New and Much Improved thale5's Loading Screen Mod [Test]

[ghosty20 150]

From the awesome thale5 who brought us the fantastic Loading Screen Mod. Comes a new and vastly improved version http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=833779378 even though this new version is still in testing the city load times of this version are vastly improved..

With the previous version of this mod the load time for one of my cities was 6.05 minutes and probably just the same without this mod, but with this test version that 6.05 minutes has been cut down to 1.45 minutes..

All I can say is wow just wow this makes not having to wait for ages for my city to load..

 

[Judazzz 1,936]

I just tested it, and the results are nothing short of incredible, pure witchcraft! (asset loading went down from 8-9 minutes to less than 2 minutes).

Needless to say Workshop-binging will reach frightening heights with this mod  

[ghosty20 150]

Tell me about it I expect my asset and mod subscribing to go to new heights..  They did say they were able to do it by as quoted from their page "The [Test] mod is multi-threaded, i.e. it uses several processor cores. I also optimized asset loading by removing the performance bottlenecks I was able to find."

So somehow they were able to enable multi-threading to speed up asset loading which is very awesome..

[mutton noir 170]

Loading Screen, Don't Crash & Less Steam are a powerful trio of mods. They are essential. I'm now able to subscribe to over 3000 mods/assets and my load times for my current city have been reduced from 30 minutes to 8. It's a miracle. The modding community increasingly make the CO devs look like amateurs. The community has transformed the game beyond all recognition from the vanilla experience. Thanks to everyone who contributes their time and creative skills to the workshop.

[Lost Gecko 481]

This is the kind of mod I feel has no reason not to be in the base game. Fair enough my knowledge on programming is nonexistent but there doesn't seem to be any drawback to this mod. Unlike many great mods that negatively impact performance and therefore won't be implemented, this one does the opposite so I don't know... Congratulations and thank you to Thale5 for this.

[R3V0 909]

52 minutes ago, Lost_gecko said:

This is the kind of mod I feel has no reason not to be in the base game. Fair enough my knowledge on programming is nonexistent but there doesn't seem to be any drawback to this mod. Unlike many great mods that negatively impact performance and therefore won't be implemented, this one does the opposite so I don't know... Congratulations and thank you to Thale5 for this.

Stop. Don't give them any ideas. 

Each time CO intregrates a mod to the base game, it becomes less usefull than before. Let them ignore this one so it continues to be important and actually useful mod for us. 

[Judazzz 1,936]

On 1/4/2017 at 8:22 PM, Lost_gecko said:

This is the kind of mod I feel has no reason not to be in the base game. Fair enough my knowledge on programming is nonexistent but there doesn't seem to be any drawback to this mod. Unlike many great mods that negatively impact performance and therefore won't be implemented, this one does the opposite so I don't know... Congratulations and thank you to Thale5 for this.

Quite frankly, I'm getting a bit peeved by these "I'm not a programmer, but CO is doing it wrong" and "CO are a bunch of amateurs"-type comments (you also see loads of them on Reddit) - mostly because if you don't have the know-how, imo. you're not in the position to pass judgement, full stop. I mean, if you don't know how the game works under the hood, based on what can you make claims about the quality of the code, or the impact of adding certain features to the base game? It's like me telling modelers that they do their work wrong, even though I have zero modeling knowledge or experience - out of line.

Don't get me wrong, this is not a rant aimed at you personally, but more a general one aimed at some of the criticism CO gets - sure, there's plenty to criticize (not in the least their focus in regard to DLC's), but unlike modders, CO has to take into consideration the minimum specs. Modders can simply say "Sorry, your rig is too slow" even to gamers that have a powerful OctaCore CPU with 32 Gigs of RAM, CO has to make sure that everything they release works on the minimum specs they determined prior to release. And if you look at what they've added to the game since release whilst preserving those minimum specs, I think CO deserves more praise than the crap they're getting from so many.

[Lost Gecko 481]

@Judazzz I think I wasn't clear enough about my point of view. I totally agree with you about the ton of people saying that everything is easy and could be done in a snap of fingers and that CO is just incompetent. The minimum specs are indeed a central aspect of their decisions and that's perfectly normal.

