Why does it take forever for guru to load? it didn't use to.

agreed, well for me it does appear a lot slower than it used to.

I can only assume there's a lot more to load in .... New shaders, New terrain , EBE and of course it depends on how big your library of assets is as GG has to read them all ....I'm around 45 seconds ... It does seem slower but I have 50 odd gig of assets in my entity bank so it doesn't seem that bad for me ..

23 seconds on my i3 6gb Intel graphics laptop, will have to check my desktop when at home, but that should be quicker.

if GG reads in the same assets and other files each time it's loaded , it would be good for engine code to be optimised so that it only reads in new files that have never been read in before. The only files that need to be read in are files that need to be in memory each time. That would so much speed loading of the engine up.
My thought for today

Bored of the Rings you are completly right thats the right thing to do

Yes an no, if it reads only the files you need at the time, and then loads new stuff and you call it, you're going to get lots of little micro-loads, won't be noticed by users with decent machines, but with low end machines it might cause the editor to stutter.

oh well that's my years experience of programming gone to poop then ha Just kidding.

But seriously, I think upon startup only of the GameGuru engine, the entire entitybank for example, should not be read in unless there have been new assets added/modified and all files that need to be retained in memory would need to be loaded in. I don't think there will be any stutter, but please feel free to explain, I'm curious.

Agreed. Here's my time.

Wow, that is pretty long, but I know other engines can also take some time if not longer also.

agreed, it just makes sense to only load up stuff as you need it but to be fair i'm also pretty sure GG doesn't load everything from the entitybank at the start? this is why if you open a big folder from the entitybank it will still also take ages to load?


true to a small extent but it really wouldn't be that much, it's good practice to do it in sections anyway because long load times can cause unresponsive behaviour and are much more likely to cause crashes, if i make a game in AGK i would never load everything at once if i don't need it, it makes everything much smoother.

it's bound to have some messy code here and there and i saw Lee say he's improving it as he works on the dx11 update so maybe it will be improved soon. it's really not that bad though, just much slower than before

@smallg-yes agree, it's most unlikely that the whole entitybank is read in each time. the Entity library is probably just updated each time there is a download/import/entity added. The FPE BMP files have to loaded in and in a sort order.

I noticed this when I got my new machine. Despite being a much faster system, the loading is really slow for GG. I put it down to maybe my new Hybrid HDD is not quite as fast as my old one, but even so, the load time is awful.

I've just timed it and get 1 min 19 seconds to load up from scratch. Then it takes a further 1 min 30 seconds to load up a decent sized map. Then another 30 seconds or more to test it. Loading is in need of improvement. This wouldn't be too bad if GG didn't crash as regularly as it does now, which is fairly often for me, at least on a reasonable map. So, every so often I have to save and reload GG. This didn't used to be a big issue as I could rung GG for several hours before a crash, but the last few releases have been nowhere near as stable. I have to reload a level after running it only a few times or risk the terrain messing up and hence losing any progress (not saving at that point).

The loading has never been the fastest and I have put up with it for years now, but of late I just haven't been able to spend any time in GG without getting frustrated at it's slowness. I'm tending to use it mainly if I get questions of late rather than to try to make anything. The new update sounds like it may speed things up a tad, which would be great. The main issue for me still though is it crashing after only a few runs of a level (admittedly fairly busy, but I only have to load up Skyrim to see it isn't really busy at all).

I'm pretty sure Lee said the shaders are the main culprit for GG's loading speed, so hopefully we can expect it to be faster when done. I just hope the memory leaks are fixed (I can only imagine that is the cause of GG crashing so quickly with large maps). I had a hell of a time getting RPG Mark finished and ended up having to remove some characters due to weird path walking issues and the fact I had only so many runs to get it working each time

To be honest, I don't think that is Lee's most pressing issue now. I'm surprised he hasn't given the final word on this yet.

That was a problem with the classic and he eventually found a round tuit. In other words he eventually got around to it.

