epic load times

[BJT_RaZoR]

Quad core 2.8GHz Processor

4GB Ram

 

Tatooine - 2-3 minutes load time

Alderaan - 2-3 minutes load time

Correlia - 3-5 minutes load time

 

Basically yeah long enough to go take a leak and grab another soda. But it feels like an eternity when you're staring at the screen waiting. Load times in this game really are rediculous. Chalk it up to EA being voted the worst company in America, lol.

 

http://www.computerandvideogames.com/342789/ea-shrugs-off-worst-company-in-america-award/

 

Their communications director laughed at that like it was nothing, why would they care what any of us think?

 

thats a mighty long time, even my laptop hits only 30 secs load speeds and its only a mid range one..

[Whislin]

A 7200 RPM hard drive should not have load times over 30 seconds in any game. Optimization is so bad in TOR. Why do I need to load the entire planet when I start in the space port? or when I'm in a subzone?

 

edit typo

Edited April 27, 2012 by Whislin

[Theronlas]

Have you actually measured this, I thought some of mine where fairly long so I timed em. Belsavis is one of the worst but its still only 30s or so. It just seems like ages when you are sitting in front of the computer.

[GRINnBARRETT]

I hate jumping on the bandwagon but I've noticed increased load times as well. My WZ queue popped a split second before I was loading a planet & I was able to click the enter button with 1 second remaining. So that's what, a minute load time? My rig is above average although I don't play with an SDD.

[Drakkip]

The two of us play together side by side on similar laptops (Same brand). Mine is a little newer, but the load times on mine are WAY faster.

 

Most of my load times are in the 10-30 second range, hers are sometimes 2-3 minutes.

 

Mine - 2.2gz, 12gb ram, 256gb SSD

Hers - 1.7gz, 8gb ram, 2 X 500gb HDD

 

I honestly think it is a hard drive thing, since mine also boots up WAY faster. If there was space in hers, I'd buy a SSD for the faster load times.

[Armourboy]

Corellia is horrible. It should not take the amount of time it does to load in when there are 4 people on the entire planet

[ConradLionhart]

This may be an oversight by the devs.

 

They want to create large epic worlds that are scaled correctly for immersion purposes. The Senate building on Coruscant is really a huge building for Senates with multiple rooms, not like the small "castle" of Stormwind.

 

But this immersion was done at the expense of convenience and practically:

1. As pointed out, these huge worlds come with the disadvantage of longer loading times.

2. Huge worlds mean too much traveling to get from point to point. I understand that you need to make Tatooine feel like a desert, and not that really small place in KotOR 1. But there needs to be a nice compromise.

3. Huge worlds highlight how un-lifelike they are because you have run out of things to put in them. There's too much space.

 

Baldur's Gate 1 also had that problem where there are zones with too much "nothing" in them. No quests, no surprises, no new party members. The devs took that feedback and made Baldur's Gate 2 zones with more stuff in them.

 

The current planets may be too huge and used up too much development time.

Edited April 27, 2012 by ConradLionhart

[DeutschGamer]

You must have a pretty crappy selection for dinner if you can make it in less than a minute.

[QuinteX]

Load times in:

 

WoW - 20'ish seconds

 

Rift - 30'ish

 

Tera online - 15'ish

 

SWTOR - 1min or more anywhere outside fleet. 30'ish to fleet.

 

I7 cpu

72000 rpm caviar black hard drive.

Woah that was fast, usually they are only 7200 rpm but yours are 10 times as fast.

 

Btw, get an SSD if your loading times are bad, i load fleet within 10 seconds, tatooine within 20. Yep, SSD is the ****.

[Zzxe]

I have an SSD and load times pre 1.2 were fine.

 

Now I've even had load times take up to 8 minutes.

 

The customer service just assumes it is a problem with each persons computer and the devs REFUSE TO ACKNOWLEDGE IT AS A PROBLEM.

 

This needs to be fixed or BioWare will continue to lose customers.

[Sanxxx]

Remember, as long as you have at least this everything will be ok

 

 

What are the system requirements for the game?

