section loading/transition screens...

[Astara_]

I'm told that there's a pause or wait on each of the transition screens to allow you to read the message and they can be disabled?

Is there an addon for that?

I regularly end up one of the last people into a next-scene after one
of those pauses.

FWIW, I have a 3.2GHz-8-core, processor, w/96G memory, GTX 1080, and SSD, so can't see any reason it should be slowed down.

Ideas?

Thanks!

 

[Fijikku Kasai]

Two things
One that addon is meant for those with already fucking fast loading
Two if you're loading last anyways it's not gonna help

 

[Astara_]

???

Why wouldn't it help?

If I'm hitting a delay to make it wait, wouldn't that be slowing it down?

If someone was were loading fast and before everyone else, i'd almost believe
they'd had it installed.

 

[cupid]

As far as I could observe, all cutscenes are mandatory.

Everything loads only and only after the cutscene ends.
Removing the cutscene file results in an huge untextured plane covering your screen.

 

[Fijikku Kasai]

Not talking about Cutscenes, Cupid.

 

[cupid]

Not talking about Cutscenes, Cupid.

Oh then I'm confused :/

 

[Fijikku Kasai]

Oh then I'm confused :/

Basically, there is a forced wait on a loading screen so you can read the tool tip.
So if you load stupidly fast you hit a small wall.
Removing that time lets you load just a tiny bit faster, hence why if you're load slow already.
It's not gonna help period.

 

[Astara_]

I'm one of those who will try many things even if its unlikely to work, sometimes just to see what the effect is.
I think my most likely problem (?) is not a fast enough CPU. It's a Xeon 6134 w/rated speed of 3.2GHz w/24.75MB of cache, w/8 cores (16 virtual cores in SMT/threaded mode).
Don't think it is memory (96GB) or disk (RAID10 using 4 Samsung Pro (2 in parallel, 2 as copies).
And I guess most are of opinion that the graphics card doesn't matter that much because the game doesn't really use it (graphics card, GTX1080, is rarely, if ever eve up to 50% usage).
My best guesses on improvement w/current HW would be if game made better use of free memory to keep already-uncompressed areas in cache, and secondly -- not to compress it in the 1st place! Oh well. Prolly not likely to happen.

Anyway, just grasping at straws, mostly, since HW isn't likely to change that much. Thanks, and *sigh*.


(9

 

[cupid]

*sigh*

Starting in the note you've finished.

Removing 100ms won't help you.

Disable "No Texture Streaming".
I know what is RAID 10, but you may very well have a SATA2 motherboard, so...

And you are using "Samsung Pro"...
If I remember, the old ones weren't that great.

In short: forget it, it won't help. Your issue is elsewhere.

 

[Astara_]

100ms? Really? That's howlong they put in so people could read the
text? Sorta doubt it, probably closer to 5s.
Texture streaming already off.
I forget the exact models but they were Samsung EVO's, new
this year, supposedly ~500MB/s RW ea.
The RAID is off of an LSI(Avago) HW raid card
capable of using PCI-based SSD's.

The Xeon 6134 won't run on an older motherboard.
It is a Dual CPU MB, w/no cpu in 2nd slot at this
time (future expansion).

The delay supposedly was put there to make sure people had
time to read the text on the images (the images are set
to off in my setup). Actually, the speed to load another
segment is variable -- which is puzzling, going from near
0 seconds as I walk through a circle-sigil to as long
as 20+ w/me ending up being the last person there.
It maybe that a pause put there to allow people to read text
won't take up much time, but 100ms won't be enough for
anyone to read anything.

 

[cupid]

Whatever it is, you're barking to the wrong tree.

Have you though that, maybe, your controller is a POS that doesn't support TRIM and you're just screwing up the SSDs?
RAID has those issues.

Have you tried to do speed benchmarks?
To check the speed?

And you still didn't said anything about your motherboard.

 

[Astara_]

1) Trim isn't needed for for most enterprise SSD's. This has been true for the past 2-3 years.
2) Most RAID cards don't support TRIM.
3) Yes, I did say something about my mobo. It is designed
for use with 2 Xeon 6134's. Very few mobo's can support the lastest
CPU's, but FWIW, it's an Intel workstation mobo.

benchmarks:
score       area       percentile
16026.8   cpu           98th
1000.6   2d           94th
5493.5   3d           78th
2911.2   mem           94th
38565.6   disk       99th
6623.7   total       99th

 

[cupid]

1. TRIM is a REQUIREMENT FOR ALL, ANY AND EVERY SSD EVEN IF THEY HAVE A PROPER GARBAGE COLLECTOR!
2. Read point 1
3. That's a nice motherboard!

Since we're going in circles and you won't stop killing your SSDs, and you will go around on how SSDs don't need TRIM, I end here my "conversation" with you.