It is pretty obvious that GG scans the "files" directory tree on startup, amongst other things determining .fpe files (and reading the .bmp files with matching names) and placing them in the entity library in memory, for display on demand .

Since GG does not maintain its own database of entitites etc., it is of course hard for GG to determine whether a "new entry" has been added, without scanning all fpe and bmp files, so it just scans everything at each startup.

If it had its own DB, the known entries (or a least their fpe and bmp files ) could be moved to the database, erasing them from the file system, so,
if new entities are being added to the file system, on the next scan, only the few fpe and bmp files then detected would be recognized as "new" and could be quickly added to the database in background.

Of course, the database then also offers the long desired option do to a fast entitites search by parts of their names, across the designers' names and their individual selection of subdirs.

Actually, I have already done the database part (sqlite is fully up to the job, and free) ,
but I'm apparently too dumb to seize control of the darned GG library panel to pass along a selected entity from my entity finder program to GG's editor
.
Anybody managed to access the editor from outside , progrmmatically ?

With 2 smoking hot gaming machines, GG takes over a minute and a half two load plus almost the same for large maps.

Unity takes longer. Shiva takes less.

It does seem to crash more.

Mike

On my old laptop:

GameGuru Load Time: 1:46
Load level "The big escape": 1:22
Hitting play, before starting: 3:58 ( hanging more then 2 min. with creating AI )

Imagine when i make a small shader change that need to be tested ( do that all the time ) , do the math

I really need a faster windows system

My load times became slower after the March updates. I think it was around that time??? For me anyway. Sometimes when selecting a entity to put on a map, It'll hang longer than it use to. Maybe it doesn't do a entity scan when booting up the 1st time? I don't know? Well, it's not enough to stop me from using game guru. Obviously! But, It sure made it more frustrating! When I just want to do some quick edits on my map. The loading time it takes when I first hit the play button, to when it come's up to the Rick video? Is about 2 minutes. Then loading up a map, Another 3-5 minutes. So almost 7 minutes before I can do anything. Then again? Somebody mentioned the more stuff being added will slow things down also. Yeah, Let's just hope the new update will speed things up a bit?

Same here, Blacknyt46, I also think it was around Match when there was a significant hit with noticably longer loading times at startup.

Maybe, GG is reading in only the directory structure of the the directory tree at startup (when the HD LED obviously is constantly "on" for quite a while), because the directory names seem to be all there instantly, when one clicks the entitiy selection icon.

With LARGE directories (say, oldpman's packs) , there is a noticeable delay until all entity icons are being displayed.

So, GG may scan for entities only if one selects the respective branch; in cases when there is an bmp file missing and one copies it to its respective branch when GG is up, one needs to leave the branch and re-enter it to make it visible, so, a (re-)scan then is occuring.

Even with saving time, I've tried saving large level and it takes long time, till here as normal; after saving I notice I've missed to add weapons+ammo to the player, then I did and saving again, and it takes a long time again. Not sure if GG just take care about changes.

3com

I was expecting my new system to make using GG less laborious. Imagine my horror when I found it seems slower than my old Q6600! It really seems slower now than it did before! Apart from when it's in game of course. There was an update just after my old PC died and since then GG has seemed worse than ever. It could be just an AMD thing, but if so, I'm stuffed. Terrible timing, I'm just not sure if it's something to so with GG or simply some difference in hardware. All I know is everything else is running great and better than before, just GG seems to be worse :/

With the new graphics overhaul and the DirectX 11 approach to resources, the shaders will now load up in less than a second instead of the 6-7 seconds they currently take with DirectX 9 (as they need to be runtime compiled). This should significantly reduce the actual load time of GameGuru, and also for any standalone executables exported. You will still be able to edit the shader HLSL files, but the engine will be detecting changes and creating the 'blob' resources digested by the new DX11 engine to ensure subsequent loads are even faster.