As we are talking about a mod that doesn't improve performance as such but dramatically improves the quality of life of everyone without any obvious drawback (I mean instinctively I don't associate something that improves loading time with worse performance), I genuinely don't know why it's not in the core game, and this has to do with my lack of programming knowledge. I didn't imply anything negative here, I was genuinely wondering why the situation is as it is.

I'm sorry if my previous comment was misleading but there isn't any criticism towards CO involved

@ghosty20 (EDIT: just tagging you as well to be sure you see this clarification  )

[ghosty20 150]

56 minutes ago, Judazzz said:

Quite frankly, I'm getting a bit peeved by these "I'm not a programmer, but CO is doing it wrong" and "CO are a bunch of amateurs"-type comments (you also see loads of them on Reddit) - mostly because if you don't have the know-how, imo. you're not in the position to pass judgement, full stop. I mean, if you don't know how the game works under the hood, based on what can you make claims about the quality of the code, or the impact of adding certain features to the base game? It's like me telling modelers that they do their work wrong, even though I have zero modeling knowledge or experience - out of line.

Don't get me wrong, this is not a rant aimed at you personally, but more a general one aimed at some of the criticism CO gets - sure, there's plenty to criticize (not in the least their focus in regard to DLC's), but unlike modders, CO has to take into consideration the minimum specs. Modders can simply say "Sorry, your rig is too slow" even to gamers that have a powerful OctaCore CPU with 32 Gigs of RAM, CO has to make sure that everything they release works on the minimum specs they determined prior to release. And if you look at what they've added to the game since release whilst preserving those minimum specs, I think CO deserves more praise than the crap their getting from so many.

Yeah I totally agree with you, it gets up my nose as well.. There is a saying “before you criticize a man, walk a mile in his shoes” and those "armchair programmers" need to think of that before they go criticizing and thinking they know better than the actual people creating the game..

 

@Lost_gecko: (Edit: It is all good saw it and understand..)

[dreesedatalink 15]

OMG...  took my load time from 12-14 min to 1min 46 sec.  

https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B_ONh3-2jMPPdU53MGVoWUVSNDg

with about 2300 assets.  

 

AWESOME!!!

 

[Avanya 2,605]

@Judazzz You took the words just out of my mouth!  I think reddit can be really bad for that sort of comments. And it's the same kind of lack of understanding (and even attempting to) we see with modders and asset creators. 

Back on topic this mod is awesome! Though I did spend alot of the loading time doing UV stuff on my models, which I load too fast to do now.  I wonder if there's some downside to this way of loading. Like a low end pc with maybe only dual core or what not. As someone who doesn't understand how that sort of thing works I can only guess. If there's no downside I wouldn't be surprised to see the default loader updated. On the other hand they might have gone for the slow option to not blow up some old pcs.  

[Judazzz 1,936]

3 hours ago, Lost_gecko said:

@Judazzz I think I wasn't clear enough about my point of view. I totally agree with you about the ton of people saying that everything is easy and could be done in a snap of fingers and that CO is just incompetent. The minimum specs are indeed a central aspect of their decisions and that's perfectly normal.

As we are talking about a mod that doesn't improve performance as such but dramatically improves the quality of life of everyone without any obvious drawback (I mean instinctively I don't associate something that improves loading time with worse performance), I genuinely don't know why it's not in the core game, and this has to do with my lack of programming knowledge. I didn't imply anything negative here, I was genuinely wondering why the situation is as it is.

I'm sorry if my previous comment was misleading but there isn't any criticism towards CO involved

No worries mate, my comment wasn't aimed at you personally. Although it may have appeared that way since I quoted you - fact is that I just needed a 'victim' to use as a launch pad for my tirade, and your post simply suited my needs. It's more just a general frustration I have, a frustration mostly fueled by comments made on Reddit and in the Workshop, because, perhaps barring a very small number of exceptions, the Simtropolis community is a lot more mature, understanding and thoughtful than those (I've been part of tons of communities, in all sorts of positions and about all sorts of subjects, and this one is by far the most peaceful, pleasant and cooperative one I've ever joined). So please don't take what I said as something personal (my apologies if it did), because it's all good!
 