Please, acquire proper raid handling procedures (like, software raid or a raid controller that supports TRIM) and then we "talk" in here.

 

[Astara_]

I have looked at this issue multiple times. As far back as
5 years ago, some brands of SSD's (Samsung) said that their
enterprise SSD's did not appreciably lose R/W speed -- and that they
designed them for Enterprise use where HW raid was common to not lose
performance in the absence of TRIM.

If you have any sources for HW raid controllers that support
TRIM, I'd be surprised. Broadcom/Avego/LSI says that none of their
RAID cards support TRIM.

Please read these articles... I do have sources and references to back
my assertions -- and don't rely on oversized red-bold fonts to make
my point.

1) https://serverfault.com/questions/776564/what-is-the-current-state-2016-of-ssds-in-raid

2) https://www.seagate.com/tech-insights/ssd-over-provisioning-benefits-master-ti/

3) https://www.spinics.net/lists/raid/msg40916.html

In all of the cases, they refer to:
1) enterprise disks start with considerably more over-provisioning than consumer grade drives.
2) to maintain performance, it is best not to fill disks more than about 75%. That's fine, since most file systems start to degrade in performance if you fill and keep them more full than that.
3) With sufficient free space, pre-erased sections can be allocated for new use on demand with little decrease in performance. Background self-maintenance is usually sufficient if the disks are idle a fair portion of the time.

You seem to be asserting that you know more than manufacturers, OS writers and other experts. Please site your sources & references.

Second. Trim is useful in maintaining write speed. The main activity
BnS is doing is *reading* and decompressing. TRIM has little to do
with BnS's performance.

 

[cupid]

BnS does write and read.
Where do you think that logs go?

Link 1 is useful, link 2 is only talking about overprovisioning and link 3 is for linux.

You seem to be asserting that you know more than manufacturers, OS writers and other experts. Please site your sources & references.

No, I don't.

Lets assume I'm totally and completelly wrong, and start with the basic.
____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Basic questions:

1. Where is the game stored?
2. How long does the game take to load into, say, into Cold Storage?
   
3. How long does it take to load into mushin's tower?
4. How much cpu % does the game use?
5. How much *free* ram do you have, when in mushin's tower, in a crowded channel?
6. Where is your pagination file?
7. Do you have hybernation enabled?
8. Do you have prefetch and superfetch enabled?
9. How much read/write is happening when the game is loading? (you can check this in the resource monitor)
10. What else do you have open while the game runs?
11. When was the last time you restarted your PC from a cold boot?

 

[Astara_]

BnS does very little writing to disk. What logs are you referring to?
Unless you turn on debugging, there is no logging.

The characters are are saved on the remote server.
Settings are usually local.

More than 99% of BnS's I/O is reading.



1. ?? It's path? the default. Only have 1
local, mounted partition. (C:\) on an SSD.
2. From where? Going through the gate for the 1st time
3. from where?
4. Varies, 50-100% of 1 cpu
5. 15146 MB in use out of 82666MB (62430MB free)
6. fixed size near beginning of disk -- unused. (system doesn't
usually swap).
7. No hybernation.
8. don't think prefetch or superfetch are useful or enabled.
9. it's not when game is loading that I have a problem.
I'm talking about loading a new area.
Loading CS, doesn't usually stress I/O...usually sections
within a dungeon are where I notice more probs....though
going from completely different areas to others can take longer
as well...but not usually a problem....
It's in a dugeon run...after finishing a Boss, and going
through a section circle into where next boss is.
10. Varies...Sometimes a movie, & browser, sometimes
nothing. It doesn't change based on background programs
since things like movies load off of network server
over a 10Gb link. Since it has 8 cpus and 2.666GHz
memory, more than one thing can run at a time, but
pauses between sections are not consistent and don't
vary based on background load.
11. also varies, but most recently ~2 days (UPS needs
new battery and power went out). Reboots are more frequent
due to wellbia's XIGNCODE malware complaining about
drivers.

 

[cupid]

Answering to point 9:

I've noticed that loading a new area is influenced by ping.

I load faster on EU than NA, with less unloaded areas in EU.
But honestly, the load is usually 1-2 seconds, so, not a huge difference.

When NA is really bad, it can take up to 5 seconds there.
On Desolate Tomb, large sections don't load, sometimes.

But honestly, that has nothing to do with this:

I'm told that there's a pause or wait on each of the transition screens to allow you to read the message and they can be disabled?

Seems like you are, afterall, barking at the wrong tree.

Also, try a file repair and run without mods.
If one of the mods is causing issues, you will know it.

 

[Astara_]

Answering to point 9:
I've noticed that loading a new area is influenced by ping.

As are many things in BnS.

