Long Load Times (solved)

coolbot100x

I have a TON of mods, I put all of them that I don't have activated in a sperate folder in My Games/Cosmoteer
Heres my mods: 301.9MB 616 Subdirs
Bounty Hunter $
Huge Ships
Star Wars: A Cosmos Divided
Archons Plasma
Blood Cult
Capital Ship Weaponry
Confederate
Drones ++
Dumpster Mod
More Ammo
Cannons Plus
Hologram Flag
Doomsday Bombs Mod
Abh Faction Mod
Additional Weapons
More Missles
More Stuff mod
starcrft2 mod
New Weapons And Devices Mod
Minigun Mod
Vanilla Extended

I don't have a large ship library tho: 20.3MB 75 Subdirs
Specs:
Cosmoteer V0.13.5

And with all that, it takes about 15+ mins to load the game, up to 3 times that if I'm not focused on the loading window. Is there anything I can do to speed this up? outside of upgrading a hard drive or disabling more mods?
Thanks! Much appreciate it!

SOLUTION (sort of):
these are the things I did, and now my load time is better. Don't expect amazing results tho :/
Turn on and off again Texture Compression in Cosmoteer settings

Use Asus GPU Tweak II's "gaming Booster" "Feature", I don't know of alternative programs to do it automatically but basically, it turns your windows effects settings to potato, turns off all background and "unnessacary" processes and defragments... your hard drive? I think...?

Find a decent enough flash drive, SD card or any external storage and go to properties, try to turn on ReadyBoost.

Clear out more hard drive space

Run in administrator

jbox1

coolbot100x You shouldn't need to move your mods when you disable them.

IVIemories

coolbot100x You're definitely going to get extended load times when you have star wars, and abh together, though 15 minutes is pretty abnormal. Try turning texture compression on and off and see if that helps you at all.

coolbot100x

jbox1 oh... good to know!
I also move them for simplicity's sake as well as being able to switch which set of mods I use quickly and knowing which mods I've tried before.

Equalizer

Are you using a disk hard drive or a solid state drive?
Cosmoteer loads lots of small files which can be very slow on disk hard drive.

coolbot100x

Equalizer 2TB 7200RPM HDD (images 29&30)
It's probably the "weakest" component of my PC other than the motherboard itself

Equalizer

coolbot100x There is something called a "RAM drive/disk" which pre-loads specified directories into memory so that when files in them are needed they are accessed from memory instead of disk.

Might be worth looking into but it probably isn't that simple to setup and I can't say for sure that this would help.

coolbot100x

Equalizer I just got an advertisement for one in an e-mail this morning lol.
so I'll look into it thanks!

coolbot100x

IVIemories Equalizer still reading but I'm not entirely sure what it would do, but if it I set the game files and the My Games/Cosmoteer up to use a Ramdisk, that'd be placing everything in volatile memory?
or is it simply using two drives with the same info to load processes at the speed of two drives?
Would it even help anyway if I don't have a backup drive faster than my HDD?

coolbot100x

IVIemories Resetting the compression settings didn't really seem to help, just made those test loads slower
EDIT: scratch that it did make it a few minutes quicker

IVIemories

coolbot100x RAM disk would likely not help, since Cosmoteer loads mods from the documents folder.

IVIemories

coolbot100x iirc ramdisk completely erases itself when your computer shuts down. Whilst Cosmoteer can be set to save to a folder thats not in Documents, this would still mean that you'd need to manually copy over all your ships and saves every time you shut down your computer and copy them over again every time your boot up ramdisk.

Would it help? Maybe - but you shouldn't be getting 15 minute load times even with all your mods so maybe there are other issues with your hard drive like fragmentation and lack of empty space.

coolbot100x

IVIemories It runs daily defragmentation tho I could sever to clear some more space I guess?
Currently at 260Ish GB free of 2TB

I'm currently setting up a tiny flash drive with Readyboost, the windows built in Ramdisk software, it seems to just be a Cache setup, so there's no risk of data loss? but my 2TB backup drive is to slow(even in USB3) to be used, and the only remaining flash drive option is 5gb, 3 of which is in use :/ so I doubt it will help but I'll test it out

IVIemories

coolbot100x Ramdisk is turning your RAM into a temporary hard drive. Not sure what readyboost is but you're welcome to give it a try.

If you do find performance gains, then please reply so other people have a fix for this in the future.

coolbot100x

IVIemories I guess it helped a little? I also used Asus GPU Tweak II's "Gaming Booster" so... Along with clearing my hard drive space. and clearing as many unnecessary tasks as possible (including like, the desktop) between these and resetting the compression settings my load time decreased by about halve, but far more importantly is less dramatized by focusing on something else. I think Readyboost would actually be a significant difference if I had a larger Flash Drive.
But at this point, I think I'd rather get a small SSD meant just for this game lol.

coolbot100x

IVIemories Is it possible to change the topic title? or give it a "solved" tag in some other way?

IVIemories

coolbot100x You can rename it yourself using the little drop down menu next to the reply button.

coolbot100x

IVIemories ohhhh, Thanks! still new here.

yobeefjerky

coolbot100x Are you sure this should be in Tech Support?
why not put it in General discussion, it would probably get more traffic there.