How long does it take for your game to load

[EWA98204 1]

I was just wondering cause it would be lovely for the game to just start already

[Kirkland22 5]

Would you mind specifying what you mean, exactly? Do you mean how long it takes to open the game up to the region map after inserting the disk and clicking on the icon? And with or without skipping through the intro trailer? For me it takes less than a minute, especially seeing is how I skip through the intro trailer each time. If it's taking you any longer than about five minutes that's not exactly normal I shouldn't think. I'd be surprised if this poll has any more votes past the 1-10 minute option.

[mrbisonm 1,622]

I just timed it. It took 2 minutes and 43 seconds to load and enter the regional map with my 14.2 GB's of Plugins and another 5 minutes and 51 seconds to open a citytile. That makes it a total of 8 minutes and 34 seconds.

Just enough time to prepare myself a good hot chocolate or coffee.

mrb

  Edited December 31, 2011 by mrbisonm  

[eufl 133]

Funny to read about this coffee making feature in simcity: when playing on my netbook i mostly plan the start of the game with a new cuppa, and always there is time for this. And i don´t need more than 1,5 Gig to slow down the loading process to maybe 5 minutes.

On my big machine with 8 Gig Ram the game with around 7 Gig plugins starts in seconds, the same for every city tile...

Greetz, Carl

[skylerracer23 71]

I have an intel atom processer(which really sucks) and SC4 starts up in 3 mins and loads a city from start up in 5 mins.any other time i load up a city it takes about 2.5-5 mins.

[A Nonny Moose 8,262]

32 seconds from click on the icon to region map. This is with Firefox in the background. I have 375MB of plugins, mostly compressed into .dat files. My machine. I have 16GB of swap space.

[coldrifting 30]

About a half minute from going black screen to the mouse showing up. Then a few minutes to load my large tile city. This is with 475 megabytes of plugins. Yeap, my 2001 Dell Dimension 2100 sucks.

[BelgradeSim 9]

On my old machine (AMD 1.6GHz, 1GB RAM) i used to wait for 3 mins to open a huge city. Now, with a new one (AMD dual core 3GHZ, 2GB RAM) its half the time. I have 1.4 GB of Plugins. I believe the amount of plugins influences the loading time.

[Wiecher 192]

For my game to load it now takes approximately 5 minutes.

On my old computer, before I deleted all the readme's and pictures from the plugins, it look 30 minutes.

However, loading my largest city takes 15 to 20 minutes, depending on if I already opened another city before (first load always takes longer)

[TekindusT 3,809]

On my old computer, since I clicked on the SC4 icon until I could actually play with my largest city, the usual time was around 10-15 minutes; enough to read some pages of a book (I always had something to read in front of me when playing SC4) or to go to the kitchen to have a snack.

On the new computer, the total load time would be of 1-2 minutes, but I still don't have all the plugins installed.

[A Nonny Moose 8,262]

From the evidence so far, it appears that the plugin suite size is the big determinant of loading speeds for the game. A city, of course, is content dependent.

I have a question for people with large plugin suites. How do you manage this horrendous thing? Do you weed out the non-plugin files?

I usually weed all documentation and other stuff out when placing plugins in my system, and if there are several BAT files, I often compress them into a single .dat. Because of the way I do maintenance, I do not use the large compression program, but manually survive using ilive's Files2DAT. I have always felt that a little file maintenance is worth the time in the long run.

[2farnorth 26]

Don't exactly time it but it usually takes me 10 mins to get into a city tile. 553 Megabytes of plugins, 2 gig memory, Intel core2 quad 2.40 GHZ processor.

[x493x 446]

Mine takes about 10 minutes I think. Let's just say that I can start the game, use the washroom, read the local newspaper, and then the region has loaded, now I have to wait about half that time for a city to load. Reason is, my plugins folder is packed.

