Just a request to figure out a way to make the load screens quicker on planetary landings. I know they aren't called "load screens" but that's what I'd call the delay when dropping from orbital flight to glide... hanging there... for seconds and seconds... sometimes half a minute... static in space, them bam, gliding. Other games not to be mentioned here seem to be able to fly direct to the planet without hanging up to load whatever Frontier is loading. Any way to make this smoother?
Horizons Planetary Landing Load Screens (AkA, Smooth Transition from Orbit to Surface)
- Thread starter JohnnyDangerous
- Start date
I'm afraid, only on client side: better PC - better internet connection. But if you land in somebody elses instance then he should have a good connection too.
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I'd dispute the better internet connection part - on bt infinity 2 here ( FTTC@78mbit/s ) and still get the horrendous transition times.
PC wise, I'm on an i5-4670k with 16Gb ram and a Geforce 970, so hardly a slouch either.
Its all about the instancing netcode.
I found that setting the terrain render to max helps a bit. It chugs on the way in but the delay is only a second or so.
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yep. You aren't alone. I came back from taking a break from ED, only to see these long load times where I maybe saw 1-2 seconds prior.
The only time I've seen truly seamless transitions -- by which I mean the "fake" glide periods synced perfectly with the start of the "actual" glides -- was when playing Solo at a quiet time (early hours, UK time for me). If you're in Open or Group there's always a delay as the game tries to instance you with other players, and at busy times when the Amazon cloud servers (on which the game's back end runs) are slammed you get further delays due to sheer traffic volume.
Things have definitely got worse over time, too. There are a whole bunch of technical reasons why this might be the case, some of which FD might be able to address and others that are out of their control. Only FD has the telemetry to know for certain, so speculation is a bit pointless.
I notice you're in the USA so your results might vary depending on your proximity to the nearest Amazon server, but in general if you want to see how smooth the planetary transitions can be try playing early in the morning in Solo. It makes for a dull game if you like human interaction, but the illusion of seamlessness is far more likely to work.
Things have definitely got worse over time, too. There are a whole bunch of technical reasons why this might be the case, some of which FD might be able to address and others that are out of their control. Only FD has the telemetry to know for certain, so speculation is a bit pointless.
I notice you're in the USA so your results might vary depending on your proximity to the nearest Amazon server, but in general if you want to see how smooth the planetary transitions can be try playing early in the morning in Solo. It makes for a dull game if you like human interaction, but the illusion of seamlessness is far more likely to work.
All of the above plus...
I had flown to the alien crash planet to have a look for myself and was having horrendous instancing problems last night (UK) such that the game just stayed in that "halted transition" mode from orbital cruise to glide phase whilst it was trying to connect me with other player's clients.
Just sat there looking at me. After about 5 minutes of this I killed the game.
My PC is no slouch and neither is my FTTC. I could see periods of communication where send and recv were going sky-high (heh) as my client was trying to connect with other clients, then it just gave up and went back to a trickle again.
So I tried to be clever by rejoining in Solo, flying down to the location, deploying the SRV, dismissing the ship, and exit and rejoin in Open on the planet surface. Endless rotating SRV whilst it tries in vain to connect with other players. Again, killed the game after 5 minutes.
So yeah it's the horrible networking side which is letting things down.
In the end I just played in Solo and had a gawp at the alien crash site.
On the technical side, I still can't see why it's not possible to make transitions from Hyperdrive, Supercruise, and Orbital Cruise seamless and THEN try and instance with other players in the background. It just doesn't make any sense to me to basically halt the entire game whilst looking for other game clients to connect to.
Perhaps an FDEV guy responsible for this side of things could explain why the above is technically infeasible?
I've built a $4500.00 dedicated gaming PC, and I still get these loads and pauses all the time in ED. It definitely ruins the immersion, and it ain't my PC's fault! Its the game!
With an overclocked 6700k, a binned GTX1080 and the game loading off a Samsung 950 Pro M.2 Nvme SSD, I should not be seeing any load time or performance based issues running this game full tilt. Yet I do.
Considering how nicely this same system runs much, much more demanding games than anything ED requires, the fault obviously lies in poor optimization of ED's code base or perhaps their choice of texture delivery.
So take it from me.... even when you throw a ton of horsepower at this game, it still chokes a lot of the time. Not major choking, but just enough to pull you out of the immersion/game experience.
