Killing Floor 2 takes more than 6 minutes to launch

[retromenace]

I do really like playing Killing Floor 2, however, every time there's a new event or new small patch there is one thing that keeps me from playing... the initial load time. I would like to play this game more, but why wait more than 6 minutes when I can load up DOTA, and wait for a full matchmaking queue, and get a game in half the time it takes for KF2 to even get to the launch screen?

I don't believe this is an issue with my hardware. I will provide full specs for my rig further down the page, but to put it into simple terms, I can play this game at 1080 with a mix of High and Medium graphics settings with a stable 60 FPS, so I don't think the game should take more than 6 minutes to launch when I get above average graphical settings.

To provide more information, when I launched KF2 today, I decided to open up the task manager and keep a detailed stopwatch of where KF2 was moving and when it hit certain milestones in the process of launching. I'm not sure if this is needed, but I thought it would be helpful.

0:00.00 - "Preparing to Launching Killing Floor 2" steam dialogue disappears, and KF2 appears in the background processes section of Task manager. In steam, KF is consistently listed as "Killing Floor 2 - running"
0:56.90 - KF2 moves from Background processes to Apps section after nearly a minute
1:13.07 - After 16 seconds, the KF2 task appears in the taskbar, though noteably it is just a blank square and doesn't sport the KF2 logo. Additionally, the KF2 window appears, but just like the KF2 logo, it is blank. Bar at the top says "KF2 is not responding"
4:37.38 - After more than 3 minutes, the KF2 logo finally appears in the taskbar, the KF2 splash art appears, and the bar at the top of the process changes from "KF2 is not responding" to behaving more normally
6:01.11 - The Georgia and Tripwire intro cinematics finally play, meaning the game proper has finally launched, but the process isn't immediately brought up to the top layer despite me having clicked on it, though I continue to hear the intro roll and menu music perfectly fine.
6:20.36 - KF2 finally comes to the top on my screen, on the main menu, and I'm finally able to play the game.

Between the extreme amount of time it takes for the game to launch, logos not showing up, and game not properly maximizing when it should makes me think something is wrong.

To help, below are my system specs, and also my launch.log file from the launch recorded above. Thanks for any solutions / fixes!

CPU - Intel Core i7-3610QM
GPU - GeForce GTX 660M
Ram - 8 GB
OS - Windows 10

 

[damnboy]

nice post buddy

 

[infntnub]

Just curious - if you launch the game a 2nd (3rd, 4th, etc) time after this initial 6 minute launch, is it considerably faster?

Everyone I know suffers some degree of waiting on the first boot up - not saying that's a good thing lol.

After about a 2 minute wait the first time I boot the game up I can launch it and be back to the menu within 5 seconds on any following attempts to boot the game up.

Are you having a similar experience to this?

 

[retromenace]

Just curious - if you launch the game a 2nd (3rd, 4th, etc) time after this initial 6 minute launch, is it considerably faster?

Everyone I know suffers some degree of waiting on the first boot up - not saying that's a good thing lol.

After about a 2 minute wait the first time I boot the game up I can launch it and be back to the menu within 5 seconds on any following attempts to boot the game up.

Are you having a similar experience to this?

I decided to try this out, and yes, the game does launch considerably faster after the first boot. I managed to get the game to launch in 31 seconds on the second boot. So I guess this means the current solution to slow KF2 launching is just to never turn off your computer?

Also, I did some small tweaks which didn't make the initial load time bearable but did improve it. By adding -dx10 to Steam Launch options, and by deleting the KF2 game folder in my Documents, I improved the initial launch time from 6:20 to 4:31. Still not AMAZING but it's nearly two minutes better.

 

[random]

I've read that after X update KF2 takes longer to load because it loads stuff on the memory to make other loads shorter, not sure what exactly, but at the very least loading a map was also very slow, so i switched KF2 to an old SSD to check the difference.

It went from 2.5 minutes to 20-30 seconds on the first load and 5 seconds to load a map, so a great improvement, it's worth to note that my pc is about 5 years old with an old budget SSD running at IDE Sata3.

at least it's an option. just in case you might want to delete your configs files except for input.

 

[infntnub]

I decided to try this out, and yes, the game does launch considerably faster after the first boot. I managed to get the game to launch in 31 seconds on the second boot. So I guess this means the current solution to slow KF2 launching is just to never turn off your computer?

Also, I did some small tweaks which didn't make the initial load time bearable but did improve it. By adding -dx10 to Steam Launch options, and by deleting the KF2 game folder in my Documents, I improved the initial launch time from 6:20 to 4:31. Still not AMAZING but it's nearly two minutes better.

Lol.

I read somewhere the first time you boot the game up it literally loads everything up front. Which, I can only assume, as more content has been added the load time has increased accordingly.

I'm not sure I love or hate the idea of doing one long boot up vs several small delays, but I've acclimated to it.

When my pc boots up I typically launch steam and boot up KF2 before I even feel like playing - just to get it over with.

 

[Hollow704]

Not to revive an old post but perhaps I can shed some light...You guys are correct in assuming KF2 loads into the RAM upfront and the increasing amounts of content makes it take longer...sometimes upward of 5 or 6 minutes...And when you load KF2 up a short time later and it doesn't take forever? Yup, still loaded into the RAM.

The 2 solutions/work-arounds I've found to this issue are

1)Buy a SSD...KF2 always took less than a minute before I moved it to my 2tb WD Black HDD so it was about a year before I knew this issue existed...(Am I saying you should buy an SSD solely for KF2? no...but I hella recommend everyone have one for their boot drive anyway.)
2)Faster ram. I timed the boot from my regular hdd. Using Corsair Dominator DDR4 clocked at 2133mhz took about 4m30s ....Overclocked to 3200mhz and it took about 2m45s.

 

[Danik]

There is a workaround for this issue. (these steps are for Win10 users) Here is what you do:

1. Go to (C/Program Files (x86)/Steam/steamapps/common/killingfloor2/Binaries/Win64
(unless you have it installed in a non-default location)

2. Find the Application "KFGame"

3. Right click "KFGame" and select "Run as administrator"

The game should quickly load up. To make this easier in the future you can send a shortcut of the .exe to the desktop for quick access. You will have to right-click and run as administrator every time. Not a fix, but it is an easy workaround.

Hope this helps!!

 

[®omano]

How does running as administrator make a program load faster?

 

[Foster Parent]

There are times, especially when there is new content, when some game resources, like materials, must be added to your local files.