Gothic 3 Loading Times

Pladio

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Hi, I know there are a lot of threads about tweaking Gothic 3, but most of them or at least what I understand and am comfortable doing just relates to ingame loading times.

Ingame which is most important to me works fine. But like most humans, once I get what I want, I want more. The loading times to load and save the games are quite long.
Over 1 minute just to load a game, sometimes two minutes if I have something running in the background.
Saving times are alright. About 30 seconds. I can live with that.
But waiting over 1 minute to load a game.
I'm someone who likes testing stuff, which means I either get killed easily or I kill some NPCs which I don't want to kill too easily. I then reload the game and try again, which is very frustrating when it takes that long.

Can someone tell me if it is possible to tweak the loading times as well, without me breaking my PC ?
 
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Do you have 2 GB RAM?
 
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1 minute is long?! I have to wait for like 3-5 minutes. *sigh*

When I started the game I found the loading times very annoying. Still, I was patient, since it was *Gothic* after all. I remember when I was trying to beat an Ogre, I died at least a dozen times before I managed to kill the monster, but I wanted to play fair so I endured the loading time. Unfortunately, now the thought of waiting for a couple of minutes just because of dying in battle in some silly way often makes me use exploits.
 
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Aside from the usual HD tweaking (defrag your hard drive often, make sure that you have busmaster/32-bit transfers enabled in the BIOS, run a HD performance test like HD Tach to make sure that your hard drive performance is as good as it should be etc), there isn't much else you can do.
The only other thing that might help a little (~5 seconds) is to use a no-CD/DVD crack since the game seems to perform random CD/DVD checks on loading sometimes. Some people have reported decreased loading times when using a no-CD/DVD crack. I don't think that anyone here would appreciate it if I posted a link to a crack so just go and check the "usual suspect" websites :biggrin: .
Make sure to copy your original EXE to a backup folder before using a cracked one. That way you won't need to reinstall the game if the cracked EXE causes issues but then you can just copy the original one back instead.
 
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@ Gorath : I bought 2GB of RAM for this game :D

@Moriendor : I'll defrag my hard drive then, but I have no idea what you said afterwards about the BIOS because I never go into my BIOS (I'm afraid I'll wreck my PC). I'll install that program then as well, HD Tach.
It's also more the minutes bothering me than the +/- 5 secs, so except if it really, really,... starts to annoy me, I don't think I'll play with cracks.

@ Kryzchu : Yes, I know it's Gothic and that's why I'm ok with playing like this, but if anything might help reduce it to lets say, 40 secs or something, then I'll be glad.
Waiting 3-5 minutes is much, much too long for me.
By the way, I encountered a cave with some ogres (and dragons), I tried to beat an ogre, but got killed in one hit. Ogres are a bit too strong.
Humans and Orcs on the other hand are sooooo weak !!!
 
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Moriendor : Can you explain what you meant about the Bios ?
I also dowloaded HD TACH, but I have no idea what the data means after i run the test.

The BIOS stuff is very difficult to explain because there are a lot of different BIOS versions out there (depending on the mainboard manufacturer and model). When I suggested originally that you should check your BIOS, it was under the assumption/hope that you are somewhat familiar with BIOS settings but since you are not, we should probably approach this from a different angle :) .

You mentioned loading times of "minutes". This is definitely not normal if your hard drive performance is optimized or even just as it should be. There are two possibilities here. The first one is that there are indeed issues with your hard drive and the second one is that you are just an impatient little critter :biggrin: .
Well, seriously, have you timed how long it takes to load a save game (not the first time you load the game but when you load a save after you die for example)? What feels like "minutes" to you might in reality be the usual ~40-60 seconds that it always takes for anyone and everyone to load a save. That's perfectly normal. However, if it literally takes over -say- 90 seconds then it's likely that there's something fishy going on with your system.

Regarding the HD Tach values, there should be a comparative chart in the results window (as shown in this screenshot ). If your values are significantly (50%+) lower than the comparative values for Ultra DMA (same as IDE) or SATA (serial ATA) that are given here, then it's quite likely that there is some kind of configuration problem or an impending hard drive failure. You should be getting over 70MB/s burst speed here.
Also, in regards to the benchmark curve, if you have a newer hard drive of at least 40GB capacity, then the HD Tach curve should start at somewhere between or over 30-40MB/s. It's normal that the curve drops to lower values from left to right. It reflects the decrease in performance that you're getting towards the end of the drive (the curve should show a significant drop at over ~50% capacity - that's why you should also keep your HD from filling up too much... to have about 40% - 50% free space is always a good idea).
As far as the seek time (random access time) is concerned, it should be between 12ms and 18ms max.

I think you should check your HD Tach values again and compare them to see if there is anything out of the ordinary to report. If there is something weird showing up, then you should contact a "geek" friend or a repair center so they can help you determine what the problem might be (including a check of the BIOS settings). Well, and time those load times. Maybe you'll be pleasantly surprised to find out that it's not taking longer for you than it is for everyone else, too :) .
 
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I remember when I was trying to beat an Ogre, I died at least a dozen times before I managed to kill the monster, but I wanted to play fair so I endured the loading time. Unfortunately, now the thought of waiting for a couple of minutes just because of dying in battle in some silly way often makes me use exploits.

Funny, when I played G3 I hardly ever died. I suppose that could be because of my hit and run tactic.
 