 

Processor:

 

AMD Athlon 64 X2 Dual-Core 4000+ or better

Intel Core 2 Duo 2.0GHz or better

Operating System:

 

Windows XP Service Pack 3 or later

RAM:

 

Windows XP: 1.5GB RAM

Windows Vista and Windows 7: 2GB RAM

Note: PCs using a built-in graphical chipset are recommended to have 2GB of RAM.

Star Wars: The Old Republic requires a video card that has a minimum of 256MB of on-board RAM as well as support for Shader 3.0 or better. Examples include:

 

ATI X1800 or better

nVidia 7800 or better

Intel 4100 Integrated Graphics or better

DVD-ROM drive – 8x speed or better (required for installation from physical editions only)

Internet connection required to play.

[xshadey]

I have an SSD and my load times where terrible but this fixed the load times for me and a few of my friends. I found it on these forums, but I can't find the link again, so I will just post it here. Hope it helps some people.

 

Just a simple bat file that I launch the game with, you might need to edit the file if you didn't install the game in the default location. https://docs.google.com/open?id=0B-ccQnhH4lylYllHSWM0emhtRkE

Or use the code below to make your own bat file.

 

echo @ off

START /d "C:\Program Files (x86)\SWTOR\BioWare\Star Wars - The Old Republic\" launcher.exe

 

[ronnymortier]

Am I the only one who remembers the loading time of a game on the Vic-20 computer?

 

With the games on tape, running on a datasette? Those were the days :-)

Load times in SWTOR are long though.

[moowart]

Gotta love it too when you are trying to zone into a warzone and it takes that long you get warning msgs saying you have been inactive for too long... even better when you finally do load the warzone and the barrier wont allow you to get through -_-

[scootle]

I think everyone who is complaining needs to understand how the HeroEngine caches the game asset files to dance around 32bit memory issues in a 64bit world. This is why the RAMdisk approach appears to be so significant in reducing load times for those who are so-inclined:

 

http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?t=394951

 

Once I realized what was going on, the long load times make sense... in terms of WHY they happen... that said, I really hope they can find a better way to do this, because the method is inherently inefficient and really gives the perception of a very poorly optimized experience for the end user. This is compounded by the now-now-now mentality of the typical gamer... minimizing load times where you are not able to interact is almost a mandate for any modern game, imho.

[revial]

There is nothing reasonable about the load times in this game, and frankly, I've been a bit amazed that it hasn't been crucified over it.

 

I consider a 20-30 s load time far too long. Sure, once, to initially get into the game, but not every time I want to zone somewhere that isn't a warzone/operation/fleet/capitol planet/my ship. I actually leave planets like Tatooine and go sit on my ship when I want to do warzones, because I can't stand the Tatooine load time (Belsavis is another kicker).

 

And, 20-30 s is on the fast end of things. I have friends with lesser computers who sometimes have 2+ minute load times on planets like Belsavis. I think I would kill myself, from a totally first world problem perspective, if I had to wait that long.

 

That said, while load times used to be a tad better early on in beta, they were never great. I assume they are a limitation of the engine and that we're stuck with them, forever. I suppose the engine simply can't do the reasonable thing, and simply load much more local content when zoning into a zone, and then continue to slowly load the rest of the zone in the background.

 

Hopefully, SWTOR is around a while, so in 5-10 years, our gaming rigs will devour the load times down to a matter of a few seconds. Until then, I suppose the silver lining about load times is that it does push us all to just sit on the Fleet, because no one feels like dealing with the load times on any of the actual planets. Oh wait, there's nothing silver about that lining at all.

 

Edit: I call shenanigans on those who claim to have 5 s load times on planets like Belsavis. Shenanigans! What I would love to see is Bioware's own metrics, in a line graph, that show everyone's load times. I'm betting it would make for some crucifying comments. Because, even if there is some mythical person out there with 5 s load times, I'm pretty sure he/she would be this little dot all alone, far outside the standard deviation.

Edited April 27, 2012 by revial

[Ancen]

I have an SSD and my load times where terrible but this fixed the load times for me and a few of my friends. I found it on these forums, but I can't find the link again, so I will just post it here. Hope it helps some people.

