Aces High Bulletin Board
General Forums => Aces High General Discussion => Topic started by: Kev367th on May 18, 2007, 02:50:07 AM
-
After talking to him a few days ago -
It's now impossible to cache all skins, this would need over 4Gbs of memory.
So this is what he recommended to me -
If like me you have all the skins released follow this method -
Disable skins downloading in the game.
Goto your skins directory.
Delete all the skins you DONT want to see.
Goto your cache directory.
Delete all the contents.
Cache rebuilds next time you enter the game.
Enable skin caching.
He suggested you should have around 50 skins in your skins folder.
Will stop the mini freezes due to skin access.
-
At work here so can't check myself....
What is the easiest way to figure out which skin file (planeX.res) goes with an in-game skin (Unit Designation)?
Regards,
Hammer
-
Originally posted by hammer
At work here so can't check myself....
What is the easiest way to figure out which skin file (planeX.res) goes with an in-game skin (Unit Designation)?
Regards,
Hammer
hmm....offline skin viewer?
-
The most recent list of "available skins" on the download section of website includes both the game skin # and the unit ID.
-
Originally posted by Simaril
The most recent list of "available skins" on the download section of website includes both the game skin # and the unit ID.
ah-ha! So I could have checked myself!
Thanks Sim
Regards,
Hammer
-
I had figured the large amount of skins I had caused the mini freeze problem I had about a month ago, especially using the 1024 textures and 4x AA and 8x AF on a 20" LCD. Even with my setup I was surprised the skins caused a mini freeze, E6400, 2gb, Raid 0, 8800GTS. I did not correct it by what Kev said. I did defrag my hard drives and haven't seen a freeze again.
I imagine the freezes are caused by the hard drives being the slowest piece of electronics in computers these days. Having a 'butt' load of skins would increase access time and if your computer is 'older' the rendering and accessing part in game when the plane enters your view is what is causing the freezes.
-
could you just stop the downloading of new skins?
-
Originally posted by Fulmar
I had figured the large amount of skins I had caused the mini freeze problem I had about a month ago, especially using the 1024 textures and 4x AA and 8x AF on a 20" LCD. Even with my setup I was surprised the skins caused a mini freeze, E6400, 2gb, Raid 0, 8800GTS. I did not correct it by what Kev said. I did defrag my hard drives and haven't seen a freeze again.
I imagine the freezes are caused by the hard drives being the slowest piece of electronics in computers these days. Having a 'butt' load of skins would increase access time and if your computer is 'older' the rendering and accessing part in game when the plane enters your view is what is causing the freezes.
If you have all the skins and are pre-caching in system memory, you aren't.
Because of the amount of skins now you will actually be pre-caching on the system pagefile.
I suggested it might be an idea to give us an option to move the skins folder to a high speed device but he didn't think HT would go for it.
Of course if your running an OS that supports >4Gb memory and have it installed you don't have a problem.
Jimbeam - yes, just turn off the skins dowlnloading in the hanger.
-
Sorry for sounding simplistic, but if you turn off the "show skins" (IIRC) button doesn't that prevent the stutters when encountering a new one in the arenas?
-
Originally posted by Edbert
Sorry for sounding simplistic, but if you turn off the "show skins" (IIRC) button doesn't that prevent the stutters when encountering a new one in the arenas?
Yes, but then you see no skins.
All you get are the default ones.
-
Originally posted by Fulmar
I imagine the freezes are caused by the hard drives being the slowest piece of electronics in computers these days.
I've got a SATA 1.5GB drive -- which is screaming fast don't get me wrong! -- but even so I get occasional hitches. Not too often that I complain about it.
Sadly, not all of us can have 10000 RPM Raptor drives, or super-fast RAIDs set up to increase read time. I don't think there's much of a way around this problem. As PCs get faster and faster we're going to get more and more bottlenecked by our input/output (including HDs).
Now, if they'd only get that gorram holographic storage idea working, we'd have read/write times as fast as the speed of light!
:O :O :O
EDIT: Technically, as fast as the speed of electrons, but STILL!!!
-
Originally posted by Kev367th
Yes, but then you see no skins.
All you get are the default ones.
Understood, just offering it as a possible solution to those with performance problems.
-
All the skins in the world do you no good for recorded flights, you only see the defaults in the film viewer anyway. Seems to me that all this skin business is just wasted effort.
-
*keels over dead*
-
For me personally, skins are real low on my list of stuff thats important to my gameplay. Probably because my graphics are so poor. If I knew how, Id make every plane look like the orange Nik. Actually, I think I could do it, but Im just SOOoo damn lazy.
-
Originally posted by FiLtH
Id make every plane look like the orange Nik.
(*comes back to life so he can keel over dead, again*)
-
Originally posted by Traveler
All the skins in the world do you no good for recorded flights, you only see the defaults in the film viewer anyway.
Why is that, anyway?
(<== too lazy to do a search.)
-
Presumably because it's not a priority fix for HTC.
-
The skins are cool...on my plane. I feel like a pimp rolling down the runway, checking the external view. However, I prefer to have other planes in the same standard skin. Helps me ID an 109E vs a 109K over the 800m mark.
-
chop the number of skins from 15 to 5 or less.
most of them are crap anyway. you can delete all mine first for all I care.
however im a on a three year old PC with RAID 0 Hard Drives with a good graphics card and I dont get stutters or freezes.
I did. but then I deleted the cache and let it rebuild itself and havent had problems since.
anyone having problems might do well to try that your milage may vary. it might be new skins released and not included in the cache? dunno but it works for me.
-
Originally posted by Krusty
(*comes back to life so he can keel over dead, again*)
:rofl
-
I preload skins and textures.
AH and another program I have both state 1.6GB of ram being used while AH is running.