[Dannibee 138]

3 minutes 36 seconds to get to a city tile from the desktop, this is with 4.01 GB's of plugins as well

[CoastRunner 24]

I find that, with a 400 mB plugin folder on a 2yr old laptop, it takes about 30 seconds for the game to load a large region from the desktop. From there to load a full large city tile ranges from 15 seconds to 45 seconds if it is absolutely packed, but I have very few cities like that. Most of my plugins are suburban.

[Jazzmaster 716]

2:03.4 s with 6.64 GB of plugins, and this is of course from the icon on the desktop to the regional view. This is with 8GB of memory and an Intel i7 processor, and iTunes running in the background. My older machine took 15 minutes to load a smaller plugin suite, but it's worth mentioning that before I added more memory it was a lousy 30 minutes.

[A Nonny Moose 8,262]

^ Kind of says it doesn't it? Lots of memory needed in order to page a big plugin suite. I'll bet your swap file is very active during the load, but unless you have a hardware monitor there is probably no way for you to count page table hits.

I have 4GB, and a small plugin suite less than half a gig. 32 seconds from click to region with a major background load. Dual core probably helps this a lot because the background stuff runs in whichever CPU doesn't have the big executable.

Clearly the thing comes down to disk speed, state of file system, memory availability, and not CPU. In a load like this, the CPU is doing something else while waiting for the I/O to finish.

Yoshi, is your disk well defragmented? In NTFS, fragmentation will cause an enormous penalty on a large plugin suite. And are your plugins condensed? Have you removed the junk files (documentation, etc.) from the plugins folders? You can fine tune this quite a bit, and in your case it may well be worth it.

Oh yes, one minute and ten seconds to load a large complicated city, but the population is only 57,000. It has a great many BAT lots however since it has two or three PEG seaports and some SPAM farms. NAM and NWM, SAM also. The disk for this game is on a USB2 channel, but I suspect this load is more CPU than I/O because of all the table lookups for the BAT lots.

[TekindusT 3,809]

@Yoshiisland: Did the game load at the same time you were playing iTunes? This was impossible for my old one; iTunes is a black hole of computer resources for me!

[Jazzmaster 716]

^ Kind of says it doesn't it? Lots of memory needed in order to page a big plugin suite. I'll bet your swap file is very active during the load, but unless you have a hardware monitor there is probably no way for you to count page table hits.

I have 4GB, and a small plugin suite less than half a gig. 32 seconds from click to region with a major background load. Dual core probably helps this a lot because the background stuff runs in whichever CPU doesn't have the big executable.

Clearly the thing comes down to disk speed, state of file system, memory availability, and not CPU. In a load like this, the CPU is doing something else while waiting for the I/O to finish.

Yoshi, is your disk well defragmented? In NTFS, fragmentation will cause an enormous penalty on a large plugin suite. And are your plugins condensed? Have you removed the junk files (documentation, etc.) from the plugins folders? You can fine tune this quite a bit, and in your case it may well be worth it.

Oh yes, one minute and ten seconds to load a large complicated city, but the population is only 57,000. It has a great many BAT lots however since it has two or three PEG seaports and some SPAM farms. NAM and NWM, SAM also. The disk for this game is on a USB2 channel, but I suspect this load is more CPU than I/O because of all the table lookups for the BAT lots.

I used to have a habit of defragmenting every week, but that stopped. I definitely should get back to that. Roughly half my plugins are condensed, but I completely turned off from the whole DAT packing thing after the first time, because I kept running into so many problems later on. At least I was smart enough to make an unpacked copy of the plugins beforehand, or I'd really be in the hole trying to change water mods etc. I haven't generally packed plugins since, because I do custom lotting from time to time and only want to use what's necessary. Also, I sometimes swap files in/out between the Plugins and a Plugins Temp folder (in the case of the Diagonal Bridge Enabler, as well as some slope and aesthetic mods). I'll think about DAT packing down the line, though.

As for the documentation (pictures and readmes), I only keep them if its for certain BATs I need information on for lot size/zone type so I can grow them later, or for really complicated mods (such as the NAM), so I can troubleshoot with it later. These files are kept in a folder outside of the plugins. The rest are deleted.

