how to reduce load times

Generally speaking, what aspects of a game world affect the load time the most? I can think of a few things off the top of my head:

1. size/amount of stuff that you've built
2. # of and size of asteroids
3. mods
4. graphics settings

I know that mods definitely affect load times, but how much do these other factors come into play?

I'm just always amazed that save times are so fast, yet load times take considerably longer. Whenever I see world sizes, it's always <10MB. What causes maps to take so long to load then?

 

I believe that the load time is also Steam fault. Also, my pC goes extremely slow after loading a big world, the HD is full working all the time. I remember when I could just open the game and load a world, then Alt-Tab to watch youtube, put some music, or whatever without problem. but now is impossible, If i Alt-Tab now, the PC just freezes for several minutes. Even when I close the game I have to wait a few minutes (and im talking about 10to20 minutes wtf?) It return to normality faster if I kill SE process and Steam. I dont know what is going on, but the game performance was muerderededed I few patches ago

 

be sure to de-frag your stuff.

 

If you run see in full screen window mode alt tabbing causes no issues

 

I've had much better load times since installing SE on a RamDisk. There is still a wait to download the mods over and over and over and over and over and over again, but a vanilla world loads very quickly, even when there is a lot of stuff populating it.

 

Well, there are tricks to making a large world fit on a small save file. I can think of one at the moment.

From what I recall reading, the world handles infinite asteroids by using a random number seed. When the game wants to know where an asteroid should be found, it can use the seed to calculate where it should be. It uses the same seed every time this question is asked, so you should see the same asteroid in the same place every time. Its only when you alter the asteroid does the game need to save information about the asteroid. Once you alter the asteroid, it will no longer be produced the same by the seed.

Chances are the load times might be used to calculate all the information that you might need for seeing asteroids far off in the distance. Try using a map with no infinite asteroids. It might load faster.

 

RamDisk? I heard about it, so I know what it is. I just never learned how to make one. Outside of DOS that is. Does it really speed the game up enough to make it worth my while to learn more about them?

Just to be clear, am I correct to think that a RamDisk is virtual disk made on your RAM?

 

Have you ever defragmented your hard drive?

Game loads fine for me :T

 

defrag becomes irrelevant with a 4ssd striping array. I think most of the delay is steam. besides account validation, if you have uploaded blueprints to the workshop, then they are then handled as subscribed bluprints, and get downloaded every time you start the game. I'm starting to run into that myself. I might check if I can unsubscribe to my own stuff. see if the game will default to the localy stored blueprint instead.

 

I must have a virus or something then, somebody injected a bitcoin miner in SE. Right now, I was loading a world with just 1 ship, I had to wait more than 30 minutes, cant even Alt-Tab, suddenly the screen went white, and i restarted the PC, turn on the PC and the white screen is back again, I thought my video card was toasted. Im going to stop playing SE for now, until it get fixed or something, I can not expend any penny on hardware right now :s

 

might be worth running a RAM test, @Spets. I've noticed that SE gobbles up ram on world load, then releases most of it once you are in game. if your ram is faulty, your computer might be trying to shift a critical process into a bad block on world load, it might write fine, but can't be read. crash. video cards can have this issue as well and most manufacturers have software to check the VRAM.
alteranively, it could also be a bad cpu pipeline. again not normally used, but on world load (one of the few times that SE uses hyperthreading) processes are shifted in. these can also only become apearant when the cpu is under a higer thermal load than normal.
hope something in there solves your issues.

 

Not everyone has SSD's/// and even less people have an array of 4 SSD's

In a singleplayer world Blueprints are only downloaded when you open the blueprint tab, not when the game loads.