I have no stutters. I did have stutters months ago, but a defrag fixed that problem.
I have a 3.0g/s SATA Harddrive and a FSB of 1.6GHz, E6400 @ 2.56GHz running DDR2-800 in dual ch mode along with 7950GT (OC to 640MHz) 512MB.
-
It would be alot easier on my eyes
-
I wish you could see a little picture of those skins on the download page so you knew what you were getting.
Wrong forum I know.
Off to delete skins, Feter's first!!
Just kidding, of all the skins I'd keep yours would be on the list along with any other skins that have teeth.
For some reason I just like a skin with teeth on it.
-
Ouch fuzeman - skin with teeth!??!!
-
Originally posted by Kermit de frog
I preload skins and textures.
AH and another program I have both state 1.6GB of ram being used while AH is running.
I have no stutters. I did have stutters months ago, but a defrag fixed that problem.
I have a 3.0g/s SATA Harddrive and a FSB of 1.6GHz, E6400 @ 2.56GHz running DDR2-800 in dual ch mode along with 7950GT (OC to 640MHz) 512MB.
The skins in total take up a little over 4.0Gbs, the other 2.4Gb (4.0 - 1.6), is in your pagefile, not memory.
-
Originally posted by Krusty
I've got a SATA 1.5GB drive -- which is screaming fast don't get me wrong! -- but even so I get occasional hitches. Not too often that I complain about it.
Sadly, not all of us can have 10000 RPM Raptor drives, or super-fast RAIDs set up to increase read time. I don't think there's much of a way around this problem. As PCs get faster and faster we're going to get more and more bottlenecked by our input/output (including HDs).
SATA 1.5 GB/s is marginally faster than IDE ATA100/133. Some people think SATA 3.0Gb/s is twice as fast as 1.5, butthe easier analogy is like this: No matter how many lanes you make your highway, the traffic isn't going to really get there any faster to the destination if the speed limit remains constant.
RAID 0 can give you near WD Raptor Performance, tomshardware.com did a review on it about a month ago. Flash memory based HD's show some promise but their read/write speed is still about the same as their older counterparts. Flash HD's will be great for laptops, but their usage in desktops is limited.
-
I would be good to be able to use the skin viewer to flag the skin as cachable or not.
-
Fulmar, this is just my personal opinion, but my 1.5G/s SATA drive is at least 5x as fast as my IDE drive, for reading and writing.
Everything loads faster. Now when I transfer stuff to my IDE (backup) drive, it's like waiting for a floppy drive to finish :rofl
-
If you merely changed your hard drive and no other components, and your IDE hard drive wasn't 5 years old and 5400 RPM's etc., I have a hard time believing it. Also if you moved from say a 80gb hard drive to a 300gb Seagate drive, you'll notice a boost, newer Seagates (250gb+) are a pretty good transfer rate). Plus your 80gb was probably full, reducing the access time on the drive. A less full drive is going to perform faster. You may have seen an increase if your cache was 2mb on your old drive to 8mb+ on your new one and your benchmarking huge files, then yes.
You would really need to benchmark both drives using a program like HD Tach. On my set up, 1 of my Maxtor drives on SATA 150 put out around 70mb/sec. Once in RAID 0 with an identical drive I was reaching 105mb/sec. A 35mb/sec increase is a noticeable difference. However, as my drive gets more full and etc, access times slow down. Kind of like, why does my computer after a fresh reformat boot in 20 seconds, but after 12 months of acquiring more data on it it takes 45+ seconds.
-
I'm with Krusty on that. I had a 2 year old IDE hard drive that was "top of the line IDE" (ha) at the time of purchase and replaced it with a SATA. AH and my other huge HD-using program both run retardedly fast now. I've preloaded everything ever since I built the computer. Stutters were barely noticeable on the IDE drive and vanished on the SATA. I have yet to finish downloading the latest skin pack, however.
-
Damn, I'll be glad to get the new stuff running. With 2Gigs of DDR2 800 memory, a 4600+ 64X2, a decent 7600GS 512MB video card, and 2 37Gig WD Raptors in RAID, I might finally get to see the game with decent performance. Maybe.
I love my Raptors, I bought the first one 2-3 years ago when they first came out. I've put them in everything I've built since, and been VERY happy.
-
Originally posted by Kev367th
Yes, but then you see no skins.
All you get are the default ones.
Does that include the ride your in? or just the other aircraft around?
-
Originally posted by ridley1
Does that include the ride your in? or just the other aircraft around?
That only disables skins on their plane, you still see custom ones on yours if you have them downloaded.
Edit- And to be specific, I mean the 'Disable other plane skins' checkbox in Graphic Detail.
-
so, checking that box will remove uneccesary stutters, and yet I can still look cool?
-
Originally posted by ridley1
so, checking that box will remove uneccesary stutters, and yet I can still look cool?
It will remove stutters if the stutters are caused by custom skins being loaded on other planes.
It would, of course, not effect stutters resulting from other factors.
-
Originally posted by Kev367th
The skins in total take up a little over 4.0Gbs, the other 2.4Gb (4.0 - 1.6), is in your pagefile, not memory.
Before the last patch, the game only used 1.2Gb. If I have 2Gb, the game will still want to just use 1.2, and then use mulitple page files for the rest? A pagefile is still restricted to 2Gb or less for WinXP SP2 right?
In the end, some people may get a stutter every few minutes or hours. I think that's more than expected/acceptable.
I have 8mb cache on my HD for Sata 3.0g/s and I also had a ATA133 with 8mb cache. I can tell you that the sata HD is a hellava lot faster than my ATA133 especially for files that are capable of entirely fitting into the 8mb cache buffer. Both are 7200rpms. I should have got an HD with the 16mb cache.:D