@Yoshiisland: Did the game load at the same time you were playing iTunes? This was impossible for my old one; iTunes is a black hole of computer resources for me!

It did load at the same time. It's interesting that you're having these problems, because I never found it impossible to run the two programs side by side even on my old machine with only one core. When you say impossible, do you really mean things just lag too much to be acceptable? On my old machine, I would have to restart the computer after playing the game to reset the memory, because everything ran slower indefinitely afterward.

[MandelSoft 2,775]

It takes 3 to 5 minutes to load the Region View from desktop with a plugins folder from over 3GB. Loading my largest city (completely filled, over 800K inhabitants, lots of jobs and even so many props that the Prop Pox occurs) takes another 3-5 minutes. Save times are a bit shorter, though...

Sometimes I monitor with Taskmanager (I play in windowed mode, so that's no problem for me) how many memory SC4 uses while it's running, and with only the Region View loaded it's over 300MB!

Best,

Maarten

[TekindusT 3,809]

@Yoshiisland: I mean that I had lag even using only iTunes (I had it installed just to feed my iPod, but I didn't listen to the music from it). I never waited the necessary time to load SC4 with iTunes running, but you can be sure it was more than 15 minutes.

[A Nonny Moose 8,262]

I don't use DATPacker, but Files2DAT by ilive. I only pack individual plugin sets and not the whole works, which it could do theoretically. Better for loading, better for maintenance.

Yoshi, it is probably time to bite the bullet some weekend and do some disk maintenance. Cites fragment the disk like crazy, and shoving plugins around will do the same.

[EWA98204 1]

You guys are so lucky I have to wait 25 minutes for it to load

[A Nonny Moose 8,262]

You guys are so lucky I have to wait 25 minutes for it to load

Unconscionable! What are your system specs? What operating system? How big is your plugin suite? Perhaps with a little maintenance we can help you cut this down.

[NMUSpidey 3,956]

I'm looking at about 5-7 minutes from click to region and either an additional 3-4 minutes (small/medium cities) to 5-6 more minutes for the largest sized cities to load. I have 2.63G in my plugins (although they are not cleaned up or organized in any way at all) and my Acer laptop's specs are 2.00GHz AMD Turion processor with 4GB RAM. I have Vista SP2 and use the Aero appearance package because I think it looks cool.

Now if you'll excuse me, I think I'm going to spend the next 30 or so minutes doing a quick once over to my plugins folder so I don't have to keep waiting for so darn long!

[SLagonia 71]

Two and a half minutes to open the game, anywhere from fifteen seconds to a minute to open the region (depending on the size - One region is gigantic) and anywhere from two to five minutes to open a city (again, depending on the size).

[dogma555 187]

I haven't had to load SC4.exe in months.

I Hibernate.. I can't believe how many of you don't do this. You guys actually WAIT for the game to load each time... seriously, why?

My SC4.exe with 10+ GB plugin folder takes about 10-15 minutes to load.. but that's not the worst part, the worst part is waiting to load my biggest cities.. the biggest and most complex of which can take around 20 minutes..

So I just hibernate the PC with the city running in the backround every night, instead of turning the PC off.. that way SC4 is always ready to go.. even right now, its just running in the background, and I'm about to alt+tab back in right after this post.

I also would imagine SSD drive users see much quicker load times too.

.. and if your SC4 is loading in less than a minute.. sorry, but you don't have enough plugins and are just failing to take advantage of the thriving modding community this game has spawned.. hit the exchange!

  Edited January 3, 2012 by dogma555  

[Jazzmaster 716]

I haven't had to load SC4.exe in months.

I Hibernate.. I can't believe how many of you don't do this. You guys actually WAIT for the game to load each time... seriously, why?

Computers being what they are today, can excel in multitasking. I can browse a forum like this or watch a quick video since a city is usually ready to go in little more than five minutes. There's also taking a restroom break or putting laundry in the dryer, things like that.

