Revolutionary Loading Screen Mod

[BLANKBLANK 4,414]

I will be trying this out on the Friday evening after the end of my working week. I still have plenty of evening time for C:S and SC4, but I focus on SC4 because that loading screen really has really irked me in C:S- it's discouraging.

[thale5 58]

Mod UPDATE Apr 20, 2016:

• Optional HTML report of failed and missing assets. The report is disabled by default. 
• If 'Load used assets' is also enabled, the report will include the assets used in the city.

Hopefully this functionality will give you useful information about your cities.

In my HTML reports, I am seeing quite many cases where a workshop building contains non-workshop props. I believe these are errors in the asset creation process. Can anyone confirm?

[Macronomicus 128]

or it could be props that where removed from the workshop, or never uploaded by the asset creator. lol  Thats something I hadn't considered until now,  I also went looking for a couple missing props to find they didnt exist in the workshop, cant recall which I looked for but Ill try again with this awesome html report you mentioned, man this mod rocks!

[thale5 58]

21 minutes ago, Macronomicus said:

or it could be props that where removed from the workshop, or never uploaded by the asset creator. lol  Thats something I hadn't considered until now,  I also went looking for a couple missing props to find they didnt exist in the workshop, cant recall which I looked for but Ill try again with this awesome html report you mentioned, man this mod rocks!

I am talking specifically about non-workshop props. It is easy to tell the difference: a workshop prop looks like this: 534802443.propname, while a private one looks like this: propname.propname. For the game, these are two different props.

[Macronomicus 128]

ahh, interesting... so for whatever reason its definitely that they never got around to sharing the prop.  Ill keep my eye out for that.

[thale5 58]

5 minutes ago, Macronomicus said:

ahh, interesting... so for whatever reason its definitely that they never got around to sharing the prop.  Ill keep my eye out for that.

Or perhaps they did publish the prop but kept on using the private one in the building. Anybody could do that mistake.

[Avanya 2,605]

It's likely to be a mistake by the asset creator. They'll create the prop and use it in their building, then upload both. The prop will then not show up, as it's looking for the local copy. Some people don't know that you need to upload the prop first, then subscribe to it and use it. This can prob account for most if not all of those cases.

[Macronomicus 128]

51 minutes ago, Avanya said:

It's likely to be a mistake by the asset creator. They'll create the prop and use it in their building, then upload both. The prop will then not show up, as it's looking for the local copy. Some people don't know that you need to upload the prop first, then subscribe to it and use it. This can prob account for most if not all of those cases.

Nope, I had no idea about that at all, thanks for the tip.  From what Boformer discovered about sub-meshes perhaps this issue will be mitigated somewhat?   It also lessens the need for subing a ton of props.  ...Ive not tried it yet but id like to at some point.

[thale5 58]

19 hours ago, Avanya said:

It's likely to be a mistake by the asset creator. They'll create the prop and use it in their building, then upload both. The prop will then not show up, as it's looking for the local copy. Some people don't know that you need to upload the prop first, then subscribe to it and use it. This can prob account for most if not all of those cases.

This would explain my observations, thanks for clarifying.

I haven't published assets, so I ask... There is no warning provided by the game? No warning that the building or park being published refers to private content?

[Sontimeister 2]

My game crashed near complete loading with a fatal error using this mod.

[Avanya 2,605]

35 minutes ago, thale5 said:

This would explain my observations, thanks for clarifying.

I haven't published assets, so I ask... There is no warning provided by the game? No warning that the building or park being published refers to private content?

Nope, not at all. Would be practical if it did.

[co-wie 4]

Hey Thale5, thanks for this mod. Suggestion: it would be also great if this mod could generate a warning when it detects for the first time an asset having been deleted from the workshop by its creator. At the moment the game silently removes all instances of the asset on load, and it is often only several saves later when you realise what had happened. To do so I'd suppose you could keep a list of assets loaded, and then when the condition occurs that (1) an asset is not available on load and (2) that asset exists in the save game, generate a warning dialog box. I think your mod already does something like that, without the dialog box, so it's quite easy to miss. Thanks for your consideration.

