Game slow-downs. Is it curable?

Well, today I defragmented the logical drive where my Arcanum is installed. Yes, there is a significant improvement, so I recommend this to everybody. You see, the game has 2 or 3 large *.dat files. If you have installed them on a fragmented drive, they become pretty much scattered, and since they actually contain multitude of compressed files, it may slow down the data retrieval. For instance, arcanum1.dat on my hard drive was separated into 147 fragments!

I don't say that defragmenting is the cure for slow-downs, but it significantly improves general performance. Though in my case it took so much time, that when I returned to the game, I found that Virgil had grown a long beard, and Sogg killed himself with drinking (apparently, he had cirrhosis). :grin:

 

Yup, when the drive is heavily fragmented, it takes a hell of a lot longer to load anything, since the drive head has to seek out all the pieces of the data. It's entirely possible on a fragmented drive to have a single sprite scattered from one end of the platter to the other.

In fact, Windows is utterly horrible about drive fragmentation, so it's a good idea to defrag at least once a month.

 

when I had a 10 gig drive and a celeron 400
yes I was lying to myself and defraging to make things run better. but now I have 3 40 gig disks and I will not defrag them till de end of time. people this is a 2d isometric game!! the slowdowns are solemly processor related!!! it slowdowns on my pc since probably there is a cache on hdd space bug or something

 

AMEN!

 

bought it 3 months ago, and only paind a 1000$ I had to almost stop eating for 2 months 'cause of that! but my monitor cost another 600.... Good that I'm in a country that actually has computer bazars.

 

Jinxed, do you see my skinny elven mug? That's because I hadn't eaten for 9 months. And what am I left with at the end? A worthless mutt... err.. machine with 300mhz Celeron (not even Pentium!) and a 15 inch monitor twitching like it has parkinsonism. Those are the cruelties of life, my friend. All I have left to do is playing this Arcanum thing until my pulse is lost, hoping for a better tomorrow... *sniff* *sniff* Where the heck is my hendkerchief? Aghrrr... shit! Somebody must have pick pocketed it from me! In the name of Alberich! Where is this world going to??? :sad:

Banzai!

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Name: Elrond | Race: Elf | Gender: Male | Scheme: Warrior Mage Good | Background: Ladies man

<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: Elrond on 2001-09-19 02:04 ]</font>

 

It's because it's a 2D game that defragging is important. If you haven't noticed by now, 2D games require a lot more art/sprite data files than 3D games.

 

that depends from the graphic engine, I'm not familiar with the one in arcanum but I can tell you I have a Maxtor 7200 66 and it is not slow, when the game slow downs it uses my hdd alot before it does not touch it.
now defraging a 40gig harddrive is not the best experience, since the windows defrag is worhless you need a norton commander witch is too slow.It is not cost effective since it takes ages to defrag and still doesn't solve the problem

 

elrond:Mushi Mushi! Life is not that bad I spend every thing on anime. I do not serf the online shops anymore beacuse I cannot afford it anymore, now that is like a drug addict not having money for heroin...

_________________

Anime Otaku
Morning Musume
Aikawa Nanase
Don't be Baka
Arigato Gozaimasu!

<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: Jinxed on 2001-09-19 02:19 ]</font>

 

Jinxed, I also wish all that mushi mushi to you! But.. uhmm... what does it mean, anyway? In this life I'm not Japanese, actually.

Arigato?

_________________



Name: Elrond | Race: Elf | Gender: Male | Scheme: Warrior Mage Good | Background: Ladies man

<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: Elrond on 2001-09-19 02:30 ]</font>

 

Mushi Mushi means a common way to say hello.
Hey But you know it's japanese! Most people think it's gibberish from a Broken one or some other zombie creature

 

hey Elrond, your elf has a "you tokin to me?"
expression on his face! Not muc hunger there

 

re

defragged, (i didnt think HD was the problem).

When I enter a bar with lots of people, it really crawls. Even if I open my logbook (to hide the 2D graphics) the mouse pointer still jumps as if i'm really dragging it.

I switched my geforce2mx 32MB for my old voodoo banshee and it gives me the same results..none.

So maybe its not video, maybe its sound? My CPU is 750mhz, that couldnt be it. My HD led doesnt light up in the bar. As with the other guy, this only recently started happening now that i'm level 30+. When I was lower 1-15 or so it was playable and it was fun. Now I dont even want to go in a shop if I can help it.

 

Hmm, where to start? I have a gef-2 card and i got screen

freeze a lot until i tweaked it. I don't know if the following will help other cards, but this game is the only have i *had* freezes on. So,what the hell:
--1. uninstall Arcanum (from the control panel.)
-- 1. Full Defrag.
---2. Reinstall. Install the 1.7 patch.
---3. Let it install Dx8. I had lotsa trouble with Dx7.
---4.. Now, I reloaded the option for replacing the basic Arcanum files. Why,
I don't know. Maybe there's a glitch between
the 1.7 patch and the game itself.
---5. Download Dakun's post "Rev/Make your system run better." Use what applies to you. It pumped me up to 84% resources available.
---6. Exit and reboot your puter.
---7. I don't know if this will help your card. It helped my gef-2 card.
---8. I have small slowdowns with the clock showing sometimes. But I got rid of the freezes and character slowdowns.

 

TweakFiles.com has several freeware defraggers that are much faster than that slow one that ships with Windows.

 

I defrag my hdd at least one a week often twice a week. Because of Arcanum I defrag it everyday now. It is helpful but only a very little bit. Even if playing straight after defrag I get serious slowdown.

One thing I wanna try. I want to undat all arcanum#.dat files so that the game won't have to resort to compressed ones. One question though. Which directory should I choose for the undat? Simply ArcanumData or something different maybe?

 

oh, for the good old days of Fallout- when towns were multiple load locations and everything went at the same speed sigh.

 

Hey, St. P., TweekFiles is offline permanently. Try VoodooFiles.com instead.

 

Why is everyone experiencing slow downs?

Well, my computer has Pentium III 533E with 128mb of pc 66 ram, some old 4.3 Gigs of hdd and a cheap tnt2 m64 with 32mb of video ram. I suffered virtually no slwdown and load time is quick. It loads my hdd for 2-3 seconds every minute or so. Basicly Diablo2 slows down more than Arcanum does on my computer. Why is everyone else suffering then? Most people say Arcanum programmers are incompetent but I think is them who hasn't got the latest drivers and patches.

 

the direct x applet seems to do the trick, I barely got slow downs now, also do rev's suggestions and your computer will run fast.