Very annoying, and I hope that one of these days they get serious about fixing this.
With an overclocked 6700k, a binned GTX1080 and the game loading off a Samsung 950 Pro M.2 Nvme SSD, I should not be seeing any load time or performance based issues running this game full tilt. Yet I do.
Considering how nicely this same system runs much, much more demanding games than anything ED requires, the fault obviously lies in poor optimization of ED's code base or perhaps their choice of texture delivery.
So take it from me.... even when you throw a ton of horsepower at this game, it still chokes a lot of the time. Not major choking, but just enough to pull you out of the immersion/game experience.
Very annoying, and I hope that one of these days they get serious about fixing this.
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As Jack Schitt has said, play solo in quiet times to make it smoother and even seamless at the best times.
See above, it's an instanciation problem, there is no "loading", the game would run perfectly if there was an offline mode, I've got almost seamless transition from space to planet when there is no one around me to connect and a low load on the game's servers.
It has surprisingly little to do with the graphics side or even raw CPU cycles. Badly optimised graphics routines tend to manifest as LOD issues in ED rather than choppy "load times". My PC is coming up on three years old (see sig.) and runs ED smooth as silk at a constant 60fps unless there's network activity. Then it becomes a coin toss.
You can throw all the hardware you like at this game, but its reliance upon both automatically scaling server instances and P2P (the absolute killer because it relies on the connections of other randoms on the internet over whom you have absolute no control*) means you're always at the mercy of the next spike or drop-off in packets. Add in the fact that iffy network connections on Windows are second only to legacy optical drives when it comes to hogging resources and causing the rest of the system to stall during some operations, and you have the key to why ED is sometimes a bit of a lag-fest.
The transitions still annoy me sometimes, especially supercruise drops at stations, but I honestly think that FD have done all they can with optimisation in that regard. They could probably rearrange things a little, apply more graphical band-aids, even change the point at which P2P and P2S negotiations are undertaken, but at the end of the day the game can only continue when all the incoming and ougoing packets have got where they need to go. And sometimes that takes time.
[SUP]*Not strictly true, as there are some limited things you can do to "control" those connections, but they're
outside the scope of this thread. Asp Explorer may be along in a minute to hint at what they might be...[/SUP]
outside the scope of this thread. Asp Explorer may be along in a minute to hint at what they might be...[/SUP]
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Yes, I've noticed that it's better in Solo than Open, which is why I play more and more in solo these days. And it's not a PC or network issue as others have said (I have a 16GB monster rig with hard lined ISP connections at over 1gbps) but all the reasons aside... why can I go seamlessly to the surface in Star Citizen which is all in open? Is it because they aren't really running all the clients yet? Can't it prefetch data while you're in orbit or something?
It's definitely tied to system hardware more than your connection.
When 2.0 first shipped I was playing Elite Dangerous on a manufacturer overclocked 2GB R9 270x, system has 12GB RAM, i7 860 2.8ghz CPU and a slow(ish) harddrive and transition times were pretty quick and to the point.
2.1 released, times were still fine. Specs unchanged.
2.2 beta, again time were fine. Specs unchanged.
Then shortly after 2.2 went live my R9 270x died on me. As it would have been utterly daft to fork out on a proper GPU at the time given how obvious releases due I replaced the 270x with a old 1GB HD 5770 I have stored away for replacement parts, and immediately after transition speeds went right down the crapper.
Dropping into engineer station areas can often take well over 20 seconds, dropping off general areas at least 15 seconds. Same goes with transitioning to other systems, once my GPU was replaced with one significantly less efficient going from one system to the next longer, though admittedly no where near the increase I see with dropping down to planetary surfaces.
And it really makes sense that this is the case. The bulk of what's happening is client side computation GPU side with some CPU work to boot, server-wise it's really not involved in the process other than the exchange of small amounts of information to tell the client of any significant objects in the area for the machine to then do the bulk of the leg work handling as that's how Elite Dangerous is designed to function..... heavily client orientated so that Frontier don't go bankrupt within 2 months of live state activity.
A grossly generalised summary would likely be something like locally processed algorithm is fed (remote?)seed value, algorithm computes output, feeds output into other areas that then process and spew out more output, eventually you get the result that display as solar systems and their contents, as you get closer more algorithms kick in to process planetary details etc etc.