My SC4.exe with 10+ GB plugin folder takes about 10-15 minutes to load.. but that's not the worst part, the worst part is waiting to load my biggest cities.. the biggest and most complex of which can take around 20 minutes..

So I just hibernate the PC with the city running in the backround every night, instead of turning the PC off.. that way SC4 is always ready to go.. even right now, its just running in the background, and I'm about to alt+tab back in right after this post.

I've no confirmation of this, but it sounds like that'd really bog down your memory. I guess if the program hibernated it wouldn't really matter, but I always close down a program when I'm not using it (with the exception of iTunes, and I don't really know why that is). Although, my computer boots up in about 10 seconds and SimCity 4 loads so quickly (at least compared to my last rig) that the time 'lost' doesn't mean much to me. On my older machine which took up to an hour between loading off the desktop and entering a large city, I would go play a game or take a walk. When my session was over I had to restart to refresh the memory, otherwise all the other programs running since SimCity 4's termination would lag indefinitely.

I'm not very literate in the software realm, but I would never leave a program that brings smaller machines to their knees to run perpetually in the background. It just feels like common sense, at least to me.

I also would imagine SSD drive users see much quicker load times too.

I own an SSD, and I can confirm that load times are not very much different. The thing that's worth mentioning about SSD's (from what I understand) is their lightning fast read/write times are usually only seen on initial startup or with very large files. The Plugins suite, which is a collection of individual smaller files, doesn't fit into that category, and since it makes up the bulk of the SimCity 4 load, putting the game on an SSD won't really help things. I just moved the game from my SSD to an HDD and I find no noticeable difference.

  Edited January 4, 2012 by Yoshiisland  

[dogma555 187]

Computers being what they are today, can excel in multitasking. I can browse a forum like this or watch a quick video since a city is usually ready to go in little more than five minutes. There's also taking a restroom break or putting laundry in the dryer, things like that.

Do you mean to say your PC is not "stuck" in a black screen while SC4 is loading? Or that you have a second rig? I cant do anything while SC4 or any individual cities are loading. I always assumed it was the same for everyone.

<<I've no confirmation of this, but it sounds like that'd really bog down your memory. I guess if the program hibernated it wouldn't really matter, but I always close down a program when I'm not using it (with the exception of iTunes, and I don't really know why that is). Although, my computer boots up in about 10 seconds and SimCity 4 loads so quickly (at least compared to my last rig) that the time 'lost' doesn't mean much to me. On my older machine which took up to an hour between loading off the desktop and entering a large city, I would go play a game or take a walk. When my session was over I had to restart to refresh the memory, otherwise all the other programs running since SimCity 4's termination would lag indefinitely.

I'm not very literate in the software realm, but I would never leave a program that brings smaller machines to their knees to run perpetually in the background. It just feels like common sense, at least to me.>>

I've been doing this for about 3 years now, so I think its quite alright. I refuse to take it easy on my equipment, and push everything to its limit..

Right now SC4.exe is taking up a gig and a half, but it has absolutely 0 impact on my ability to browse the web or do anything else. In fact, I don't even shut down SC4 to play other games, and there is still no slowdown to be found. I play Counterstrike Source all the time with SC4 running.. and this is only on windows xp, 32 bit, with only 3.4gb of the 4.0 gigs of ram being recognized.

I also believe that since Windows Vista, the operating systems are set to automatically try and utilize 100% of your ram at all times anyway.. and RAM is now the cheapest part of the whole rig (literally like $20 for an entire rig's worth) so I wouldn't worry a thing about beating up on it.

<<I own an SSD, and I can confirm that load times are not very much different. The thing that's worth mentioning about SSD's (from what I understand) is their lightning fast read/write times are usually only seen on initial startup or with very large files. The Plugins suite, which is a collection of individual smaller files, doesn't fit into that category, and since it makes up the bulk of the SimCity 4 load, putting the game on an SSD won't really help things. I just moved the game from my SSD to an HDD and I find no noticeable difference.>>

That's what I feared.. but odd since I heard otherwise from another user. But you're only the second

So basically, if you hibernate there is not much point of getting an SSD drive quite yet, since I'm never waiting more than 15 seconds to hibernate into GB's of programs already running anyway.

