Transitions/loading suddenly take excessively long

[Epsilon]

This started happening around the time I got to the city in Chapter 2.

Loading was smooth and short when I initially got into the city, but suddenly it's taking 30-90 seconds to go into a shop, change streets, and even to exit battle (oddly, entering battle is immediate.)

I've tried a fair number of troubleshooting steps at this point:

• Reinstalled game
  
• .....I figured maybe there was some bit rot on my SSD somewhere?
  
• Copied game to same drive, removed old one, renamed current to old
  
• .....This would theoretically verify if I had some bad sectors on my SSD. Of note is that the copy ticked merrily along at 200-300MB/s - this is roughly the performance I'd expect out of this SSD.
  
• ..........System got restarted right around here - I ran a disk scan on my SSD, just on principle.
  
• Uninstalled game again, installed it to a Steam library on another drive.
  
• .....Again, maybe something wrong with the SSD? Nope.
  
• Tried loading one of my first saves in the game
  
• .....Interestingly, the problem appeared here as well. That probably made the following steps futile, but I wanted to be complete about it.
  
• Trimmed saves to most recent 5 or so.
  
• Removed all old save files, leaving autosaves.
  
• Removed all autosaves, restoring the 5 saves I'd trimmed down to.
  
• .....Corrupted save causing a fuss for some reason? Made the Morrowind mistake, where things would go to hell if you got over ~100 savegames?
  
• Set video settings to "Portable" in case something there had triggered it.

None of this appeared to help. At this point, I'm reasonably convinced that it's not a hardware problem on my end - I've moved it on and off my games SSD, video isn't a problem (I played Empyrion for a few minutes to verify that - if my video card was shot, that would have caused it to choke and die with the settings I play it on,) CPU/mobo/etc. isn't broken since I'm not noticing performance issues during general work on this machine.

The only thing I can guess at this point is that there was some sneaky little "very minor patch" that caused everything to go south. I'm actually about to revert to 1.04 and see if the problems pop up there.

Other than that though, any insight would be appreciated, especially if someone else has seen this problem and solved it.

[󠀡󠀡󠀡⁧⁧the.jester]

There have been no game updates since march

What are your hardware specs?
OS version?
How much free space is there on your SSD?
When the problem occurred, were there any updates for your OS or drivers?

[Epsilon]

Originally posted by the.jester:

There have been no game updates since march

What are your hardware specs?
OS version?
How much free space is there on your SSD?
When the problem occurred, were there any updates for your OS or drivers?

Fair questions, but I'll point out that the game was running smoothly up until I reached Chapter 2.

The only thing I haven't done is blow away all my local data - I'm not keen on replaying 20-30 hours of the game if I'm not doing a NG+.

I think I'm going to have to do that, if only to see if I can pin it on something the game is doing weird internally...

Specs:
OS: Microsoft Windows 7 Professional (x64) • CPU: Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-4770K CPU @ 3.50GHz (3.50GHz) • Memory: 31.9 GiB Total (23.0 GiB Free) • VGA: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2070, Mirage Driver • Uptime: 15h 10m 36s

SSD free space is 100GB/1TB.

No recent updates on this end either, which again makes the whole mess really weird. Additionally, no issues on Empyrion, Factorio (other than mods not loading right, big surprise there :V,) or KSP.

[Epsilon]

ding ding ding

Reverted to 1.04 (just remembered that I'd triggered that process) and suddenly everything's working fine, at least for load times after battles.

Now I'm going to re-revert to 1.05 and see if things suddenly run poorly again. If so, I'm going to consider that definitive evidence that something went awry.

Edit: And suddenly, just like that, I'm back on 1.05 and everything's still running smoothly. I did notice that it only had to download something like 88MB instead of 20GB, so perhaps there's something wrong in the 1.05 release that a lot of people haven't noticed since it's not replacing all the files? I literally downloaded the whole install at least twice in my first three troubleshooting steps, so it's not like I had old stuff sitting around

Something is definitely screwy, but now I really don't know what. :V

[Epsilon]

So, an update to this.

This started happening again, so I decided to pull the trigger on an SSD upgrade. I've been due for a while anyway, and it'd eliminate a potential issue.

After the upgrade and an uninstall/reinstall, the issue is still happening.

Any other thoughts from anyone on this?

[Koby]

I really don't know why it would be having this issue on multiple SSDs.

Shoot, I played the entire game twice on a 5400 RPM drive and never ran into loading time problems.

[󠀡󠀡󠀡⁧⁧the.jester]

I doubt it's related to the SSD to be honest.

Is it from starting the game? Or does it happen after a period of time? Does the issue clear up after a reboot?
edit: Are you alt-tabbing a lot at all?

[Epsilon]

@Koby and @the.jester: For what it's worth, I didn't think it was SSD-related either - I'd just been thinking of doing an upgrade on my boot and games drives (which were 120GB and 1TB respectively.) There'd be a slim chance that I was having problems on either drive that I just wasn't noticing with my checks - since savegames are stored under the user directory, which lives on my boot drive.

@the.jester: I was about to admonish you to read the OP, but I realize I never described exactly how I was testing the issue. :V

My tests were performed with a save I had on the road outside the Ex. Camp. I'd wait for it to load (very long,) get into a battle (immediate,) finish the battle and wait to get control back (long,) and then run back to the Ex. Camp (long on the area transition.)

I read elsewhere that alt+tabbing could cause the issue, so in all my tests I avoided that.

Edit: To be more clear and concise: Reproducible from game start, and actually affects the game before I formally load a save.

-----

So. Funny thing.
This time, I decided "hey, why not jack up my video settings and run the game in fullscreen mode - since everything wants to be slow, it might as well look good?"

And the loading problem went away again - just got done with another 20 hours of playing or so.

I give up on figuring out why this damn game does what it does. (╯°□°)╯︵ ┻━┻