How long are your loading times?

[zit]

I have Galaxies Unbound, KSP Interstellar Extended, Tantares, Bluedog Design Bureau, Scatterer, EVE Redux, and I think a few other dependencies. Loading times can easily take like 5 minutes or more, and that's on an NVMe drive. It's reminiscent of the time 90's UNIX workstations take to boot up (Think Silicon Graphics, the workstations used to make Jurassic Park and Super Mario 64 amongst others).

And sometimes when I hit M to view the stellar map, it'll lag and delay for about 5 seconds as it tries to calculate all the orbits, but at least it gives me more time to plan manoeuvre nodes.

[MaxxQ]

I have 116+ mods, including JNSQ, SSTU, all of Nertea's Near/Far Future mods, Tundra Exploration, Wild Blue Industries, and so on.  My load times are around 12-15 minutes - just enough time to go outside and have a smoke before settling in for a gaming session.  That's on an M.2 SSD.  On a regular HDD, it's just a minute or so longer.

That's also on a 2-3 year-old PC.  I'm considering building a new one at the beginning of next year.

[zer0Kerbal]

My career has about ~230 mods, just over 15,000 patches and loads in about 7-10 minutes (depends if needs to rebuild the MM cache).  This is from the start of QuickStart to in-game (where ever I have QuickStart drop me)

My dev install(s) take about 1-2 minutes to load - depends upon what I am working on and what needs to be present.

I7-4790 32GB SSD with hyperspace and SSDKeeper which acts like a 2GB ramdisk (automatically). RX-550 with 4GB DDR5 - and 75hz refresh rate (which does seem to affect load times - use a self patch to make sure KSP max-framerate is set to max). Also the Making Less History mod seems to cut some time.

Edited August 8, 2021 by zer0Kerbal

[Gotmachine]

For plugin development, I have a stripped-down install that load in less than 30 seconds on my potato by taking those actions :

- Use Janitor's Closet to permaprune a good 2/3 of the stock parts (usually I keep only the 2.5m parts)
- Remove the "GameData\SquadExpansion" folder (DLCs)
- Remove all files in "GameData\Squad\KSPedia" excepted "kspedia.ksp"
- Remove all folders in "GameData\Squad\Spaces" (IVAs) excepted "Placeholder", working in conjunction with the following MM patch :

@PART[*]:HAS[@INTERNAL[*]]:FINAL
{
	@INTERNAL[*]
	{
		@name = Placeholder
	}
}

 

[theJesuit]

45 minutes ago, Gotmachine said:

Remove the "GameData\SquadExpansion" folder (DLCs)

I do that as a matter of course.  But for a while i kept the parts and removed anything else.  Then ReStockPlus came along...

47 minutes ago, Gotmachine said:

Remove all files in "GameData\Squad\KSPedia" excepted "kspedia.ksp"

I like this.  I like it!  I'll try it.

 

[jimmymcgoochie]

My load times vary wildly depending on which of my collection of KSP copies I'm using- a relatively stock setup with a few parts mods, no graphics mods and some general utilities takes under 5 minutes, but my RSS/RO/RP-1 game with over 50,000 patches can take over twenty minutes (with a small chance of a PC crash on the main menu for reasons I still can't explain). All my KSPs are stored on an external SSD that I bought specifically for that purpose, it makes a significant difference to load times.

Try the Hyperspace mod, it might help- but only if you don't change your installed mods/patches very often (if ever):

It's also a good idea to disable frame limits and V-sync as the game's loading speed is related to FPS for some reason and both of those things reduce your frame rates and so increase load times.

If you're not using the Making History mission stuff then Making Less History will remove that bit (and the Woomerang/Dessert launch sites unfortunately) without deleting the parts that come with the DLC, that can help load times and RAM use when the game is running. It still works in 1.12 last time I checked.

Generally speaking most of the other options are variations of "delete anything you don't absolutely need", whether that's removing parts from mods, clearing deprecated stock parts, or removing IVA views that you don't want- for parts mods with lots of ship/station/base stuff, this can make a pretty big difference.

Another solution is to use a faster storage drive, the faster the read rate the faster the game will load- putting KSP on an external SSD cut my load times by nearly half versus my PC's built in HDD and having an internal SSD will make that even faster.