 

most of the time if ram is bad, then you get a big BSOD
the addres it refers to most of the time can be used to tell if its ram or VRAM that went nuts.

https://blog.laptopmag.com/faster-than-an-ssd-how-to-turn-extra-memory-into-a-ram-disk

allso for those interested in a ramdisk.
actually i wish there would be a rpduct similar to gigabyte i-ram, but one that supports ddr 3 or ddr4.
https://www.gigabyte.us/products/product-page.aspx?pid=2180#ov

 

I have no issues with loading the game at all o_O

 

Edit: this turned into a wall of text about reliability and oauses of failiure. I won't be sad if folks skip reading it.

My ssds are only 120Gb each. So they are cheap. I've only got windows and SE on that array at the moment (wolfenstien recently dropped in for a visit, but stopped having interesting things to contribute to the conversation, so SE, win7 and I asked it to leave). everything else goes on a pair of 3tb platter drives (also striped, cause why not). it can be done cheaply if you planned for it when you choose your motherboard.
I vaguely recall something about a pci express card that you could load RAM sticks into that would act like a pci attached hdd. Anyone know what I'm talking about? Or did I dream that?
As far as bsod on ram failiure goes, it really depends on how its failing. Quite often PCs have damaged ram or cpus that don't cause critical failiures. Especialy with modern OSs, they have built in error correction and parity checks everywhere and can recover from loosing a few bits here and there. This presents as a system getting slower in specific situations where that specific part of the hardware is utilised. You only tend to get bsod these days if the error checking process itself its compremised by the faulty part. Because its such a distributed function, you need quite a few lost bits to get it to happen.
Most of the damage is caused by voltage spikes or sudden high thermal load. Spikes can be avoided by using a UPS with built in surge protector. A surge protector alone won't provide full protection. If you experience a brownout, your PSU will increase its gain to maintain its output voltges. Gain typically ramps up faster than it decays, so when full power is restored, its your PSU providing the voltage spike before it can reduce the gain. Thermal load can be reduced by allowing your computers components to warm up before doing something demanding. Booting from 10°c and going straight into using all the cores at high load will cause the tempurature to increase more rapidly in some parts than it can be conducted to other parts. If this happens on a cpu, one pipeline can hit 70°c before the other side of the ohip has warmed up. This causes thermal expansion differential and its a mechanical force. Imagine what that does to conductors only a few dozen atoms across. The other themal consideration is thermal cycles. A substrate can only be heated and cooled a certain number of times before the expansion/contraction cycles break something. To fix that, either keep your computer switched on, or use a cabinet heater (its basicanly just a 1-10 watt resistor thats powered when the computer is inactive) to maintain a higher base terpurature when its switched off.
Other than those two, there is also the sorry fact that matter is inherently unstable. Thats not an issue when parts are visible to the eye. But as junction density increases, the junctions get smaller. The densest integrated circuits have conduction paths measured in atoms. If one atom sponteneously decays, or brownian motion chaoses a little bit too much energy into one of them, then one of those atoms changes properties, or moves. Thats damage you can get just by sitting on a shelf unplugged.
All of the above don't take into account the concept of 'acceptable funcionality'. thats where the manufacturer knows that some errors are inherent in the manufacturing process, and they have chosen a level of errors that they deem acceptable for sale. When you buy a stick of ram, it could be error free, or it could have just barely scraped past QC and is only one more error away from noticable faliure (this is why when buying matched components like drives for arrays, video cards or ram, I try to get consecutive serial numbers, failing that, the same batch number. That way I have a better chance they have the saoe error level and will perform similarly otherwise the slower one gets a higher thermal load for the same task and fails sooner)
A lot of this goes into reliability studies and is used when designing systems for long term unsupported use (like aerospace, military or remote industry) but if you want a PC that performs its best for the longest possible time, it pays to to look into into it.

 

Oh. So the RamDisk is a physical object that turns installed RAM into something that mimics a hard drive? I thought that someone did a software trick to set aside some space on the RAM for a virtual drive.

 

don't know. I remember that being a thing before ssd and sata 6. not sure is its still a thing or if it was dropped as a dead end (like physics cards, or optical disk cartriges)

 

OP: In vanilla it's usually #1, the amount of stuff you have in the world.