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Funny, when I played G3 I hardly ever died. I suppose that could be because of my hit and run tactic.

Did you use the bow? With my bow character I barely died as well, but my first character was a melee one and I quickly found out it was pretty much suicide to try take an orge on (unless you are cheap and can pin one against a wall and then do the fastest swing)
 
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Did you use the bow? With my bow character I barely died as well, but my first character was a melee one and I quickly found out it was pretty much suicide to try take an orge on (unless you are cheap and can pin one against a wall and then do the fastest swing)

I did use the bow until they got close. Then I switched to melee. I found fighting against other sword fighters easy. The tough fights involved wolves and boars, but still I don't recall dying that easily. I never fought Ogres; allway's ran away from them:blush: . Probably the easiest creatures to beat using melee were "Monsters" I think.

The "Fast Swinging" is useless in my opinion.
 
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Cm : I did the test and some of the drivers needed updates according to the test, but I can't download the updates from the site since it's for subscribers only.

Moriendor : I did the test and this is what I get for my hard drives :

Scan Drive C Quick
Scan C long
C has about 70 % free space.

Scan Drive F
Scan F long

F has about 10% free space.
 
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Funny, when I played G3 I hardly ever died. I suppose that could be because of my hit and run tactic.

Fighting against humans and orcs is pretty easy, but when monsters are involved... I sometimes die in the most ridiculous ways, for example fighting a single wolf, or minecrawler. High stats? Strong armor? - It all doesn't matter, when the opponent hits you 3 times per second and you keep tripping over some small rock behind you, which renders you unable to strike or move or do anything else except watching yourself die.

I really thought I was missing something in the game, when I easily slaughtered a band of 20+ bandits in a cave and a minute later got killed by a single wolf just outside that cave. o_o
 
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@Pladio: i use the loading time to wash my dishes or do some other small homework. havnt done that much since playing gothic3 :biggrin:
 
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Moriendor : I did the test and this is what I get for my hard drives...

OK. That helps. The results for your C drive look a little fishy. You see the large bumps in performance that you are getting at the beginning of the drive? That is not normal. The most normal looking chart is the one where you took the long test of your 'F' drive.

For comparison here are my results (2 hard drives, both the same model - fast and full test). I also got one bump during the testing but that might have been my Outlook Express downloading mail in the background (yes, I violated one of the golden rules of benchmarking and didn't shut down all background processes :biggrin: ).






Now the big question is why this strange behavior is showing up on your system. It could have A LOT of possible causes. As we can see, your CPU utilization is a little high as well. Do you have any background processes running like Windows auto update or virus scanner auto updates or anything like that? Or do you have the Windows Live Desktop Search installed (this is often installed in conjunction with Office 2007)?

I think you should definitely check your background processes and tasks. Then make sure you disable/end any and every non-critical processes (in task manager if you press CTRL+ALT+DEL, you can see all running processes. The ones where the "user name" says "System" are critical system processes that can not/should not be halted but just about all other processes can be kicked. I think it would be a good idea if you would weed out all of the unnecessary processes/tasks and then run the test again... and again... and a 3rd time *g* to see if anything changes and if you are getting a smoother curve.

If this is still not the case... phew... well, you should check your device manager and see if any question marks/exclamation marks for missing/broken drivers are showing up. In case you got IDE drives, check if the master/slave configuration is set up correctly (2 drives per controller - 1 master/1 slave - usually you got 2 controllers onboard for a max of 4 IDE drives). You could also download the SeaTools from the Seagate website (Maxtor, the manufacturer of your HD has been acquired by Seagate some time ago). The tool runs a diagnostic check of your HD and will report any problems such as bad sectors etc. I don't know how long this particular tool takes for the check but it could be that the test takes up to an hour or even more so you best start this when you're not planning to use the computer anyway.

Well, there is a lot more that could be done but I hope that any of the suggestions above (especially kicking any unnecessary background tasks... and I forgot to mention this above but even more especially if you have a Symantec/Norton program installed... just trash those processes) will yield positive results. Good luck :) .
 
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Uhmm. When I was scanning the drives with HDTach, I had Paint, two IEs, MEdia Player Classic and Skype on. I think those might have been the cause for the bumps. I'll try again tomorrow. Too tired now.

About the Loading times, they're about 60-90 seconds when it's not the first load. Fastest I got was 65 secs, slowest 80 something.

Fridi : I think I would have done the same, except I don't have any homework now.
1 minute isn't enough for the dishes since it already takes 15 secs to get to the kitchen :D
 
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Uhmm. When I was scanning the drives with HDTach, I had Paint, two IEs, MEdia Player Classic and Skype on. I think those might have been the cause for the bumps. I'll try again tomorrow. Too tired now.

*whap* :biggrin:

About the Loading times, they're about 60-90 seconds when it's not the first load. Fastest I got was 65 secs, slowest 80 something.

Ah, so you actually timed it now. Good :) . 60-90s is a little high but I'd say it's actually within the limits. It should be a little faster (45 - 60 seconds) but it could be that the (random?) copy protection checks are just taking a little bit longer for you because of your CD/DVD drive's error correction capabilities (or lack thereof) or something like that. But as long as we're not literally talking "minutes" as you originally said, then it seems there's nothing major to worry about. If you shut down a few of your background programs like Skype, then maybe you can squeeze a few more seconds out of your system.
 
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I never shut down Skype; it's how I talk to the World; well Cm at least!!! :)
 
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