[thale5 58]

23 hours ago, Sontimeister said:

My game crashed near complete loading with a fatal error using this mod.

People are not generally reporting crashes but with software, nothing is impossible...

If you think it is related to the Loading Screen Mod, I would be grateful for the debug_log.txt. Using Gist, for example.

[thale5 58]

15 hours ago, co-wie said:

Hey Thale5, thanks for this mod. Suggestion: it would be also great if this mod could generate a warning when it detects for the first time an asset having been deleted from the workshop by its creator. At the moment the game silently removes all instances of the asset on load, and it is often only several saves later when you realise what had happened. To do so I'd suppose you could keep a list of assets loaded, and then when the condition occurs that (1) an asset is not available on load and (2) that asset exists in the save game, generate a warning dialog box. I think your mod already does something like that, without the dialog box, so it's quite easy to miss. Thanks for your consideration.

Your points (1) and (2) sum up the "asset not found" concept of this mod. So, this would be possible but I am a bit cautious to expand the scope from the loading screen to in-game. There are still many things to investigate.

I added the "(N not found)" information to the top left for this purpose. So it is already possible to notice, at a glance, if there are missing assets and if the number has changed from the previous day.

[co-wie 4]

But that means I have to keep my eyes glued to the screen while the save loads, i.e. I can't go make a cup of tea  :-O 

Joke aside, point noted. Once the mod settles and if you are thinking of enhancements (or even, a small mod that does just this task) please consider it. Thanks in advance.

[thale5 58]

Yesterday, I posted a fix for the LOD issue that affected material and texture sharing.

My thanks to Boformer for the LOD Toggler mod! It helped me greatly while investigating.

[Judazzz 1,936]

So I can now safely enable the 'Share textures/materials' options again? \o/
Related: I know things vary from configuration to configuration, but on the whole, do those settings have any noticeable effect on performance or loading time?

[Macronomicus 128]

Yes Judazz, I tried it and it worked flawlessly! Wooop! I love this mod

[Judazzz 1,936]

Awesome! Hopefully by enabling those settings I manage to squeeze an extra frame or two per second out of the game (thus doubling my tally ... or rather... )

[hbn 244]

Interesting to see shared resources. Anything to reduce the overhead on asset loading would be welcome. Now if I can only get into game to try it out.

[thale5 58]

18 hours ago, Judazzz said:

Related: I know things vary from configuration to configuration, but on the whole, do those settings have any noticeable effect on performance or loading time?

This is the central question of course. Like you said, it varies. My limited experience is that the gain in loading time and RAM usage is about 5%, sometimes 10% but not more. I was hoping for more but as I am optimizing software here without access to sources, I will settle for this.

GPU memory is another thing. My 2 GB is always immediately consumed, so any relief with that must be a positive thing. Luckily, the prefab-based approach taken in Unity explicitly supports shared meshes, materials and textures.

[thale5 58]

In case someone is interested, you will find a line like this in your output_log.txt:

[LoadingScreen] Textures / Materials / Meshes loaded: 207 / 75 / 70 referenced: 45 / 15 / 20
Here, the first three figures are the number of resources loaded from the disk. The remaining three figures are the loads that could be skipped because identical resources were found in memory, based on check sums.

Later, I might add an option for a rather detailed HTML report of the loaded and shared resources. Mainly out of personal interest but asset creators might benefit from it, too. Players don't need such information.

[thale5 58]

1 hour ago, hbn said:

 

Interesting to see shared resources. Anything to reduce the overhead on asset loading would be welcome. Now if I can only get into game to try it out.

 

I will add one more thing that came to my mind. There are also other factors that usually make Loading Screen Mod a little bit faster than the default routine. The funniest is probably this one: because of a bug, the game by default always loads all custom vehicle trailers into memory, no matter if they are disabled or enabled in Content Manager. If disabled, the vehicle itself is not loaded and the trailers stay hidden. Some vehicles have several trailers, so this bug alone can make a difference.

