Different loading times?WTF??

half an hour? are you on a notebook? could be that it is in saving mode.

Ive never had any load problems of that magnitude, seems abit random though, but between 10-20sec should be "normal" depending on hardware ofcourse

Loads a smaller map faster then a larger one?
OMFG!
I wonder if u walk up a mountin, if its harder then walking up a hill
*Trys*

mk, n00bness aside...30 minutes?! I highly doubt that, I get a 2 second load on anymap

I am highly interested in the specs of the computer you are running, half an hour loadtime is indeed a little bit out of the ordinary.

Also, like SgtDPilla sarcasically suggested, smaller maps indeed do usually load faster than large maps.

- SixFrags

/Facepalm



No.

Load times that long are indeed extra-ordinary and certainly shouldn't be occuring. My own PC isn't exactly top-of-the-line (AMD X2 3800+, 2GB DDR2-667 and an x1950 Pro) but i'm haven't experienced load times of more than 30-40 seconds sofar, let alone as much as that. Could you tell us your PC configuration please, because something seems very wrong there.
As Multianna asked, is it a Laptop and is it running of its battery? Because some laptops have incredibly agressive powersave settings by default, especially when on internal power.

Commodore 64? remeber to swap your tapes to the otherside its probbably the problem.

I'm not on a notebook... My computer is not state-of-the-art, too, but it's still well above the maximum preferences... Ok, I admit, sometimes I too load in about a minute or so, but that's very rarely... You might think it's because I'm running the game on 'Highest' and I'm not... But there's no logic in it... I've got a Dual Core 2.3 GHz processor, 2GB RAM DDR2 and an 256MB 8600 Nvidia... The Nvidia is brand new( no more than a month) and I updated my RAM last November... There's no way it should lag this much... But it does... Strange thing is- when it lags during the game, I scroll the menu just fine...

Sounds almost like an HD issue, but that is a little ridiculous...

That said, one reason you might have very erratic load times is the game seems to "cache" data -- once you load up one game, all the others tend to load a lot quicker. Same seems to apply to having started the game, the first startup tends to go a lot slower than if you close it down and start up another "copy" of the game.

uhhhh, im on a 1.86 dual core with 3 gigs of ram and the same vid card and my loads on high are less than a minute...

quite, 1.6dualcore and 1gb of ram and my loads only take a minute tops

maybe one of the few instances a defrag would actually improve performance?

lol, good one, I remember all the times I waited over 15 minutes for a game to just load and then my older brother would come and pull the wire out.

Yep, and at the end of waiting 15 minutes for the game to load, you get "Load Error".
Those where the days!

The only reasonable explanation I have for that is that your PC is having trouble getting data from A to B.

Might be the first signs of a dieing hard drive.

Could also be something HD intensive working in the background, like a virus scan.

I noticed that the game takes forever to load if I'm running a virus scan and playing music in the background (far more time than I'd expect as I often play music and have the daily scan running while playing other games).

If you're running an anti virus in the background, try disabling it, also do a spyware scan to check for malicious processes taking up CPU time. Also check your page file size, setting it up to 4GB or so can often help.

I really hope it's not the HD dieing... It's almost new (got it 2006, winter)... I don't do visus scans when I play... I do them when I'm asleep... Or when I'm not infront of the computer... I don't usually have many programs running in the same time with a game... Only Skype, Xfire and GameSpy Commrade, but they are trey-ed, so I can't believe it's them causing the lag... I'll see that spyware scan in a sec.. By 'page size' do you mean the virtual memory cache? BTW- How do you do a spyware scan??

there are plenty of free downloadable programs to do a spyware check, Ad-Aware and SpyBot: Search and Destroy are my two personal favorites. Both are thorough and free to use. You may also want to see about defragmenting your harddisk, that may reduce the problem a bit atleast. (although i doubt fragmentation could be bad enough to cause this much trouble)

Yeah, yeah, I know... I got Spyware Doctor... Anyway... I ran a scan and found around 80 infections... Deleted them all... And how do I defragment my hard? I've also extended my virtual memory cache by about 2000 to 4000 MB... I think that's enough... I'll see if the loading gets faster...

To defragment your harddisk open "my computer" and right-click on the harddisk, then go to the "extra" tab, there are 2 buttons there, one to check the disk for errors and one to defragment the harddisk, run the defragment program and tell it to analyse the harddisk. That will check how bad the fragmentation is and will let you know wether or not defragmenting is needed. When that is done, i recommend doing the harddisk check aswell, never know if it finds something or not.

Thanks... After the scan(spyware) it runs better... Not faster, but it sill loads in less than three minutes, which is something I can manage with... The big lag during loading is right before it starts the game... I'll do the de-frag now at tell you how bad it is...

Sorry for double posting...
BTW- What is defragmentation... I know that fragrance is a sort of granade that has a big explosion and is designed to so a lot of shrapnel damage.... I don't think defragmentation has anything to do with fragrance... Does it? :NOTSURE:

I know this one!
I bet your running vista...If You are, thats why its taking so long, vista likes to rape hard drives until they die, so that everything is in 'prefetch' it will exagerate load times as it will cache the textures, normal maps, models everything to increase the load speed lol.
If you do have vista, that is your the reason...Its raping your Hard Drive

not fragrance (since that's just scent spelled fancy :P) but fragmentation.
Fragmentation simply means breaking up of something in many small pieces. A Fragmentation Grenade does just that, the outside of the grenade shatters on detonation scattering razor sharp pieces over a wide area and making a big mess of anything that happens to get in the way.

Basically Windows has the habit of moving files about a bit for ease of use. This however means that pieces of files sometimes get scattered all over the disk (hence the word fragmentation)
Defragmenting is basically finding all the pieces of the various files and putting them next to each other again, making Windows load them a great deal faster. I'm not entirely sure why fragmentation happens, but i know if its high it really slows things down as the computer has to search your harddisk back to front to find all the pieces of a file.

fragmented means spread apart. a frag grendade spreads shrapnel in a blast radius. You should defragment the harddrive to reorganize the data on the drive.