How long will it take for the game to load?

[grumphie]

Yea. Its really quick now.

if i undeerstand that correctly, it uses multiple threads ONLY when loading? would it in any way be possible to also let is use more threads in normal play? that could really help performance on machines with plenty of threads but less power per thread.

 

[Poh]

if i undeerstand that correctly, it uses multiple threads ONLY when loading? would it in any way be possible to also let is use more threads in normal play? that could really help performance on machines with plenty of threads but less power per thread.

iirc it has been discussed before and the overhead is too large when using multiply threads so you wont actually gain anything. They are already moving whatever they can to other cores.

 

[SonGoku]

EU4 loading is fine. I mean, it takes ages, but it gives me the time to prepare tea or beer.

This. The loading time should correspond with the time I need to open another beer.

 

[Centurion1973]

if i undeerstand that correctly, it uses multiple threads ONLY when loading? would it in any way be possible to also let is use more threads in normal play? that could really help performance on machines with plenty of threads but less power per thread.

HoI3 alredy supported muticore CPUs (IIRC after 2nd expansion), but beyond 4 cores, effect is minimal. I expect similar from HoI4.

 

[Adonnus]

Yea. Its really quick now.

What about slowing down in game, especially later on?

 

[Centurion1973]

What about slowing down in game, especially later on?

I dont expect much of a problem in late game, since you will be likely too busy to play at speed 4 or higher. At least if you have a PCs with 4core Intel CPU (8core AMD), decent GPU (Nvidia 770 or AMD 270) and enough RAM (6+GB) and have game installed on SSD.

Getting some feedback on game requirements from devs would be nice - last time I heard demands were expected to be a little higher than HoI3 or EU4.

 

[potski]

HoI3 alredy supported muticore CPUs (IIRC after 2nd expansion), but beyond 4 cores, effect is minimal. I expect similar from HoI4.

Correct, added in Their Finest Hour:

For the Motherland - Developer Diary 9 - No more free lunch in the bunker

Loading is rubbish, because of the game design, supposedly to make things easily possible to mod. Every one of the province files have to be found on the disk opened, read and closed. Even though the amount of data in them is tiny. Using SSD makes a massive difference because the seek/read time is so much quicker than HDD. Using multiple threads here doesn't make much difference.

It's a very inefficient design of the file structure. If it was in a relational database you could load all of the province data for a specific start time in one go. Even one CSV file containing all province data for a particular start date would improve things. And modding wouldn't be hard when you can open the file in Excel. Instead, you open the localisation file (which is a CSV), search for the name you see on the map. Get the province number. Search for a text file with that number in a different set of folders, split by country/region with no consistency as changes were made to the map, so some province files in North China are in the Japan folder, some in the China folder , I think I even found some from MAN in the Soviet folder. Then you open the text file and it has entries like:

infra=4
airbase=3

You have to have code to parse this and decide what values to load. It's probably very efficient and not complicated, but you have to code it to decide whether to allow:

infra=4
infra = 4
Infra =4

When you could just have the infra value in a particular column of a CSV, as there can only be one value for each province.

This format of the files has existed since at least HOI2, more than 10 years ago. Maybe the new engine has improved this?

 

[Centurion1973]

Based on Podcats post, they clearly made changes that allow fast start of the game, without sacrificing moddability - which I really appreciate.

 

[asamy]

If it takes longer than 1 femtosecond I am going to be disappointed.

+1

 

[Had a dad]

Hoi3, even without mods, takes 5min to load on my SSD.

Odd as on none of my machines that have SSDs (all 3 of them) does it take even a minute to load.

(even if loading a certain mod :ninja: )

 

[bwc153]

Odd as on none of my machines that have SSDs (all 3 of them) does it take even a minute to load.

(even if loading a certain mod :ninja: )

I did a test:
Vanilla TFH took about 2 minutes, 6 seconds.
BlackICE took 2 minutes, 9 seconds (This speed may have been faster due to back-to-back loading leaving some used vanilla info in RAM)

CPU: FX-8350 8 core 4ghz
SSD: SAMSUNG 840 EVO 250GB

5 minutes may be a tad exagerated, but it definitely is pretty long. I remember when I accidentally reinstalled HoI on the SSD in the first place and decided to leave it there simply BECAUSE of the long loading times.

Meanwhile, CKII (all expansions) and EUIV (all until Art of War, not including AoW) usually startup for me in 1:00 (EUIV) to 1:20 (CKII) , and that's on my primary games and storage drive.