Nah. I do defragmentation every couple months, and I have about 200GB free on my gaming disk.
That said as I mentioned before, loading times haven’t been that extreme after the initial session. I suspect that my PC might have been doing something in the background, though I did keep an eye on disk activity and nothing major popped up.
It’s ok right now, though worse then any other game I played in recent memory, especially that you load between geoscape and tactical constantly. That is something that probably should wait until the development of PP slows down a bit.
Regarding optimisation - I am playing through Shadow Tactics before Desperados3 release. Last time I played it was on release. Wow, they did some serious optimisation work since then. I remember loading times being painfully long, and the game barely run for me on low settings. Now loadings are way better (though not exactly brief either) and the game runs smooth on high settings. Nice surprise.
So as recently discussion about loading times popped up again, I decided to record how much it actually takes me to load into a mission… Turns out: much longer then I thought!
I start the timer the instant the screen goes black, right before it pulls up the loading screen. I stop the timer the instant I can see the battlefield.
To be true. I don’t know how long it took earlier, because I havent measured the time. But right now, first mission (Nest) after launching game loaded for me in 22 seconds. I’m also running on NVME M.2 drive. Will check it tomorrow on my SSD SATA 3 drive.
Still 30 seconds on SSD is a bit long as well no? But comeon, never owned SSD disk, and never encountered anything as bad as PP.
I could understand if it was groundbreaking, open world title which needs to stream excessive amount of data, but I see no justification for that in PP.
Mostly just wanting to bring the issue to devs attention. It’s difficult to keep retention in PP with that kind of interruptions on a lower end machine.
Just tried that. It was not a clinical test (not the same mission, or mission type - this time it was a nest, which traditionally takes a wee bit longer to load). It took over 5:20sec to load into the mission.
Ok. Old save, so pre-Cthulhu save game - on SATA 3 it took 1 min 7 sec to load Scavenge (rescue vehicle) mission after launching game (later load times are faster like 33 seconds to the same mission).
Yeah, both saves are first tactical missions (so load into geoscape, wait a bit for disk to stop loading assets, and then proceed to loading missions).
Our of curiosity I will record loading time in my next sessions and see how they fare on longer playthroughs.
EDIT: Played a longer session today. Defragmented my disk before (though there wasn’t much to optimise), made sure Windows done all it wanted to, turned off internet and:
First load into tactical mission (nest, same as yesterday) from geoscape - 3:11
New Jericho Special Mission - 1:24
Scavenging mission recover vehicle - 2:11
Overall, it’s closer to what I remember. Not sure what happened yesterday that made the game load for 5 minutes. THough windows have been setting up for some major updates yesterday, so even though I disabled net it might have something to do with that.
Yeah, I noticed this. Game’s been on the same SATA 3 SSD since install. Like others, I can’t swear how long loading levels used to take, but it’s now taking much longer. I’m gonna guess it used to take about 20 to 30 seconds. Now it takes a minute or more, something like 90 seconds, maybe.
Nice surprise.
I’m sorry. I just had to. <3