I suppose this hasn't been noticed although it is openly reported in output_log.txt.

[Judazzz 1,936]

3 hours ago, thale5 said:

In case someone is interested, you will find a line like this in your output_log.txt:

[LoadingScreen] Textures / Materials / Meshes loaded: 207 / 75 / 70 referenced: 45 / 15 / 20
Here, the first three figures are the number of resources loaded from the disk. The remaining three figures are the loads that could be skipped because identical resources were found in memory, based on check sums.

Later, I might add an option for a rather detailed HTML report of the loaded and shared resources. Mainly out of personal interest but asset creators might benefit from it, too. Players don't need such information.

That's interesting. I'll see what your mod will do - and spits out to the log - later today.
Thanks again for this awesome mod - not only does it make the loading time more bearable by having something to look at, also even the tiniest amounts of added efficiency are more than welcome!

[hbn 244]

Thought I'd check it out.

When the loading bar gets to the middle, that's typically when it stops. Instead it kept spinning slowly as I watched it load asset after asset, prop after prop. Safe to say I might need to cut some back. It got to about 15Gb before the save finished loading. The bar didn't reach then end though. I disabled the share options. What's it warning about when the memory usage goes red? XD

Also do you guys see two images on my posts? I inserted one, it was fine. Then I clicked submit reply and it duplicates it below? Have no idea why it's doing that. Both Firefox and Chrome is doing it. Getting on my wick is what it's doing.

  Edited May 11, 2016 by hbn  
keeps duplicating images

[thale5 58]

1 hour ago, hbn said:

It got to about 15Gb before the save finished loading. The bar didn't reach then end though. I disabled the share options. What's it warning about when the memory usage goes red?

So far I have kept the default behavior of the bar. It is not optimal. It does reach 100% but the screen goes away at the same time.

You may want to try disabling the 'Load enabled assets' option. Depending on asset usage, the loading time might reduce significantly.

Red memory usage means that the Commit Size (which is not shown) has exceeded physical RAM size. It's nothing critical but you are going to see some page file activity after that point. It is not exact science (virtual memory seldom is).

[Judazzz 1,936]

Enabling shared textures/materials worked perfectly fine, this being the result:
[LoadingScreen] Textures / Materials / Meshes loaded: 5155 / 2361 / 1822 referenced: 405 / 129 / 246

It also shaved about 30 seconds off the loading time, or rather until the counter stops running - it seems that once all the assets are loaded and it moves on to simulation-related things, it stops.
I didn't notice any impact on performance or memory usage. But my fps has always fluctuated madly, sometimes topping 25fps, sometimes dipping well below 10fps, so it's hard to quantify any changes to begin with. Also, memory usage seems to decrease significantly once everything is loaded (when I open the Resource Manager while running the game, it uses about 7-8GB instead of the 13GB mentioned during the loading process), so I'm not quite sure how to read those values.

One little request: would it be possible to add a target="_blank" attribute to all Workshop links - I prefer to open links in a new tab, so by force of habit I've more than once accidentally killed the tab with the report because I closed it instead of going back (also the reason why Reddit and I have this love-hate relationship  )

[co-wie 4]

4 hours ago, Judazzz said:

so by force of habit I've more than once accidentally killed the tab with the report because I closed it instead of going back (also the reason why Reddit and I have this love-hate relationship  )

There's an option in Reddit that makes all links open in a new window. It's the second option inside the preferences: 

clicking options	open links in a new window/tab

[Judazzz 1,936]

Most excellent, thanks for pointing that out  

[Matthias King 348]

I finally tried this out yesterday. I have a couple of questions.

When it says an asset is not found, what does that mean? It seems simple, but it said that about assets that I have, and were loaded. The Kleikie Sophia Hospital for example. It was loaded into the game, but I had to replop it. What's that about?

And when it fails to load something, what causes that?

Basically I'm wondering about everything that shows up in red in the 'scenes and assets' list upon loading.

Thanks.