdisk I'd bet it would eliminate almost all hitching and hard drive access. The entire textures directory is only 1.3 gig, so it should be doable. media/soundbanks is also a good choice, that is the 2nd most accessed directory. The music is being streamed out of there, as well as on-demand sound effect loading.

What a fun excersise! I don't think this will make a huge difference, but for the tech nerds like me its a fun thing to do. :)

[Midnight Meows]

Thanks!

Yeah I like to nerd out on things from time to time. My RAMDisk will have enough space for that so I'll do that next time that I load the game.

[FaroBoon]

My hard drive would load like crazy after quick saves and my FPS would drop below 20fps while in Windowed mode. I found that if I ALT-Tabbed back to Windows and back to the game, the FPS would return back to normal (140fps) and the continuous hard drive loading would stop.