Load times in Unity RPGs

[Jenkem]

every fucking topic on the codex will always loop back to obsidian. you people need help.

 

[Roguey]

I don't think Owlcat or Obsidian even tried salvaging it.

Kingmaker runs well for me so far. Perhaps I'll run into those increasingly long loading times, but that's a consequence of the save file getting larger and larger on account of it needing to keep track of every change in every map you visit.

 

[guestposting]

I don't think Owlcat or Obsidian even tried salvaging it.

Kingmaker runs well for me so far. Perhaps I'll run into those increasingly long loading times, but that's a consequence of the save file getting larger and larger on account of it needing to keep track of every change in every map you visit.

The number of saves also seems to make it worse. I deleted a bunch of old ones and my load times are now much faster, even in the last chapter.

 

[Tacgnol]

I don't think Owlcat or Obsidian even tried salvaging it.

Kingmaker runs well for me so far. Perhaps I'll run into those increasingly long loading times, but that's a consequence of the save file getting larger and larger on account of it needing to keep track of every change in every map you visit.

The number of saves also seems to make it worse. I deleted a bunch of old ones and my load times are now much faster, even in the last chapter.

It's worth using that cleanup mod on the PF nexus as well.

Deleting all the left over studded leather armours and greatswords when you leave a map makes a pretty big difference.

 

[Lacrymas]

Kingmaker runs well for me so far. Perhaps I'll run into those increasingly long loading times, but that's a consequence of the save file getting larger and larger on account of it needing to keep track of every change in every map you visit.

This is what caused the lengthy loading times in PoE1 too, having to track every change (read: items on ground and sold to merchants) on every map. But that is what screams unoptimized to me. The engine only has to keep track of that and it falls apart? What would happen if it was more complicated?

 

[fantadomat]

Kingmaker runs well for me so far. Perhaps I'll run into those increasingly long loading times, but that's a consequence of the save file getting larger and larger on account of it needing to keep track of every change in every map you visit.

This is what caused the lengthy loading times in PoE1 too, having to track every change (read: items on ground and sold to merchants) on every map. But that is what screams unoptimized to me. The engine only has to keep track of that and it falls apart? What would happen if it was more complicated?

Not really,poe games have long times regardless of your progress. Also i didn't noticed kingmaker having that long loading time,for me it was pretty passable,5-10 seconds...maybe 15.

 

[Nano]

Nah, Kingmaker's loading times were pretty bad, even on an SSD. You can tell it's bad when the player tries to minimize area transitions because of it.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

It's not Unity, it's bad developers. Atom(Unity game) has near instant loading times.

 

[conan_edw]

Buy an SSD

 

[fantadomat]

It's not Unity, it's bad developers. Atom(Unity game) has near instant loading times.

That is true,most devs just use premade shit on unity and don't bother optimizing the game.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

Kingmaker runs well for me so far. Perhaps I'll run into those increasingly long loading times, but that's a consequence of the save file getting larger and larger on account of it needing to keep track of every change in every map you visit.

This is what caused the lengthy loading times in PoE1 too, having to track every change (read: items on ground and sold to merchants) on every map. But that is what screams unoptimized to me. The engine only has to keep track of that and it falls apart? What would happen if it was more complicated?

Not really,poe games have long times regardless of your progress. Also i didn't noticed kingmaker having that long loading time,for me it was pretty passable,5-10 seconds...maybe 15.

iirc my kingmaker savefile was nearing 500mb uncompressed towards the end of the game. Loading times were taking forever.

 

[Lacrymas]

Not really,poe games have long times regardless of your progress. Also i didn't noticed kingmaker having that long loading time,for me it was pretty passable,5-10 seconds...maybe 15.

PoE1's loading times become worse the more you play. PoE2's are terrible in general, I don't know if they get even worse later on. It's also well-known that Kingmaker's loading times become worse for the same reason as PoE. This is not speculation, these are things confirmed by the devs themselves.

 

[fantadomat]

Kingmaker runs well for me so far. Perhaps I'll run into those increasingly long loading times, but that's a consequence of the save file getting larger and larger on account of it needing to keep track of every change in every map you visit.

This is what caused the lengthy loading times in PoE1 too, having to track every change (read: items on ground and sold to merchants) on every map. But that is what screams unoptimized to me. The engine only has to keep track of that and it falls apart? What would happen if it was more complicated?

Not really,poe games have long times regardless of your progress. Also i didn't noticed kingmaker having that long loading time,for me it was pretty passable,5-10 seconds...maybe 15.

iirc my kingmaker savefile was nearing 500mb uncompressed towards the end of the game. Loading times were taking forever.

Not really,poe games have long times regardless of your progress. Also i didn't noticed kingmaker having that long loading time,for me it was pretty passable,5-10 seconds...maybe 15.

