ut2004-demo slow between levels

mr_clark · n00b Joined: 13 Feb 2004 Posts: 14

I've been playing ut2004-demo on my system and the game seems to play fine (except for the very first couple of seconds of each level which are a little choppy and then fine) However in between matches it is taking over 2 minutes to load the next level. Any ideas what could be causing this?

My system: Athlon 2500, 512MB RAM, Ti4200 video card.

Moofed · Posted: Thu Aug 05, 2004 1:19 am Post subject:

ut2004 is a bit notorious for its long load times. The only real suggestions I have are to make sure "Preload Player Skins" is disabled and perhaps install more ram/a faster harddrive.

kamikaze_gerbil · Posted: Thu Aug 05, 2004 3:42 am Post subject:

The filesystem can make a difference too. I found rieserfs to load the levels alot faster than ext3 does.

floam · Posted: Thu Aug 05, 2004 6:19 am Post subject:

512MB isn't very much. The game will use around 600ish when loading levels, so it's probably swapping out to disk. I've got 2GB of ram, but even 1 should be plenty.
_________________
Think about your breathing.
http://floam.sh.nu

MighMoS · Guru Joined: 24 Apr 2003 Posts: 416 Location: @ ~

This is a bit extream, but if you want to free up some ram, emerge blackbox, log out of Gnome/KDE, and use blackbox as your window manager. I do that for my two "heavy" games, Neverwinter Nights and Unreal 2004, and I can feel a difference in all around game performance.
_________________
jabber: MighMoS@jabber.org

localhost # export HOME=`which heart`

Moofed · Posted: Thu Aug 05, 2004 5:30 pm Post subject:

mr_clark · n00b Joined: 13 Feb 2004 Posts: 14

I came across a post regarding this problem at http://www.ataricommunity.com/forums/showthread.php?s=&threadid=360368 I tried all their solutions with no luck.

At one point I had managed to get the load time to about 1:45 but I made some more changes with the various precache settings and now I'm back to about 2 minutes load time.

I really don't think the issue is with swapping because when I do a 'top' I see that I have about 1GB of SWAP and only about 40MB being used when the game is starting.

Any other ideas?

MighMoS · Guru Joined: 24 Apr 2003 Posts: 416 Location: @ ~

I remember a while ago there was a bad patch released for linux. Try re-grabbing the linux patch, and installing that.
_________________
jabber: MighMoS@jabber.org

localhost # export HOME=`which heart`

mr_clark · n00b Joined: 13 Feb 2004 Posts: 14

In a very roundabout way I figured out how to fix this problem.

I think I forced some sort of update in the past and ended up with a masked newer version of glibc. Every time I tried to update my system it wanted to downgrade glibc.

After chatting on the #gentoo channel, I unmasked the newer version and did a system upgrade. However, I ran into some snags with my opengl drivers on the system after that.

When I tried running the ut2004 demo it would complain about not being able to find opengl.

I did a 'opengl-update nvidia' and it wouldn't work.

I re-emerged the latest nvidia drivers, opengl-update nvidia, but ut2004 still wouldn't work.

Then I came across
https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic.php?t=207993&highlight=ldpreload+usr+lib+libgl

I created a batch file to start the game with:

#!/bin/sh
LD_PRELOAD=/usr/lib/libGL.so &&
export LD_PRELOAD
ut2004demo

Now my games start in about 10 seconds. I'm so happy!