Rimworld Loading times

[filippe999]

Hello fellow colonists of this rimworld!

Latel i've been adding many mods to my game, and the loading times went from a minute to two in the vannila game to almost 25m now, with all the mods installed, is it possible to lower the loading times? 25m is just way too much.

[warden]

25 minutes, are you being serious? You've timed it? Something's badly off with the mods you run. Even 1-2 minutes for vanilla is a long time to load, you might consider upgrading your hardware. An SSD drive is one of the cheapest improvements any computer can get, even laptops.

My load time for the largest map size possible, with a 5+ year running colony, was about 20-30 seconds. About a dozen or so mods.

[Smikis]

I've noticed that if you tab out and just hover over tab checking if its loaded it will always show that is still loading until you fully maximise game window, maybe thats your issue, you just tab out of the game while loading and just hovering to see if its loaded ( something I do as well )

[SSS]

I've noticed that if you tab out and just hover over tab checking if its loaded it will always show that is still loading until you fully maximise game window, maybe thats your issue, you just tab out of the game while loading and just hovering to see if its loaded ( something I do as well )

This may be the culprit. There's an option to run the game in the background that's deselected by default. It won't load if you minimize unless that's turned on.

[Goldenpotatoes]

I remember reading awhile back about VPN programs (hamachi, tuungle, ect) causing some serious increase of loadtimes. I used to have god-awful loadtimes like yours, but after removing every VPN program I had installed, it went from 5-10 minutes to around 30-60 seconds.

So yeah, if you have anything like that installed, uninstall it and try again.

[skullywag]

Modded with 50+ mods takes 2 mins max...something is wrong, that isnt normal. Not sure what bar the above checks though.

[Goo Poni]

My game takes a few minutes to load, enough that I can go make a quick sandwich and still be back in time to catch it loading in. Didn't do that before with A7, even on a 3 year colony that ran like crap with TTM and a whole lotta extras

[Panzer]

Same problem as Goo Poni, a few alphas back loading was fine, now it takes some minutes to load. I can tell when the loading is almost done though, I can hear the geothermals starting up ^^

[Tynan]

Unfortunately there seems to be a bug in the Unity code that loads images and sounds for mods that can make it take up to 20s per image.

https://ludeon.com/mantis/view.php?id=506

I may have to write some new code to work around the Unity image loading code entirely because yeah, it's pretty bad.

[kic]

Yikes. That's a heck of a loading time/bug. I think I'd leave the game running all the time if I had that happen.

[filippe999]

I guess i'll try to stop running skype and bittorrent to see how my loading times roll, also, I meant the time it takes for the game to start(double-click the .exe until main menu, the game itself once loaded takes 40s at max to load a save), let's see how allowing it to run in background affects my loading times, thanks for the answers

Don't see any noticeable difference when not running VPN programs, also toggling on to run on background makes no difference on the startup time or the time it takes to open/close the mods menu

[RemingtonRyder]

I found a blog post on this issue, by the way.

At least, I'm guessing it is, based on the symptoms.

[filippe999]

So i've decided to realltime how long it takes to load my game, from starting the application until the main menu, my original mod list is http://pastebin.com/KWDvdBtY]here.
So I decided to time how long it takes to load this list, and when it hit 36m I gave up, so my max time is 36m.
Measuring time until main menu:

• Base game no mods on the list: 29s(30s for reference);
• Base game with 1 mod(3D Print Guns & Armors(1.01))=45s(+15s) ;
• Base game with 2 mods(Less Incident Trolling V 1.2.3)=45s, I guess overhaul mods don't need to load textures so the blog post from MarvinKosh explains this result;
• Base game with 3 mods(Auto-hunt Beacon v2.0)=1m 5s(+20s), didn't read the requirements on the forum post, i'll add the mod mentioned and see if the time improves;
• Base game with 4 mods(Common(CY))=1m 5s, no change, I'm guessing times only gets worse if the mods adds any graphics, staying true to the blog post again;
• Base game with 5 mods(Cybernetic Storm v3.5)=6m 49s(+5m 44s) , now that's unexpected, bad thing is I enjoy this mod very much, as a matter of fact i was gathering enough cloth to make the nanosteel basing from it  , the blog post states loading times of textures so perhaps if i compress the mod image files it can get smaller?;
• Full modded game: 36m+.

Now i'll enable the mods one at a time and see which one adds the more startup time.
Just noticed a major flaw in my testing methodology from above, i was adding all mods, one at a time and the time kept scaling up, although what i wanted to know in reality was how long that mod took to load, not how long the whole game took to load, as such from now on i'll only add the mod mentioned and subtract from the base, that way I can get results faster:
Same settings as up except that i subjected all imaged from cybernetics storm mod to the .png compressing service of this website=6m 48s(-1s) from previous time

[skullywag]

try deleting the texture folder, itll error but see if its any quicker.

[RemingtonRyder]

^
^
^
Basically the Unity image loader reads in three bytes at a time, with no buffer. At least that's what I read. Understandably, this means textures take far longer to load than they should.