But honestly,_that has nothing to do with this:

"extra 3-5 seconds wait time when loading a new area, on top of
load and/or ping times, to allow a few extra seconds to read hint
text on the screen"

Seems like you are, afterall, barking at the wrong tree.

How do you figure? say load time is .2 seconds, normal
ping is .2 seconds, but say a bad ping takes 2 seconds and
the read-text delay is 3-5 seconds.

So for fast loaders, wait time would be 3.4 - 5.4 secs, with
slow pingers waiting 5.2 - 7.2 seconds.

If the 3-5 seconds of read delay was removed, that would drop total
wait time to 2.2 seconds. That could allow a slow pinger to catch
have a shorter, overall, wait time.

So how do you see removing the text-delay as not being related
to shortening the overall delay time?

What I don't get is why you are arguing against someone trying
out such a patch. Why would you care so much that you would spend
this amount of time arguing against letting someone even trying
the wait-removal option? If it works, great!, If not, I'd have
to look elsewhere.

 

[cupid]

You're mixing things....

You are mixing "load screens", "cut scenes", "load screens tips", "multiple areas" and "portals".

Please, stop making a salad.

I will write a full list for you, you take whatever you need:

• When you get inside a dungeon/area, the loadscreen has some time to show the tips.
  Won't make much of a difference, since you will have to wait for others.
  Unless you're a big whale and can solo everything.
  Result: useless in F8, don't bother
  
  
• When you go from a boss to another one, there aren't loadscreens (unless you have high ping/slow storage).
  If you have loadscreens there, investigate your ping/storage.
  Result: removing tips won't do anything at all

Hope I de-complicated the tangled mess.

If this is true:

I regularly end up one of the last people into a next-scene after one
of those pauses.

That means it isn't the "pause", but something else.
As I said before, ping and storage.

Also, the "pause" won't do this:

it's not when game is loading that I have a problem.
I'm talking about loading a new area.
Loading CS, doesn't usually stress I/O...usually sections
within a dungeon are where I notice more probs....though
going from completely different areas to others can take longer
as well...but not usually a problem....
It's in a dugeon run...after finishing a Boss, and going
through a section circle into where next boss is.

Again: ping and storage.

Conclusion: don't bother with investing time into removing the pause to read the tips, since your problem is elsewhere.

 

[Astara_]

You're mixing things....
You are mixing "load screens", "cut scenes", "load screens tips", "multiple areas" and "portals".
Please, stop making a salad.

You are adding things that I never said. I never used the term
'cut scenes', neither did I ever use the term "tips". You are making things
up and claiming I said them to try to obfuscate the issue.

I will write a full list for you, you take whatever you need:

But your list has your created terms and near duplicates.

When I go from one area where I fought a boss, to the next area, *usually*, I see the transparent circular portals that I just step through. HOWEVER, on ***occasion***, i.e. not usually, (it may be only certain dungeons, not sure), as I step through the tranparent circular portal, instead of seeing the other side, I see what looks like a transition screen or black if I have those load-screens disabled.

When the progress bar reaches the other side, there is an additional 3-5 second pause, then I see rest of party again with them waiting at next boss.

So...when I see the progress bar halt and wait for 3-5 seconds, cpu wil
drop and there is little or no I/O. Seems like that is a timed wait.

When you get inside a dungeon/area, the loadscreen has some time to show the tips.
Won't make much of a difference, since you will have to wait for others.

Except that they will already be at next boss waiting for me. If I could skip
that extra 3-5 second pause, I might get their near the same time or a bit
less late.

Result: useless in F8, don't bother

Not useless: I might not enter quite as far behind everyone else, but
I do raids as well.

When you go from a boss to another one, there aren't loadscreens (unless you have high ping/slow storage).

I have them turned off, so I only see black screen. But you had
me bench things -- my I/O is in 99th percentile usually well over
100MB/s. My pings are usually ~ 120-130ms, of which, 50ms is network delay.

So as I said in my previous post -- even if I have a bad ping on way to
new section where next boss is, then cutting 3-5 seconds off the
wait time at end might have me entering about the same time as everyone
else.

If you have loadscreens there, investigate your ping/storage.
Result: removing tips won't do anything at all

Except remove an 3-5 seconds -- when I see the progress bar, the CPU and the IO go idle for a few seconds. You already had me bench my IO and my ping doesn't jump around that much.

Hope I de-complicated the tangled mess.

You added several terms of your own. However, you didn't answer this:

Why you are arguing against someone trying out such a patch. Why would you care so much that you would spend this amount of time arguing against letting someone even trying the wait-removal option?

[cupid's] Conclusion: don't bother with investing time into removing the pause to read the tips, since [the] problem is elsewhere.

That is your conclusion. Not mine. I have enough of a background in software engineering and computer science to know that trying it out is "cheap" and takes far less time that it has taken to discuss it here.