cars.wad size and track loading time

theres been a few threads about minimizing cars.wad-sizes (by deleting all unsused high-res resp. low-res files) and gain some fps... i am wonderung: could a smaller cars.wad bring also shorter loading times ? anybody tried that ?
i am sooooo tired of watching the loading screens in gp4.

greetings, jp

yep.
smaller wads means quicker loading.
on the loading bar from about 10% to 50% is the cars.wad.
it jumps to 10% then slowly loads the cars (upto about 50%) then the rest is pretty quick.
time that bit, and then see how much difference a smaller wad makes.



____
Tony

thx

looks like it's cars-wad-time again. tomorrow night ! i'll post my results...

greetings, jp


anything else i could do to decrease loading times ? what about the other 50 % ?

i've got
cars 70mb
anim 8mb
trach 20mb
and other things. but the cars take about 75% of the time. you can't really reduce the track or anim wads. unless you want untextured tracks, but that may crash?
dunno what else.
did you see the thread about using lod_0 only? that should reduce loading time, but will probably give less fps. but if you now use the lod_0 copied down then you may gain from it.



____
Tony

the last 90% is anim.wad (thats where i normally used to crash it )

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the last 90%.

try deleting various things, and see where it crashes.
the cars load one at a time - team1, team 2.. etc



____
Tony

did you see the thread about using lod_0 only?

yes, i saw it. but hex-editing my .exe would be going a little bit too far. i'll try deleting the files first...

greetings, jp

ull crash it

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ok - deleted all the hi_.... car-textures from my cars.wad.


results:
1. no ctd

2. loading time stayed the same
(ok, if i absolutely want to see a result, i could say it dropped from 17 to 16 sec...)

3. po on first hockenheim straight dropped from 70/80 to 60/70.
Now, thats quite a result, isnt it ?

now i have to wait and see if i can live with the poorer grafics...

greetings, jp

16 secxonds isnt too bad anyway.
your po dropped, but what about fps?
do you use fraps?



____
Tony

I believe your po dropped not because of smaller wad size, but because there are no textures to be loaded



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Bojan Tarticchio

no, i dont have fraps. i use "test" in grafic-options. i'm afraid i forgot to check the recommended fps after deleting the files. will have to do it tonight.

and i watch the po in game. i know it's not the "real" po, but is good to compare before-after.

greetings, jp

fraps constently displays the fps in the corner, and you can work out the actual fps compared to set fps and get a more realistic po.

i have mine set to 26, but can lose upto 10 in certain places.



____
Tony

@ bojan: no, there are textures being loaded, but not the high-res cause i deleted them. the cars are not white.... (good idea, btw - sacrifice the car textures for less po and better physics. maybe the solution for PIII 500 mhz ?)

greetings, jp

Yeah, well when we played Quake 3 in lan, we also turned off texures, and walls were blank. More than 100 fps...why not do this in GP4

OK, if you make GP4 to use only lods 4, and make all car textures 64x64 I bet we'll get 60fps very easily



Post Edited (08-14-03 12:49)

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Bojan Tarticchio

ok, who's gonna do the definite "lowest-spec-mod",
with no txtures and only lod_0's ?

i wont...


greetings, jp

u dont want only lod_0s that is a waste of polygons at distence, u might as well trade 10po for more fps. its good deleting files but uve got to balance it without going insane first


having all lod_0s will kill ure pc more then having the full lod scale (thats why theres lods!!!)

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Actually, all lods 0 are not killing performance very much, if the car is under 4000 polys; 1024x1024 textures are real problem.



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Bojan Tarticchio

hehe ok

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test-button in grafics-menu suggests 35-36 fps after deleting the hi_... files. before 34, sometimes 35.

what a breakthrough.

greetings, jp