Fallout 2 Load/Save survey and possible solution.
Nathan Carter (ARTS)
I'm getting the impression that load/save times are influenced by whether
the game is installed on the computer's primary drive/partition or on a
secondary drive/partition.
For those of you who are experiencing "unacceptable" load/save times, is
Fallout 2 installed on the same drive/partition as your operating system
(i.e. the C: drive)?
For those of you who don't have a problem with long load times, is the
game installed on a different drive or partition?
I installed the game on my secondary drive and have pretty fast times for
loads, saves, and town transitions. Admittedly, they're slowing down now
that I have done a lot more stuff, but when I started my loadgames were in
the range of 5-15 seconds and town transitions ranged from instantaneous
to 10 seconds. PII300, 64MB, 24x CD-Rom.
- Mega
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|Nathan Carter Senior Student Technology Consultant|
|Fine Arts Computing University of South Florida, Tampa|
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James N. Daniel, III
>
> I'm getting the impression that load/save times are influenced by whether
> the game is installed on the computer's primary drive/partition or on a
> secondary drive/partition.
>
> For those of you who are experiencing "unacceptable" load/save times, is
> Fallout 2 installed on the same drive/partition as your operating system
> (i.e. the C: drive)?
>
> For those of you who don't have a problem with long load times, is the
> game installed on a different drive or partition?
>
> I installed the game on my secondary drive and have pretty fast times for
> loads, saves, and town transitions. Admittedly, they're slowing down now
> that I have done a lot more stuff, but when I started my loadgames were in
> the range of 5-15 seconds and town transitions ranged from instantaneous
> to 10 seconds. PII300, 64MB, 24x CD-Rom.
>
I have it on a secondary drive (on partition E:), but it has become
unacceptably slow. It seems to be mostly a function of size.
As near as I can tell, the procedures involved are doing lots of processing
as well as loading/saving of the data. While I know there's tons of
data to handle, I sincerely doubt there is so much that it should go that
slow. I could copy 100 of megs in the same time it takes to load (about a
minute or so). What I suspect is going on in there (from my experience as
a software QA), is that the load/save module does not or cannot save game
information in the same way that it is stored in memory, so it goes through
a simple, robust, but time-consuming loop to translate it, and that the
procedure loop is "load-translate-load-translate-load-translate-(and so on)",
which would quickly slow down load times. A quicker procedure would be
to translate info into the game on an as-needed basis, otherwise storing
it in its saved form: we have to pause anyway to enter a new screen, and
I'd rather wait an extra 5-10 seconds on a new screen than spend that
time all on loading.
Of course, this is all sheer speculation on my part, and I could be way
off base. Also, it's such a glaringly obvious problem, I'm sure Interplay
has it as a top priority on their first patch. It shouldn't be too hard to
fix, but probably requires a rewrite of the save/load engine since I really
believe it would have been fixed already were it a simple fix. For this kind
of game, with tons of little things to store as data, one almost needs to
write a database engine to manage it all efficiently.
James Daniel
Craig Horn
I have only one drive and one partition, using the large (not humongous)
install. Load times are around 10-15seconds early in the game, but go to
40-45 seconds late in the game. I understand it could be much worse, so I'm
not complaining.
Craig
joe
my specs are better than yours
Nathan Carter (ARTS) wrote in message ...
>
>I'm getting the impression that load/save times are influenced by whether
>the game is installed on the computer's primary drive/partition or on a
>secondary drive/partition.
>
>For those of you who are experiencing "unacceptable" load/save times, is
>Fallout 2 installed on the same drive/partition as your operating system
>(i.e. the C: drive)?
>
>For those of you who don't have a problem with long load times, is the
>game installed on a different drive or partition?
>
>
>I installed the game on my secondary drive and have pretty fast times for
>loads, saves, and town transitions. Admittedly, they're slowing down now
>that I have done a lot more stuff, but when I started my loadgames were in
>the range of 5-15 seconds and town transitions ranged from instantaneous
>to 10 seconds. PII300, 64MB, 24x CD-Rom.
>
Carl Larson
so fragmentation is not an issue, humongous install. Load/save times
began unnoticeably fast, but have slowed as the game has progressed
(currently at the NCR, Vault 13, Vault 15 area), so that now they are
around 30 seconds.
Carl
Craig Horn wrote in message <727i4m$d7f$1...@newsin-1.starnet.net>...
Matt
load times are pushing 90 seconds.
