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[drhead]

My game is taking about 15 or more minutes to get from the launcher to the main menu.  I have no clue why it takes so long, not only because I have played it on this machine before with few problems, but also because I have a fairly modern CPU, and one of the fastest SSDs available on the market today.  During my troubleshooting, I have tried uninstalling the game and reinstalling it, as well as updating Java to the latest version.  I tried launching the game using the batch file in the starsector-core directory, which appeared to open a console along with the game that logged events.  I noticed that, as it was loading textures (really small ones, most less than 0.1 MB) it was loading them at a very steady rate of no more than two textures per second.  There is absolutely no reason why it should be limited to going this slowly.  Is there anything that could be done to fix this?

[Alex]

Hi - sorry about the trouble. I have to ask, have you tried rebooting?

If it's taking a while to load small textures, the two likely culprits are:
1) The harddrive - maybe it's on the fritz? You'd probably also experience other problems if this was the case, though.
2) The video card - is it possible you've got two video cards, an integrated one on the motherboard, and one "proper" good one? If the OS all of a sudden decided to run the game using the integrated card, that could cause a drop in performance, though I still wouldn't expect loading to be *that* affected.

How long are we taking here to fully load the game, btw? And how does it perform once the loading is finished? Also, are you running with any mods?

Another question is whether it's possible you've got something else that's running in the background and interfering with the game. Would be more of an issue if it wasn't an SSD, probably, but...

Another thing to look at are the video card drivers; if you've updated them recently, it's possible that a driver update broke something. Wouldn't be the first time!


Basically, as far as the texture loading code, it hasn't changed in quite a long time. So, more likely than not, *something* changed on your end that's causing this... the question is, what?

[drhead]

Thanks for the fast response.

This problem was happening yesterday, and wasn't as much of a practical problem then since I was only loading the game up once for a long session, and now it is a problem since I'm trying to install a mod and edit in a save game that has all of my character's stats.  Since then I have rebooted.  I do have two graphics cards in an SLI setup, but I've had that for a while with no issues.  I have tried this with and without mods and it happens in both cases, and with mods the problem is more severe since there are obviously a lot more textures.  I am running NVIDIA beta drivers, though, and I see now how that might be causing a problem.  I'm going to go roll those back to the latest stable release and see how that works.

I also forgot to mention that I tried using the last version of Starsector to test this bug as well, which supports the idea that it wasn't any sort of change in the code.

[Alex]

Thanks for the additional info, hope the graphics drivers are the culprit. Hmm. A couple more notes:
1) If, once the game finishes loading, loading up a save doesn't take longer than normal, that would support the "something wrong with graphics card/drivers" theory.
2) I've seen cases  (er, not personally, but it's been reported) where the game was properly using the "good" graphics card for a while and then the OS decided to switch to using the integrated for no discernible reason.

[drhead]

Apparently my computer has other ideas about me rolling back my drivers, since I have gotten three consecutive BSODs when attempting to roll them back.  This is probably going to be the last time that I try beta drivers.

And yes, save games do load normally once the game is actually loaded, so I'm fairly convinced by now that it is the driver.  I'm going to try a clean install and see if that works.

[Alex]

Ugh, good luck! Hope that goes well.

[drhead]

I managed to roll back to the latest WHQL driver (335.23), and the bug is still there.  Either the bug has existed in NVIDIA drivers for a while, or it isn't the graphics drivers.  It'd really help to have someone else with a NVIDIA card say whether they get normal load times with these drivers, but I'd suspect that this bug would be a bit more widespread if it were just the graphics drivers.  I'm also really not willing to download and roll back through several driver releases in order to troubleshoot this bug, as annoying as it is.

Is there anything else as far as standard fixes go?  I'm not really sure how to proceed from here, other than to attempt to run the game in a VM running the latest release of Ubuntu (which I am equipped enough and almost desperate enough to try tomorrow).

[Alex]

To be honest, I'm kind of stumped.

Have you checked the system event log to make sure you aren't getting a ton of hardware errors?

Another test that might be worth trying is to run the game using the integrated graphics card. That'd take the NVIDIA drivers and the card itself out of the equation.

If you have multiple hard drives (or a USB stick handy), running the game off that might help narrow it down, too. The game doesn't depend on being in the install location to run, you should be able to copy it anywhere and still have it work.

[MesoTroniK]

drhead, what video cards are you using in your SLI setup?

[drhead]

I'm using two 560 Ti 448 Core cards.  I've tried copying the game to another hard drive, and this didn't help.  I'm not entirely sure I have an integrated graphics chip on my motherboard to test this with, either, and I'd really rather not do the messing around in the BIOS that I would have to do in order to test this, or at least not tonight.  I'm not so sure about the Event Viewer, either, I'm not seeing anything that is very suggestive of any hardware problems.  At this point I'm thinking it's something with Java or one of the java-related things the game is using.  I haven't gone too far into learning about programming, but I just find it odd that it isn't showing any sign of trying to use 100% of the resources I'm giving it -- it almost seems as if it is being slow on purpose.

Though I have at least solved the issues I was having with troubleshooting the mod I was trying to install, so at least I can launch the game and alt-tab out while waiting 20 minutes for it to load at this point (which is what I have been doing).

[MesoTroniK]

Ok, the only reason why I was wondering is because I have a GTX 780 TI and every recent driver I have tried with the exception of 331.82 (from December) was having massive issues with every game I fed it.

[Dark.Revenant]

Do a clean wipe of Java and install just Java 7.

[Alex]

The version of Java really shouldn't matter, especially if the game hasn't been modified to use an external version and just uses what it's bundled with, though. But as nothing else comes to mind... hmm.

[drhead]

I do have Java 7 Update 55 installed, by the way (both 32 and 64 bit versions).  During my troubleshooting, I did try using different versions of Java in the Starsector folder, and it didn't help.

Hmm.  If this is a problem with Java or LWJGL, shouldn't I be able to make a similar problem happen with other games that use Java and LWJGL?  Like Minecraft, for example?  Just a thought...

[Alex]

That'd make sense, yeah, so it's probably not.

Oh!!! I think I might know what it is. Do you by chance have vsync forced on? The progress bar when loading updates the display after every asset is loaded, and if vsync is forced on, that's going to take 1/60th of a second, which *really* adds up. So, the game turns vsync off during the loading phase, but if the graphics card forces it on...