Long Screen Loads

[Drahumira]

Hi there, new player.


I did some searching here on the forums and guides and was not able to find the answer I am looking for.

I am noticing when crossing some lines that I go to a loading screen.  Some are quick and others (as in entering Hydlaa area) take a very long time, sometimes up to a couple of minutes.  I was wondering if this is normal or if perhaps my laptop is unable to handle the game?

Your help is greatly appreciated,

Enkari

[bilbous]

Some of them are major boundary crossings and have a lot of stuff to load, others should be almost instantaneous. The major ones tend to be in the artificial passes, the cut out cones or the golden rock formations in front of the cities, the arch into East Hydlaa. I'm not sure why the minor ones seem to get longer at times but it could be that a zombie PS process is still running -- this also results in very low frame rates. If you find yourself suffering from this check your task manager to be sure only one instance of planeshift is running. It happens after crashes but it also happens after intentional shut downs.

[LigH]

Loading a map does not load only the next map alone (and Hydlaaplaza has already much more geometry information and different textures than most other maps), but also parts of the adjacent maps to ensure that you can see the next sector looking through the next map-loading portals (and Hydlaaplaza has a few more adjacent maps than others).

You might switch to "Background Loader: World" in the PlaneShift launcher. Then the adjacent sectors will be loaded while traveling. That means you can probably pass a map-loading portal without a map loading break; but loading breaks may appear anywhere else at sector boundaries, e.g. under the houses built over the entrances to the East Passage, in both directions. Except you walk slowly in such areas, and the map loading process finished in the background already before you pass the sector boundary.

You may probably find this mode rather annoying after a while.

[Aensor]

I think the background loader for maps is disabled at the moment.

If your laptop got enough ram, i.e. 4GB, you could try to get the PS art to load from a ramdisk..

[Mordaan]

Background loading once was very buggy but in one of the recent releases it began working very well.  I switched to it and it reduced the number of map loads significantly.  I use it all the time now.  Of course it's only effective after you've entered an area at least once.  The first time still requires the map load.

But yes, I have noticed longer and more frequent map loads than in the past.  So it's not just you.  But 2 minutes is a long time.  Try deleting the shadercache file.  The downside there is at the very beginning, things will be even slower as the file gets rebuilt.  But after visiting every area, things may improve a bit.