Server has little to do with it outside of sanity checks, additional information not to do with the heavy stuff, and (perhaps) some stepping in for synchronising states in problematic situations.
When 2.0 first shipped I was playing Elite Dangerous on a manufacturer overclocked 2GB R9 270x, system has 12GB RAM, i7 860 2.8ghz CPU and a slow(ish) harddrive and transition times were pretty quick and to the point.
2.1 released, times were still fine. Specs unchanged.
2.2 beta, again time were fine. Specs unchanged.
Then shortly after 2.2 went live my R9 270x died on me. As it would have been utterly daft to fork out on a proper GPU at the time given how obvious releases due I replaced the 270x with a old 1GB HD 5770 I have stored away for replacement parts, and immediately after transition speeds went right down the crapper.
Dropping into engineer station areas can often take well over 20 seconds, dropping off general areas at least 15 seconds. Same goes with transitioning to other systems, once my GPU was replaced with one significantly less efficient going from one system to the next longer, though admittedly no where near the increase I see with dropping down to planetary surfaces.
And it really makes sense that this is the case. The bulk of what's happening is client side computation GPU side with some CPU work to boot, server-wise it's really not involved in the process other than the exchange of small amounts of information to tell the client of any significant objects in the area for the machine to then do the bulk of the leg work handling as that's how Elite Dangerous is designed to function..... heavily client orientated so that Frontier don't go bankrupt within 2 months of live state activity.
A grossly generalised summary would likely be something like locally processed algorithm is fed (remote?)seed value, algorithm computes output, feeds output into other areas that then process and spew out more output, eventually you get the result that display as solar systems and their contents, as you get closer more algorithms kick in to process planetary details etc etc.
Server has little to do with it outside of sanity checks, additional information not to do with the heavy stuff, and (perhaps) some stepping in for synchronising states in problematic situations.
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Star Citizen functions off of static maps. Every system and its contents is a designed map some designer put together.
You enter a system, you load that designed map location and the objects pre-placed there. Go down to a planet, again similar thing... which is fine for Star Citizen as their end goal for a game galaxy is absolutely tiny and wouldn't even take up any space if you were to stick it into the main populated bubble in Elite Dangerous.
Elite Dangerous doesn't work off of pre-designed static maps like that, a lot of the work load is generated on the fly as and when a player needs it. This is what allows Frontier to have a galaxy that is so large as everything is created procedurally from seed values. As long as the seed value for each system is kept constant, then they can have the game client constructing it on the fly and get the desired result each time with little to no discrepancy.... downside of this is it introduces problems with transitions that vary depending on the specifics of the machine handling it.
Long long long long long long long drops
To the people saying it's due to your system or your connection or there's nothing that FDev can do to improve things.
Why is it so much worse now than it was a month or two ago (pre 2.1) I've changed nothing at my end so.... I can easily accept a few seconds or even 20-30 seconds of delay but it's turning into minutes (I've had it up to 10 minutes at times, it was never that bad before. My computer is a bit ancient but comes up as being able to run ED when fed into the tester and my connection is fine (tested via the isp) I can even upload things to fdev....
So somethings changed and not right.
I should add that if I kill the application via task manager (regularly forced to at the moment) and reload the whole game from scratch it takes considerably shorter amounts of time.
To the people saying it's due to your system or your connection or there's nothing that FDev can do to improve things.
Why is it so much worse now than it was a month or two ago (pre 2.1) I've changed nothing at my end so.... I can easily accept a few seconds or even 20-30 seconds of delay but it's turning into minutes (I've had it up to 10 minutes at times, it was never that bad before. My computer is a bit ancient but comes up as being able to run ED when fed into the tester and my connection is fine (tested via the isp) I can even upload things to fdev....
So somethings changed and not right.
I should add that if I kill the application via task manager (regularly forced to at the moment) and reload the whole game from scratch it takes considerably shorter amounts of time.
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anyone thought about HDD/SSD performance? I have a 5mb line which is crap in my area but I have my ED folder on my C: drive(intel535ssd). not C
rogrm x86 or any other sub, just straight to C and my "load" times rarely exceed 2 full seconds.
rogrm x86 or any other sub, just straight to C and my "load" times rarely exceed 2 full seconds.
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because post 2.1 builds added new terrain textures that need to be handled on your end. Not to say FD cannot optimize the process but I think it ultimately depends on data I/O speed on the end users PC.
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