I've had reason to experiment with stuff that affects the load times, while analysing the code behind it, and found that the deserialisation (loading a file and creating the associated in-memory objects) of the xml files for ships/stations and bases can be very slow when the total number of blocks for all of your ships rises and this contributes more to the load times than anything else.

On new worlds, you probably won't experience this much, but on older worlds (or multi-player), where you've built a lot of bases, support ships and/or captured cargo or exploration ships, the delay will become significant.

As an example, if you look through the ships prefabs folder you'll see why, some of the ship files are relatively huge and each can add more than a second to the load times, even unmodified. You might notice the game freeze for a couple of seconds every so often as you're flying around new territory in game. That's because it's loading at least one big ship file for a newly spawned encounter (even if you don't see it) or cargo ship.

I had to load in all of the vanilla encounter ship blue-prints (about 45 or so) at one point for a feature that I was developing and it added over 20 seconds, to the load process, on an SSD drive (with 32Gb ram installed).

The worst offenders are obviously the large, high block count ships and stations, but surprisingly the small ship 'Coockie Monster', is very slow also, due to it's very high small block count (about 8500 I think). It's the only good reason not to build large small ships IMO.

As a rough guide, every 7000 blocks present in your world adds about a second to the load times (at least on my machine).

Basically, when you load the world, all of the ships that you've created or found (and touched), anywhere in the game world is also loaded. Over time this will mount up significantly. You could delete them or use SEToolbox to remove ships that you don't need, but this won't help much in multi-player.

Haven't found a faster way of deserializing the ship data, although I've not looked very hard.

If you are using a lot of big mods, then that will likely become the predominant cause of slow loading, due to the time it takes to download, unpack, apply and deserialise the additional data.

 

Load times do get pretty horrendous, but usually only with mods installed.
If they are getting bad otherwise I'd say you probably have other issues at play (Edit: see above). I do hope Keen will eventually optimize the loading procedures for mods.
With about 58 mods on our server at ~800-900Mb's of mod data, on a empty world, the load time goes from <20 seconds to >6 minutes.

I expect a decent hit to load time of course, but...that is pretty damn disproportionate for the data being added compared to the content that is already there, so I think something is definitely bogging down the mod initialization, you know? That was not with download times, the whole mod collection was pre-installed. That is 900mb extra data already sitting on a (reasonably fast, defragged HDD), so I'd say that is the current best case for the average user in such a scenario.

 

Ramdisk creates an image and allocates however much RAM you want to be used as a virtual hard drive, then loads your disk image at each boot. Access times are the same as accessing RAM, so lots quicker than a standard non-SSD HD.

I have 24 GB of RAM on my machine, so I set aside 8 GB for the RAM disk. It slows down my Windows boot and re-boot/shutdown times, as it needs to load or write the RAM Disk image, but I don't mind that as much as I do being able to watch a full season of Game of Thrones during some SE load times!

 

Not bad sinbad.
but anot 1:1 true, while verry close indeed.

1st. those pci cards are still used today in servers. at a cost you don't want to know.
and a ram SSD is far faster than any ssd raid you could build.
voltage spike part is allso true, but only if the main's vcoltage ripple is faster than what the powersupply can follow, within the range of the regulators.
SMPS has this drawback. when i was findling with custom high power computers i built linear powersupplys for that and other reasons.
"decay" of parts happens even if they are not powered, heating them up is not going to help.
what id does help with, is to overcome issues what treehuggers are responsible for.
BGA packages soldered with lead free solder. the balls crack. at least they used to. xbox360 owners might had seen that action , as most RROD problems where a result of this.
fixed over a hundred of them with proper solder technology.
and not every ram is ECC enabled. some lack the circuitry. actually most of them don't have an ecc chip at all.
error correction is still done, even on a perfectly working computer. since nowdays none of them are perfect at all.
noise is an issue all around.
when you have slowdowns , its mostly regular hdd to look at. they can halt the system till they manage to position the head.
SSD can turn slow too, if its worn.
ram? mostly returns corrupt data if it has an issue and throws a BSOD if error correction fails to repair it.
if it does manage, then you will not notice it performance wise.

drifting of atoms happens faster when temperatures are higher.
so keeping things hot all the time is not a good idea.
rather, keeping anything cool, now that is a good idea.