PoE1's loading times become worse the more you play. PoE2's are terrible in general, I don't know if they get even worse later on. It's also well-known that Kingmaker's loading times become worse for the same reason as PoE. This is not speculation, these are things confirmed by the devs themselves.

Hmm not arguing against that,was just saying that i didn't experienced such a thing. You know how computers are,some toasters have a problem with the game,others don't. Did you guys used a manual save or a quick save?

 

[thesecret1]

To me, Kingmaker was fucking unplayable on a HDD. I spent more time staring at a loading screen than playing. Then I upgraded my PC, got an SSD, and suddenly found myself on a higher plane of existence where loading times do not exist. Seriously guys, get an SSD, it's so, so worth it.

As for Unity, it's got a lot of really shitty things optimization-wise, often done in the name of helping inexperienced devs getting shit to function. That being said, those things CAN be worked around (usually by overloading Unity's shit with your own that does the same thing but runs much better). Of course, it's extra work and requires some experience with both the engine and programming, hence most Unity games (often made by total amateurs) do not have this kind of optimization. As for devs, a large part is that the new generation of game programmers does not have experience with optimization. They often only programmed stuff for PC, and today's PCs are so powerful that you can do a lot of lazy shit there without worrying about performance. Of course, that lazy shit adds up, so eventually you run into problems, but by then you'd often need to rewrite the entire game code, and the programmers who wrote it still don't know anything about optimization. Old school devs programmed their shit on weak hardware where every instruction was precious, and automatically write performance-friendly code even today.

 

[Cat Dude]

Unity engine was the only reason I upgraded my gfx card a few years ago.

 

[Cat Dude]

rpgcodex: where games suck if they have bad graphics

Correction; Badly performed gfx

 

[onemananadhisdroid]

I didn't have any problems with Deadfire's loading times though, and I played at max settings.

Did you play it without the DLCs and on a super quick SSD?

Yeah. I played it on SSD.

I have a fairly entry level SSD, but same. Sure, it takes a good few seconds, but nothing overly instrusive. That said, the decision to have auto-save non-optional is a bad one, in particular as there are too many scene transitions in city hub/s. Auto-saving may not actually take that much time, but it really adds up. Now Pathfinder on the other hand... it takes ages to even boot that up.

The worst I've ever had was playing Tyranny on a) an old HDD and b) with but 4 gigs of RAM. It depended a lot on the maps, but Lethian's Crossing took minutes to load up. Every time I got there I alt-tabbed to the desktop and went browsing. :D Tbf, the official minimum requirements list 6 gigs. But since I could run PoE1 fine as well, I had given it a shot regardless.

Isn't Atom RPG also Unity made? The loading times on that one are crazy fast. This goes for saving / loading games as well. How big an area is seems also to make little difference. Then again, visually, it's a game of lesser fidelity than PoE, Pathfinder et all.

 

[JarlFrank]

Every time I got there I alt-tabbed to the desktop and went browsing.

Borderless Window Mode is the greatest blessing of the modern age.

 

[Tigranes]

BG2 on release interior / zone transition loading took around as long as POE on release for me.

But then, I had a hotwired potato for most of the 2000's. Morrowind 8fps never forget

 

[Cyberarmy]

Heh, I played King's Quest 8 back then, no loading screen can bother me anymore.

 

[pomenitul]

Loading times in the PoEs have never been an issue on my end (SSD ftw), but I agree that their optimization leaves much to be desired. In Deadfire, especially, I still get micro-stuttering in small areas where I'm hovering between 140 and 150 FPS.

 

[Horvatii]

The reason Deadfire having bad loading time is the virtual file system they use. I dont know if its Unity fault or not.

But loading a savegame costs your 20.000 file opens (potentially disk access), 80.000 reads (something like ReadFile api), 29k of Other...
2.2 gig of data 'read'.
Reads are probably the main issue, becuase for example 'characters.unity3d' is opened 2 times and read from 22000 times - a file which is 2gb is read from for 428mb.
vfx.unity3d is only 340mb file on disc, is read 29000 times for 308mb. Might have just loaded it into ram straight...

In blue is high probability file access through disc. Which is supported by red in CPU utilization, which means kernel time, which means disk access through drivers, so file access through disc.
When all stuff is opened, you have memory read/write/move of some kind in purple.

There is also super effienceint stuff at game start like touching Partymemeber.png 737 times... and similar greatness.

 

[Horvatii]

^ I might try to run the procmon trace on ATOM later.

 

[Crispy]

People getting severe FPS drops in I-forgot-the-name-of-the-first-big-city.

There's a fix for that in PoE 2. I don't remember if it works for PoE 1 as well.

 

[pomenitul]

Special K never worked for me.