I would also say that most of the "speed" from the quicker boot times you guys are seeing from the SSD drives are not necessarily because of the superior SSD architecture. Its mainly because they are ridiculously small capacity drives. So when you boot up a 64gb capacity SSD drive, its not just the fact that its an SSD.. its that you were probably used to booting from a 640gb hard drive or something. You can install windows onto a 60gb WD Black and it will boot up almost, but not quite as fast as an SSD drive.

But if you hibernate, you're avoiding the boot time all together. I just don't see the point of turning a computer off all the way off after the hibernation feature was introduced. Even though designed for laptops to save people's data after low battery, it works flawlessly for desktops too.. almost instantly resuming exactly where you left off, avoiding ridiculously long load times in programs like an sc4 with gigantic plugin folder.

[Jazzmaster 716]

Do you mean to say your PC is not "stuck" in a black screen while SC4 is loading? Or that you have a second rig? I cant do anything while SC4 or any individual cities are loading. I always assumed it was the same for everyone.

No sir, I run the game in a window. I edited my command line in the game's shortcut to run the game in a full res window, so I can enjoy the maximum playing window without having to alt+tab to access other programs. It's quite simple to do, actually.

Right now SC4.exe is taking up a gig and a half, but it has absolutely 0 impact on my ability to browse the web or do anything else. In fact, I don't even shut down SC4 to play other games, and there is still no slowdown to be found. I play Counterstrike Source all the time with SC4 running.. and this is only on windows xp, 32 bit, with only 3.4gb of the 4.0 gigs of ram being recognized.

I also believe that since Windows Vista, the operating systems are set to automatically try and utilize 100% of your ram at all times anyway.. and RAM is now the cheapest part of the whole rig (literally like $20 for an entire rig's worth) so I wouldn't worry a thing about beating up on it.

I'm not sure that the OS was designed to use up more RAM. I just know that it (Vista, or 7) use up more memory for the visual features in Windows Aero. And naturally, as the memory and processing size of computers increase, the programs and OS's running on them are increasing their memory usage as well.

That's what I feared.. but odd since I heard otherwise from another user. But you're only the second

So basically, if you hibernate there is not much point of getting an SSD drive quite yet, since I'm never waiting more than 15 seconds to hibernate into GB's of programs already running anyway.

I wouldn't bother unless you really feel like you want it. It's definitely not necessary. Flash memory is slowly crossing the bridge from a luxury to the industry standard. I don't think HDD's are going to just disappear anytime soon, but the SSD tech has been getting cheaper and better like anything else.

I would also say that most of the "speed" from the quicker boot times you guys are seeing from the SSD drives are not necessarily because of the superior SSD architecture. Its mainly because they are ridiculously small capacity drives. So when you boot up a 64gb capacity SSD drive, its not just the fact that its an SSD.. its that you were probably used to booting from a 640gb hard drive or something. You can install windows onto a 60gb WD Black and it will boot up almost, but not quite as fast as an SSD drive.

I've got a 120GB Intel 510 SSD, and the performance on it is pretty superb. Not to mention it's nice and quiet.

But if you hibernate, you're avoiding the boot time all together. I just don't see the point of turning a computer off all the way off after the hibernation feature was introduced. Even though designed for laptops to save people's data after low battery, it works flawlessly for desktops too.. almost instantly resuming exactly where you left off, avoiding ridiculously long load times in programs like an sc4 with gigantic plugin folder.

I've always felt differently, but my computer (not to brag, or anything, sorry if it comes across that way) is so fast that most programs will open in a couple of seconds at the most. The only exceptions are SimCity 4 and 3Ds Max Studio 2012, and what makes SimCity 4 load slower is the Plugins Suite; without that it starts in about a couple of seconds, too. But like I said, the load time never bothered me so much that I had to leave it constantly running. I understand your mentality though.