 

You may be speaking of the SSD drives actually being a PCI card and not what you commonly see when speaking of SSD (aka the old 2.5" case).
https://ocz.com/consumer/pci-express-ssd

 

https://img.tomshardware.com/us/2007...defines_solid_state_storage/gigabyte-iram.jpg

clickidy-click the link.
there are versions that do not use the sata interface, rather just use the pci interface.
i think hyperos made a thiingy like that.
in every way its faster than a flash memory based ssd, and does nto wear like an flash based ssd.

pci connected devices have verry large IOPS, and there fore are still used in proper servers that have large databases with a lot of traffic.
top notch server grade stuff would be far out of your budget, even if you are a rich boy.
closest thing that is affordable is
https://www.asus.com/ROG-Republic-Of-Gamers/RAIDR_Express_PCIe_SSD/
this thingy.
it could be far faster, 800 mb/ sec is not that slow but still its a flash based product.
nice ripoff of them to give you a ramdisk freeware with the thingy, and show of ramdisk performance numbers.
do notice, the card in question is not a ramdisk. its a flash drive.
12,000MB/s stands for RAM disk.
that is what you can do with any ramdisk freeware.
but when booting you would have to wait for your regular hdd to copy the stuff into the ram drive,
so asus made a pci version flash based ssd, and the software they give you will copy stuff from that flash ssd into ram.
yeah, ripooff.
on the otherhand an entry level real ram based ssd with pcie interface starts out for 5K usd.
i seen those guys in action, its verry fast indeed.
i'm not a fan of flash based ssd products to be honest.
specially if they connect to a sata port.
6 Gbit / sec is 600 Mbyte / sec. so if you don't have a sata 3 port, then you can not utilise the full speed of even a cheapo kingston ssd drive.
pcie 2.0 offers 500 MByte/sec / lane.

 

I have my entire Steam library and OS on an SSD, and 32gb RAM, and an i7-4790k, so I think my system is pretty on par for the job...

Anyways, the world in question is I am building a very very very large shipyard that I would eventually want to host on a dedicated server, and while I have optimized it in SE Toolbox many times, the load time is still somewhere in the 7-10 minute range. I do use alot of mods, but I try to keep the ones I'm not currently building with deactivated and activate them as I need them. My world is only 10km I believe, but I did spawn alot of asteroids (not the infinite, but whatever the largest # is), that's why I wondered if I delete some of the smaller ones if that will improve the load time at all?

 

give a try to a 8 gig ram drive.
you will see the difference that i can promise.

 

disconnect from Internet and you'll bypass the mods downloading.

 

I haven't tried that. is SE set up to allow play with steam in offline mode?

 

Install what exactly to the ramdisk? the Space engineers directory with the executable or the save file? If its the save file how would I open that in space engineers?

 

After the RamDisk is formatted and ready to go, you'll need to uninstall SE from Steam, then choose to re-install it, but this time choose the RamDisk as the destination. I installed SE Toolbox on the drive as well.


Your save data remains on the C drive (or wherever you have it by default). I suppose it probably could be moved, but since my C drive is an SSD, I didn't feel the need to mess with it.

 

Just to say, the last two times I actually clocked the loadtime, 42:22 minutes and 46:24 respectively, I have 125 active mods atm. the world is basically new, got a few captured (endless cargoship) fighters, a miner, welder and a grinder ship aside from my modded yellow tub. I have mined on maybe 5-6 different asteroids. trash removal and floating objects set to 25 and playing low settings on a computer that while not new should be good enough.