Matt
Peacedog1
>I'm getting the impression that load/save times are influenced by whether
>the game is installed on the computer's primary drive/partition or on a
>secondary drive/partition.
>
>For those of you who are experiencing "unacceptable" load/save times, is
>Fallout 2 installed on the same drive/partition as your operating system
>(i.e. the C: drive)?
Yes. Install size seems to have an effect on load times as well. I started
with the mega when I first played. By the time I got to the Den, Walking
between areas took around a minute; loads and saves longer. It got alot worse
as I played on. I went to the second largest install size and things increased
dramatically. Walking between areas never takes longer than 10-15 secs, but
loads and saves have gotten bad again, over a minute. I am very far into the
game however, and for awhile loads and saves were no problem. Black Isle has
said they are aware of the problem, and it is a priority for the first patch.
Ryan J Franklin
Nathan Carter (ARTS) <nca...@satie.arts.usf.edu> wrote:
>
>For those of you who are experiencing "unacceptable" load/save times, is
>Fallout 2 installed on the same drive/partition as your operating system
>(i.e. the C: drive)?
>that I have done a lot more stuff, but when I started my loadgames were in
>the range of 5-15 seconds and town transitions ranged from instantaneous
>to 10 seconds. PII300, 64MB, 24x CD-Rom.
I have the same system setup, and Fallout 2 is installed (the humongous
install) on a secondary partition of my drive. Some other possibly
relevant information: I have an AWE64 soundcard, a 4MB AGP Matrox
Milennium II video card, Win95, DirectX 6.0, and all my drivers
are current as of two weeks ago (including the IntelliMouse driver).
My loadgames and transitions were really fast at the beginning of the
game, and now that I'm very close to the end they're somewhere in the
40-60 second range. For the record, I've been shutting down most of the
background programs (virus checker, plus anything I know isn't really
needed, like some graphics control panel software) before running the game
as kind of a voodoo charm against encountering bugs.
Does the charm work? I don't know--my car is still in one piece, but I
can't chat with President Tandi in NCR because it freezes my system. (I
have to take the mission and end conversation immediately, which is _far_
more annoying than waiting a minute to reload a saved game, in my opinion.
I want to hear the rest of the dialogue!) I get the boxing ring bug (game
can't handle fighting 2 bouts in a row, I have to save, exit, and reload
before I can fight again), the Pretty Boy Lloyd bug (game freezes if I
enter the grave and try to move to the box), and the game's booted me to
Windows a few times with an illegal operation. I've stumbled into a
couple of scripting errors (nothing too serious), and there's a fair
number of typos in the text (including a ranger in NCR who says
"Greetings(player name here)!" instead of actually having my name there).
All in all, it's on the low side of playable; the game itself is great,
and I love it to death, and while I can find workarounds for some of the
bugs I mention above, they still annoy me deeply. Not so much that I
would stop playing (I'm almost finished!), but enough to put a dark cloud
over my enjoyment of the game. Thank god Black Isle reads the newsgroup
and their web page's message boards, 'cause that makes it more likely that
the upcoming patch will fix these things.
--
they damn well better fix tandi
fran...@u.arizona.edu
Nathan Mates
Nathan Carter (ARTS) <nca...@satie.arts.usf.edu> wrote:
>the game is installed on the computer's primary drive/partition or on a
>secondary drive/partition.
>For those of you who are experiencing "unacceptable" load/save times, is
>Fallout 2 installed on the same drive/partition as your operating system
>(i.e. the C: drive)?
>For those of you who don't have a problem with long load times, is the
>game installed on a different drive or partition?
I've had glacial loading times off of both C: and E: with the
maximal install for both. System details: Pentium 200 (no MMX), Win98
w/ DX6 and all critical updates installed, 64MB EDO DRAM, SB AWE32
with +8MB Soundfont ram, Matrox Milennium II 8MB PCI, Adaptec 2940UW
SCSI controller on motherboard. All drivers updated about 2 weeks ago
via websites of makers.
My HDs are both 7200RPM UW SCSI Quantum Atlas IIs; C: and E: are 2
and 7GB partitions on the first physical drive, and D: is a 2GB
partition on the second drive. Fixed swapfile at 256MB on D:. Plextor
12/20X SCSI CDROM as S:, but FO2 disk not in drive after install. HDs
defrag'd w/ Norton Utils before and after install.