@Avanya - if I understood the explanation I read elsewhere correctly, what the mod basically does now is adding support for multiple threads to the loading process, something that wasn't there originally (even though the game itself is optimized for multiple threads, something that CO did add themselves) - with the old version you could see the game load custom assets per batch (it loaded some 20-25 assets, and then the process stalled for a short while), while the new version appears to be loading assets continuously, without interruption (although that may be CPU dependent).
Why it wasn't there in the first place I don't know, so I wonder if CO never thought/cared about it, or perhaps has a technical reason for not implementing it.

[Avanya 2,605]

Multi-tasking for the win! And there's something satisfying about the loading not stopping. I wouldn't be surprised if half the time I'm loading faster is from those periods where it was just stalled between batches.

Maybe CO never imagined it'd be relevant. If they figured most people would have less than 100 custom assets then implementing it might not have been worth it. Ofc that's not really what happened and over 1000 doesn't seem to be that uncommon.   Could be interesting to ask CO if they have a random Q&A again at some point.

[Mr_Maison 2,426]

TPB recently helped me make a -noWorkshop shortcut I been using for mod testing. This new mod just made that shortcut unnecessary. I will still keep it as a backup just in case but I am so glad I can now test my new assets with all mods activated without waiting 6-8 minutes. I'm now down to 1min 23 seconds.  And yes @Judazzz I will be subscribing at will on the workshop now...no more holding back

[thale5 58]

On 1/5/2017 at 10:32 PM, Avanya said:

Multi-tasking for the win! And there's something satisfying about the loading not stopping. I wouldn't be surprised if half the time I'm loading faster is from those periods where it was just stalled between batches.

You nailed it! People tend to focus on the multi-threading part but finding and fixing the stalling issue was far more significant. I suspect it is even more than 50% of the improvement on most computers.

I guess the issue was not fixed earlier because it was not found. It is trivial to fix but hard to find. I of course want to share the solution with the developers.

The issue was a garbage collection mistake that stressed the computer by needlessly restarting garbage collection while it was already running.

[thale5 58]

I have also felt uneasy about those reddit comments that aim to make the game developers look bad. In truth, the game is of a high quality. What is more, by not obfuscating the binaries they made modding possible.

Those of us who work in IT know the harsh realities: it is not economically viable to optimize your product endlessly. For hobbyists with the motivation, long hours are possible. Sometimes such optimizations happen to make a noticeable impact.

[Badi_Dea 476]

Thanks for all your hard work

39 minutes ago, thale5 said:

Those of us who work in IT know the harsh realities: it is not economically viable to optimize your product endlessly. For hobbyists with the motivation, long hours are possible. Sometimes such optimizations happen to make a noticeable impact.

Work in IT, can confirm. If you attempt optimize a large project to the point of perfection it'll never get done.

I appreciate a skilled developer like yourself acknowledging that fact, its something we need more of. One must never forget that they're standing on the shoulders of others, tear them down and everyone falls.

[ghosty20 150]

5 hours ago, thale5 said:

You nailed it! People tend to focus on the multi-threading part but finding and fixing the stalling issue was far more significant. I suspect it is even more than 50% of the improvement on most computers.

I guess the issue was not fixed earlier because it was not found. It is trivial to fix but hard to find. I of course want to share the solution with the developers.

The issue was a garbage collection mistake that stressed the computer by needlessly restarting garbage collection while it was already running.

Which I find interesting in that it was not picked up on by CO or maybe they did not factor in the amount of modding and assets were going to be made a case of who knows..  All I know is that thank you for finding it, it has me playing the game again as the long load times was always a pain..

[Tim The Terrible 586]

Works like a charm, thank you so much! But do you think you can make it work for loading the Editors? Loading the Asset Editor still takes ages like usual.

[Leeijo 314]

1 hour ago, Tim The Terrible said:

Works like a charm, thank you so much! But do you think you can make it work for loading the Editors? Loading the Asset Editor still takes ages like usual.

Hold left ctrl when starting editor and it's used there to! 

[thale5 58]

48 minutes ago, leosten said:

Hold left ctrl when starting editor and it's used there to! 

Yes, there is a left ctrl trick for the Editors. I know it is awkward but those who need the feature will eventually find it and can use it with ease. It is even easier than having a mod option.

