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My Two Cents

Kipper

Grizzled Veteran
Mar 25, 2006
707
114
Connecticut, United States
Well, it's been about a week now since I bought ROOST on Steam. I've been with RO since 3.3 (the mod for the newbs) and I've been faithful to it. I'm happy with my purchase, however, I felt the need to voice several worries I have that I was wondering what solutions may or may not be in the future.


Basically, I'm having the problems with load times everyone seems to be having. I've settled for leaving precaching on, all settings on lowest (resolution 1280x800 however) , and cachemegs at 64. The problem I have been having was with load times when I had precaching on. I fixed that. Precaching always off worked. However, on almost 90% of the sereves I'd join, it'd take 50ish seconds to load the map, then bring me to the team selection screen, then class selection, then when I clicked continue, it would take another 50 seconds to load (meanwhile it's not responding at all) and when I am finally dropped in game I've timed out from the server so I'm just floating around on the map. Quite frustrating. I enabled precaching again figuring that maybe this would fix the time out issue: no go. I turned the settings to lowest and disabled precaching, no go as well. Re-enabled precache and settings on lowest, that worked. It works about 99% of the time now.

However, the game is now ugly as hell. My computer can handle running ROOST at Highest @ 800x600 and remain at 30fps 90% of the time. The mod ran perfectly well with the same settings and I never experienced the time out. Since this has been the only issue I have had, and I have 'fixed' it, I was wondering if there was a solution to this?

I play America's Army sometimes. It runs off the Unreal engine as well and it loads everything lightning fast and I have never even heard of a timeout issue there. If they can do it, so can Tripwire. I have faith in their abilities, I just am worrying that these issues may not be a priority for a next patch.

Also, I miss some of the maps from the mod (Warsaw, Moscow Highway, Danzig, Donets and a few others), anyone planning on porting them?

Otherwise, Tripwire has done a bang-up job. I'm glad the release went as smmothly as it did for them. I'm even more excited about how the community has grown and has gained much greater visibility. Great job to everyone involved! Sorry this was mostly negative, I really do love this game and I will 'put up' with my issues because I have so much fun with ROOST.

Oh...and...fix my Tiger! =P

...kidding
 
King Ragnar said:
20-30 minutes? Im afraid that is just utter bull.
QFT


To the OP, what are your system specs, and what type of system maintenance do you run? It sounds like you could be facing -

Ram issues
CPU bottleneck
HD speed slowdown (usually ties in with a low RAM count, as pagefile access is slowed)
Poor PC maintenance
GPU bottleneck (this is the least likely, due to you playing AA aparently well)


Remember that even though there are a tons of games that use the Unreal engine, most of them (I can't think of one that is, but just to be safe) are not as CPU intensive as RO. Those balistic calculations add up over time. I believe that's why we saw so many poor servers at launch: people had underestimated the CPU power it takes to run fully realized ballistic modeling for 32 players plus tanks, with full ROF on the guns (as an aside, most games handle things like MG 42's by doing half the bullets, double the damage. RO gives you the full bullet count at almost 1200 rounds per minute [I think that's the RPMs?]. Much more CPU intensive)

Not trying to sound condescending, and there is of course a very good possibility that the combination of Steam plus Unreal engine on your specific hardware configuration just doesn't want to cooperate :) If that's the case, I truly feel your pain, but expect it to be fixed at least partially in a Steam update.

If you want to give it a go though (I understand if you're just frustrated and don't, however) feel free to post up and see if some forum goers can offer a hand :)
 
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Amd Athlon 2400+
512mb ram
2 120Gb harddrives
Nividia Geforce FX 5900 XT
Asus A7V8X motherboard

I defrag the harddrives weekly I have not had a single problem running unreal engine before or any other game for that matter.

King Ragner who are you to tell me that it doesn't take 20-30 minutes to load I just wasted 45 minutes trying it again after I tweaked it some more, that also included a disconnect because the map changed. Mind you it had been sitting there for 10 minutes already

Frustrated would be an understatement and not to mention I suffering servere fps withdrawal.

Hey enjoy it for me!
 
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Wazid said:
Amd Athlon 2400+
512mb ram
2 120Gb harddrives
Nividia Geforce FX 5900 XT
Asus A7V8X motherboard

I defrag the harddrives weekly I have not had a single problem running unreal engine before or any other game for that matter.