 

Just a simple bat file that I launch the game with, you might need to edit the file if you didn't install the game in the default location. https://docs.google.com/open?id=0B-ccQnhH4lylYllHSWM0emhtRkE

Or use the code below to make your own bat file.

 

echo @ off

START /d "C:\Program Files (x86)\SWTOR\BioWare\Star Wars - The Old Republic\" launcher.exe

 

What exactly is this supposed to help? All it does is open the launcher... literally nothing else. START /d is a batch file command to simply look in a directory for the specified file. The echo off simply suppresses the DOS window messages.

[revial]

I also call shenanigans on the SSD making load times drastically faster. It's been proven over and over again that load times are almost 100% CPU-dependent, and that SSDs have little to no effect on load times.

[scootle]

I also call shenanigans on the SSD making load times drastically faster. It's been proven over and over again that load times are almost 100% CPU-dependent, and that SSDs have little to no effect on load times.

 

You need to take the time to understand how the game engine caches the game assets on the disk before you spout off like this. Please do some research first.

 

http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?t=394951

Edited April 27, 2012 by scootle

[chrisdaskunk]

Sorry, but according to resource monitor it's not. While there certainly is disk activity at times during the long load most of the time there is no disk activity at all.

 

I think the internet connection does a big part on that. I didnt notice much difference copying the game from HDD to ssd. only a few seconds. Alltough i dont have that bad loading times, about 30 secs on the big planets

[revial]

You need to take the time to understand how the game engine caches the game assets on the disk before you spout off like this. Please do some research first.

 

http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?t=394951

 

Which in no way backs up the claim that a SSD drastically improves load times. I have a SSD, and my laptop does not. I know, from experience, that it doesn't. As does hundreds of other people in older threads concerning load times. A SSD improvement of your load time is completely negligible, and it's almost criminal to try to insinuate that it isn't, and that people should shell out a bunch of money for a SSD, for this game, because it's simply not going to improve your load times in any meaningful way.

 

The one common denominator in every single previous epically long thread concerning load times is the better the CPU, the better the load time. People with really crappy CPUs, are the people with 3+ minute load times. Regardless of how good their disk is.

Edited April 27, 2012 by revial

[Ancen]

Which in no way backs up the claim that a SSD drastically improves load times. I have a SSD, and my laptop does not. I know, from experience, that it doesn't. As does hundreds of other people in older threads concerning load times. A SSD improvement of your load time is completely negligible, and it's almost criminal to try to insinuate that it isn't, and that people should shell out a bunch of money for a SSD, for this game, because it's simply not going to improve your load times in any meaningful way.

 

You couldn't be more wrong if you tried... not sure if you're being serious here.

[Jackobite]

To my shame I posted at the start of the game in a guys post about long load times that my load times were under a min for each planet, I still stand by that tho, I think they were.

Today, Ill look at the screen for 2 mins sometimes, other times it goes ok, it is (for me) definitely got longer since about 1.2

Does anyone else "hang" at around 20% for ages then finally the other 80% sweeps up in 4 or 5 seconds?

 

I do not have a huge computer I bought yesterday for 3k, I do have a nice year old gamers computer from Overclockers, Its not clocked or anything like that but it should be enough to load in a game in under a min.

[QuiJonPed]

I appreciate you trying to troubleshoot for me, but I respectfully disagree. I consider load times of around 30sec to be acceptable and that is what I usually get in most games-- mmos-- that I play. Why is Swtor the exception? Not all the time, but it is staggering, to me, when it does happen.

 

I'm dying to get an ssd, but the capacity to dollar ratio isn't where I want it yet.

 

I concur. You shouldn't need a SSD just to load in less than a minute.

 

Since 1.2, the load times for me have increased significantly, so much so that if a WZ pops before I zone, it will timeout before I load. This didn't happen for me pre 1.2.

 

So yes, now I make sure I enter before zoning, but that's not the point I am making (premptive).

[Bruthor]

I just build a new highend system with a Samsung 830 256GB SSD, and I also can't really see any difference in loading times.

 

Outside SWTOR however, it's an entirely different matter. My loading times have improved drastically.