slowdown in huge level

Posted By: martin

slowdown in huge level - 12/20/05 21:39

we are developing a special purpose game, consisting of only one huge level, with almost no geometry, mostly models. we are running it on an athlon 3000+ with 1gb ram and a 256mb geforce6600.
the level loads fine, but when playing, every now and then there's a big slowdown, maybe 1 second freeze. i checked the statistics, and in the ms/frame column, the ent value goes up a lot when that happens, and there's also a lot of disk activity. also the usedmem value goes up, so i'm guessing it's loading new entities from disk. the second time i run through the level it doesn't happen nearly as much, if at all.
the question is, is there a way to have them all load beforehand so that there won't be slowdowns? they are all level entities, put into wed, so according to the manual they should already be preloaded.
as i said it's a special purpose game, so i don't care about system requeriments, so i could add more ram, but maybe that won't fix the problem.

any insights?

thanks!
Posted By: ulillillia

Re: slowdown in huge level - 12/20/05 23:31

If there's a lot of disk activity, that's a sign that you've run out of memory and things are being read from swapfile. Swapfile is used to store memory items that can't fit in memory and are placed on the hard drive. Two solutions:

1. Close some unneccessary programs to free up memory.
2. Buy more RAM. RAM is quite cheap. You can get a 512 MB for about $70 or 1 GB for about $90. Make sure your motherboard can handle this much memory though before buying.
Posted By: ISG

Re: slowdown in huge level - 12/21/05 00:25

Yes, there is a way to preload the models before playing. If you look in the manual I think you can look under:
ent_preload
And you should see what your looking for! This is IF they aren't already preloaded all the way, but who knows...always worth a try....
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