King Ragner who are you to tell me that it doesn't take 20-30 minutes to load I just wasted 45 minutes trying it again after I tweaked it some more, that also included a disconnect because the map changed. Mind you it had been sitting there for 10 minutes already

Frustrated would be an understatement and not to mention I suffering servere fps withdrawal.

Hey enjoy it for me!
Try a fresh install of windows on a spare hard disc? (as a test) Sounds like a software problem, since the hardware is capable enough.
 
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Wazid said:
Amd Athlon 2400+
512mb ram
2 120Gb harddrives
Nividia Geforce FX 5900 XT
Asus A7V8X motherboard

I defrag the harddrives weekly I have not had a single problem running unreal engine before or any other game for that matter.

King Ragner who are you to tell me that it doesn't take 20-30 minutes to load I just wasted 45 minutes trying it again after I tweaked it some more, that also included a disconnect because the map changed. Mind you it had been sitting there for 10 minutes already

Frustrated would be an understatement and not to mention I suffering servere fps withdrawal.

Hey enjoy it for me!


Your video card should be able to run RO fine, though I'm not sure about adding AA/AF. Have you checked your aperature size in your BIOS settings? Depending on the on-board memory of your card (should be 128, 256, or 512) you can up this variable to improve your performance. If you have 128 or 512 megs on your card, bump this up to 128 in the BIOS. It should help RO run better, I'm not sure about the loading, however.

I would highly suggest more RAM than 512. That *will* reduce your load times by giving the program more room to 'put its stuff', in short. I have a an Athlon XP 2600, and load in under a minute, so I would imagine your CPU is not that much of a problem (I'm not sure of the clock difference betwix the two, but I doubt it's enough to make a serious performance impact).

You mentioned the harddrive size, but do you know what speed they are? The most common are 5200 RPM and 7200RPM. That may not seem like a whole lot when there are 10000RPM harddrives on the market, but the difference between 5200 and 7200 is astronomical performance-wise. If you don't have 7200 RPM drives at a minimum, it is worth the upgrade. You can transfer all your data directly to the new one, so no need to worry about a dataloss. If you don't know how to image a drive or are scared to try (wiped my data a few times myself! :eek:) any worthwhile computer service shop/department should be able to do it for a price.

Check your pagefile size, if you haven't already. The ideal size is twice to three times your RAM size (it's different for every system, but that's where the range usually falls). I recommend disabling 'let windows decide' and setting the pagefile to the same amount for minimum and maximum. Going over 1g in pagefile might hurt you more than help, so if it's set to higher than 1024, try turning it down a notch.

Since you defrag, I'm going to guess you also run spyware searchers and/or AV software if you're not behind a hardware firewall. If you ARE running antivirus software and are behind a hardware firewall (router), try uninstalling it completely, and seeing if that helps. I know it sounds scary, but the risk is almost nill (unless you're on a campus network, or some other 'untrusted user network') as long as the router is properly configured. If you don't feel like the gain is enough or just want to have AV running, reinstall it. It shouldn't be too much of a hassle for you :) A lot of gamers run on hardware firewalls with no AV and are virus-free (with safe-surfing habits), so it's entirely your call.



I don't know how much of the above applies to you, but hopefully something will help. Deleting RedOrchestra.ini is the best course to put in fresh changes, also, as the game will automatically recreate it each time the game is launched, so if you think you tweaked 'too much', just trash it instead of trying to re-edit your changes yourself.


We're in your corner, lets see if we can tackle this beast :D
 
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My specs:

AMD Athlon 64 1.8 Ghz
512 MB RAM
60 GB Hdd 4200 RPM (issue here with load times I suspect)
64 MB Geforce 4 Go 440 (yeah, I'm on a notebook, and I realize the gf4 is a crappy card)

I am just a bit annoyed with the timeout on larger maps. I've found that I can increase the visual quality to low and only timeout 50% of the time on the larger maps, this is a good trade-off in terms of visual quality and connection.

My system is kept in rather excellent condition. I run spyware scans weekly, I use CCleaner often, defrag every two weeks or so. I've disabled all the useless Windows services, I complete control of startup, no programs running in the background that I don't know about. Never had a virus. Ample disk space. Pagefile set to 1.5 gb. Basically, I've got total control.
 
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