I don't support the Editors by default because the number of combinations (game modes, mod options) to test quickly becomes overwhelming.

[tony56a1 79]

10 hours ago, thale5 said:

I have also felt uneasy about those reddit comments that aim to make the game developers look bad. In truth, the game is of a high quality. What is more, by not obfuscating the binaries they made modding possible.

It's a bit annoying though to hear everyone claim that CO is "modder friendly" simply because they didn't obfuscate the codebase. Considering their lack of engagement with the modding community, and the almost complete absence of documentation/support for the official API, it's hard to make any claim that CO really values the modding community IMO.

[Tim The Terrible 586]

3 hours ago, thale5 said:

Yes, there is a left ctrl trick for the Editors. I know it is awkward but those who need the feature will eventually find it and can use it with ease. It is even easier than having a mod option.

I don't support the Editors by default because the number of combinations (game modes, mod options) to test quickly becomes overwhelming.

Hmm, didn't really work out for me. It did show up, but in the end I saw the last city I played in the background (with blue roads) and I got an Object set to null error..

[thale5 58]

14 hours ago, Tim The Terrible said:

Hmm, didn't really work out for me. It did show up, but in the end I saw the last city I played in the background (with blue roads) and I got an Object set to null error..

I just tested the following sequence:

• load a savegame from the main menu
• quit to the main menu
• start Asset Editor / New (also tested Load) with Left Ctrl

and there was no problem.

Can you specify your sequence and provide your output_log.txt so I could make some progress? This is exactly why the feature is hidden behind Left Ctrl. There are so many combinations to test that I always end up chasing ghosts.

[Tim The Terrible 586]

@thale5 I will ASAP, but first I have something new. I started the game, loaded a city (Mod working) and after doing some building, pressed F4 (reload) and something weird happened:

• The mod's interface showed up.
• While loading, three errors showed up, including Simulation Failed().
• I ended up in a brown world with only a German wall flag on screen.. I couldn't do anything but end process in task manager.

Spoiler

Here is the output log

EDIT

I tried what you said and this is the result:

Output_log.txt   _{(link valid for 2 weeks)}

Spoiler

 

[thale5 58]

20 hours ago, Tim The Terrible said:

I will ASAP, but first I have something new. I started the game, loaded a city (Mod working) and after doing some building, pressed F4 (reload) and something weird happened:

Thanks for your submission, very useful! Often the logs I get are so plagued by out-of-date mod issues that they are hardly usable. But these ones will help my work, thank you!

I noticed that you have many assets that depend on mods (Network Extensions 1&2, One-Way Train Tracks). I also noticed that my asset failure detection for such assets does not work properly, I need to work on that. As a result, you got a full reload rather than the fast reload you would expect when you press F4. The crash in Log 1 follows from that. There is possibly a mod conflict in Log 2, I need to make experiments.

I also noticed that there is a "NetInfo missing" from Santa Barbara Station. Maybe the mod that provides the NetInfo has not finished in time? I'll get back to you when I know the reason.

[Deezyhayes1 5]

This mod works amazing, my load times are now down to the 5 - 6 minute range.  Before the load time was approaching 30+ minutes!

[thale5 58]

On 1/8/2017 at 10:11 PM, Tim The Terrible said:

I will ASAP, but first I have something new. I started the game, loaded a city (Mod working) and after doing some building, pressed F4 (reload) and something weird happened:

I promised I will get back to you with my analysis results, so here goes. I found and fixed two Loading Screen Mod [Test] bugs, thanks to your logs.

I realized last week that the 81 Tiles mod currently does not support reloading after Quit to the main menu. The asset editor crash followed from this.

I also determined under which condition users can get  "NetInfo missing" from Santa Barbara Station. There are three different cases, actually:

• (obvious) One-Way Train Tracks is not enabled.
• Another city (with a different biome or map theme) is loaded from the Pause menu. Many major mods (One-Way Train Tracks, Network Extensions) don't support such loads at all.
• A rare Installer issue in One-Way Train Tracks prevents the mod from initializing properly. This also affects other mods with the same design (Network Extensions, Metro Overhaul). I haven't been able to reproduce this on my computer.

Thanks again for your submission!