Load times have been slow from the beginning of the game. Loads do
NOT seem to be disk bound-- the HD access light flickers maybe once
every 1/2 to 1 second during the duration of loading, about 45+
seconds. Long map loading times when walking around (after loading)
appear to be correlated with amount of graphics to load for the new
map-- Klamath's 2 more 'downtown' maps can be changed easily, but
going from either to the more wilderness maps (Canyon, Torr's brahmen,
Still) is a _long_ load. Load times also seem to increase as I play
for hours on end, as if FO2's running an internal memory cache, and
it's getting badly fragmented.
Nathan Mates
--
<*> Nathan Mates http://www.visi.com/~nathan/ <*>
# What are the facts? Again and again and again-- what are the _facts_?
# Shun wishful thinking, avoid opinion, care not what the neighbors
# think-- what are the facts, and to how many decimal places? -R.A. Heinlein
Nathan Carter (ARTS)
> I've had glacial loading times off of both C: and E: with the
> maximal install for both. System details: Pentium 200 (no MMX), Win98
> w/ DX6 and all critical updates installed, 64MB EDO DRAM, SB AWE32
> with +8MB Soundfont ram, Matrox Milennium II 8MB PCI, Adaptec 2940UW
> SCSI controller on motherboard. All drivers updated about 2 weeks ago
> via websites of makers.
>
> My HDs are both 7200RPM UW SCSI Quantum Atlas IIs; C: and E: are 2
> and 7GB partitions on the first physical drive, and D: is a 2GB
> partition on the second drive. Fixed swapfile at 256MB on D:. Plextor
> 12/20X SCSI CDROM as S:, but FO2 disk not in drive after install. HDs
> defrag'd w/ Norton Utils before and after install.
Interesting.
Have you tried installing to D: yet?
As a hardware kinda guy, I'm genuinely curious as to what's causing some
people to have really long load times and other people to have short load
times.
I'd be more curious, of course, if my load times were of the longish type.
heh, heh. Guess I got lucky.
Erik Harris
>I'm getting the impression that load/save times are influenced by whether
>the game is installed on the computer's primary drive/partition or on a
>secondary drive/partition.
Only drive, second partition. The load times on my P2-400 w/ 128 megs RAM and
one of the fastest UDMA hard drives available (DeskStar 14GXP) are just as
slow as, if not slower than Fallout 1's load times were on my P-166 w/ 32 megs
RAM and a SCSI drive that is quite slow by today's standards. (i.e. much
slower than my current UDMA drive).
So there goes your theory, since your load times improved on a secondary
partition. :-)
Erik Harris http://w3.to/erik/ esh7@c_rnell.edu
ICQ: 2610172 ftp://esh7.resnet.cornell.edu
Chinese Martial Arts Assoc. @ Cornell: http://w3.to/CMAAC/
To avoid unsolicited mail, my address at the top is INCORRECT.
Change the underscore to an "o".
Olaf
Nathan Carter (ARTS) wrote in message ...
>
>
>I installed the game on my secondary drive and have pretty fast times for
>loads, saves, and town transitions. Admittedly, they're slowing down now
>that I have done a lot more stuff, but when I started my loadgames were in
>the range of 5-15 seconds and town transitions ranged from instantaneous
>to 10 seconds. PII300, 64MB, 24x CD-Rom.
Most people's times are good at the beginning. They start to slow donw big
time when you hit Den. I am 99% sure that there is nothing that can be done
from our end, it is up to Interplay to get a solution out.
olaf
Jason Hegel
>Does the charm work? I don't know--my car is still in one piece, but I
>can't chat with President Tandi in NCR because it freezes my system. (I
>have to take the mission and end conversation immediately, which is _far_
>more annoying than waiting a minute to reload a saved game, in my opinion.
>I want to hear the rest of the dialogue!)
I have this problem as well. I called Interplay and they were less than
helpful.
They told me to get DirectX "Certified" drivers before they would help.
Fine, but I have a Yahamma (sp.) DS-XG PCI Sound Card and a Matrox Marvel
G200 and neither company offers "Certified" drivers.
I tried to explain this to the guy on the phone but all he could say was
that I should expect crashes and lockups if I didn't have "Certified"
drivers.
I tried calling back an hour later and got someone much more helpful. He
didn't solve the problem but at least he didn't send me on my way without so
much as an apology.
IMHO the above excuse is hooey.
Jason
Bob L
patch will not be compatible with version 1.0 saves. oh, shit