Ways to make game load faster

[Las-pen]

I have a lot of mods. About 50-60 last time I counted. My game also takes forever to load. Some 10+ minutes. It becomes really annoying especially when trying out new mods (because mod creator was too lazy to put good pictures and description, among other reasons)

Is there any way (apart from uninstalling mods) to make the game boot up faster. And don't recommend ActiveTextureManagement. It doesn't do squat about loading.

Also not sure if this should go here or support.

[DerekL1963]

The only way to make the game load faster is to install fewer mods.

[Claw]

Double check that you don't have any virtual network adapters installed (such as Hamachi). There's a bug with Unity that can cause the game to take a long time to load.

Unless you really do just have that many assets to load from those mods.

Cheers,

~Claw

[DrMonte]

I'm not using mods at all and I'm pretty happy about it.

There are two options to decrease startup time:

1. Upgrade your hardware. SSD disk will boost the performance for sure, 4GB of RAM is minimum requirement.

2. Use texture redux mods. They will reduce the startup time and increase performance in casual flight.

The option about fewer mods might be more customizable. You can delete only the parts you never use from the parts folder instead the whole mod. (Backup first)

[Streetwind]

You could approach all the mod authors and lobby that they start using DDSLoader...

[mhoram]

You might experience this bug:

http://www.reddit.com/r/KerbalSpaceProgram/comments/23jh7a/ksp_takes_an_age_to_load_up/cgxoet3

Also during the time I tried out creating an addon, I used a virtual Ram Disk (ImDisk Virtual Disk Driver) on which I installed KSP. This requires however to have a decent amount of RAM, but speeded up the loading time by a factor of 2-3.

Also putting KSP on an external USB-3-stick helps with the loading time.

[Taki117]

I personally have two copies of KSP installed, one for testing mods, the other that I play on. You could do a similar set up?

[1of6Billion]

As DrMonte wrote: SSD's are your friend!

[capi3101]

I might suggest LoadOnDemand; it changes the game's startup procedure to load up meshes only and loads texture thumbnails - which are way smaller in size than the full texture images - at startup. It's only when the full texture is required that it loads that full texture up into memory, and it unloads it from memory when it's no longer needed. I use it myself; it has shortened the game's load-up time for me considerably. Other than that I haven't got any suggestions to offer other than what's already been recommended by other folks.

[HafCoJoe]

Look into the mod Active Texture Management if you're in the hole RAM wise and want load time and less crashes over top notch visuals.

[Zylark]

Hehe, ModuleManager reports 919 patches on my load. I just use the time to put on another batch of coffee...

As the game goes into Beta we'll probably see some improvements in performance - and load times.

[Vastronaut]

I run the game in OpenGL mode (edit shortcut to the game, add the following in the target field: ".....KSP.exe" -force-opengl With opengl I can run a lot more mods without using Active Texture Management or any other RAM saving mods.

[Kerbal101]

Linux 64 bit, Debian Stable (backports for kernel to 4.2 Liquorix and opensource radeon graphics driver)
Athlon II X4, AMD HD5850, 8GiB of RAM

1.0.5 x64 + 50 Mods.

 

Loading times - over 60 minutes (I killed the game each time).

Have tried everything: disabled all networking adapters, used older Module manager, tried Active Texture Management, DDSLoader, Dynamic Texture Loader.
NOTHING helped.

Then, I started to move out the mods, one by one - and BINGO!
The mod "KerbPaint" was to blame. Without KerbPaint loading time is 2 minutes.

I hope this helps somebody!!

EDIT (by the "later" me): This issue was caused by latent "ModuleManager.dll" HIDDEN INSIDE OF PLUG-IN DIRECTORY. Just go inside the plugin and delete this file. Thanks to selfish_meme for persistently pointing this out!! Now no long loading times and KerbPaint works as advertized!

Edited January 16, 2016 by Kerbal101
outdated hideous dll was the reason

[Wemb]

On 30/10/2014 at 8:12 AM, DerekL1963 said:

The only way to make the game load faster is to install fewer mods.

Or, buy an SSD. Either work. Though I'm not sure this is the answer the OP was after :-)

 

Wemb

[Kerbal101]

On 10/30/2014 at 4:53 PM, Zylark said:

Hehe, ModuleManager reports 919 patches on my load. I just use the time to put on another batch of coffee...

As the game goes into Beta we'll probably see some improvements in performance - and load times.

I have over 2,400 patches and it loads under 5 minutes from HDD. There are definitely improvements. The process seem to bottlenecked to maximum performance of one CPU core, than any disk IO.

[Streetwind]

This thread is maybe a liiiiittle bit old... still, thanks for pointing it out, I guess?

[SpaceEnthusiast23]

89 mods, loading time: 25 mins. I'll try all these things you guys recommended

[Streetwind]

4 hours ago, SpaceEnthusiast23 said:

89 mods, loading time: 25 mins. I'll try all these things you guys recommended

This thread is from 2014. Most of the advice no longer applies because the game changed so much since then.

[SpaceEnthusiast23]

3 hours ago, Streetwind said:

This thread is from 2014. Most of the advice no longer applies because the game changed so much since then.

All the mods except DDR reader are up to date. I'll make a new thread

Edited May 19, 2017 by SpaceEnthusiast23

[Blaarkies]

On 1/18/2016 at 0:17 PM, Wemb said:

Or, buy an SSD. Either work. Though I'm not sure this is the answer the OP was after :-)

SSD does near nothing for KSP, i tested this on my new computer. Started out with everything on SSD because "it would be speedy!" and i had 5minute loading times. Didn't really notice any difference, so i moved the entire KSP folder onto the HDD. Got 5 minute and 20 seconds loading times...SSD's have a very specific use case where they improve everything, KSP loading is not one of them.

Think about how long it takes to copy KSP from the HDD back onto itself...50 seconds? Now realize that read speed alone is slightly faster than write, and that is all that RAM wants. All the "data" can be put into RAM by the time the first picture slideshows. The majority of work in KSP does not happen on the HDD (virtual memory is a different matter, that is much better solved by more RAM than an SSD)

[Wadusher0]

18 hours ago, Blaarkies said:

The majority of work in KSP does not happen on the HDD (virtual memory is a different matter, that is much better solved by more RAM than an SSD)

If that's the case, where does the majority of the work loading KSP happen?

[Curveball Anders]

On 2017-05-20 at 7:35 AM, Wadusher0 said:

If that's the case, where does the majority of the work loading KSP happen?

Since it doesn't seem to be the actual reads from the disk and the CPU goes up quite drastic I'd guess that it's related to some form of 'unpacking' of the data.

[technicalfool]

On 20/05/2017 at 6:35 AM, Wadusher0 said:

If that's the case, where does the majority of the work loading KSP happen?

KSP loads pretty much everything it needs at once at the start of the game, hence the long startup period, especially with mods. I've seen widely varying reports about how much an SSD helps here. Personally I did a SSD vs HDD comparison on a SATA3 controller and came up with significant improvements, down to <30 seconds from over 50 seconds on a stock install. There's a whole bunch of files that need to be accessed while KSP is loading, and the 10ms or so seek times of a HDD soon add up. Your mileage may vary, and I imagine a faster processor/bus will also help with any unpacking steps.

Some of the info here is pretty old. I'm not sure how big the need for ATM is now anyway since everything went to .dds, though it's worth looking to see if any mods have a bunch of .png textures slowing the load process down. LoadOnDemand seems to no longer be working, and neither is its replacement, currently.

If anybody wants to start a new thread I'll lock this one, and link to the new one.