Game takes forever to start

you can increase loading times by telling you antivirus to not scan the SimBin folder in you My Documents & also your Steam folder... to keep safe, do a manual scan of everything before you install any new items from now on....
 
1. I think Gunthar means "decrease"... :giggle:

2. For me, it depends on my internet connection and hardware. For example, back in the prehistoric age of on-peak and off-peak periods, Evo would take anywhere from one to three minutes to load. Also, when we upgraded to a better graphics card (ATI Radeon X1650) Evo's starting times decreased rapidly. For me at least, amount of addon content/mods installed has little to no effect.
 
  • daRock

I have no mods installed on my STEAM installs and they are on two pc's, one is a months old quad thumper, the other a two year old that was a thumper back then. Both take time to get to the game. The two year old takes about a minute and a half.
After all, once you click on the desktop icon, you have to wait for STEAM to respond and give you the window that you can then tell it you want to see your applications

and wait for it to give you the window that you can tell it which application you want to launch

and wait for it to give you the little window that you can tell it that, yes you want to launch the application you told it you want to launch

and then wait for STEAM to start launching.

It takes both machines about 20 seconds for STEAM to get through it's "do you really want to launch" bit....... and then it takes about 35-40 seconds to actually launch. Well, it takes my new machine about 35-40 seconds.

It's a quiet night and it just took 1:03 got get to the server selection lobby.

You could be spoiled by GTR2. It just took me 12 seconds to get to it's server selection lobby. No waiting on STEAM there. And only two clicks, one to launch GTR2 and one on the Multiplayer button.
 
Solve the Steam launching bit by having a shortcut to GTRe. Obvioulsy Steam needs to be on in the first place but it will just launch from that shortcut no questions asked if it is. Even quicker is just to keep Steam in offline mode.
 
I don't have any non-racing games on my steam account so I can't compare. But for those that have them installed: does it takes ages to fire them up as well?
 
  • leahcim

I don't have any non-racing games on my steam account so I can't compare. But for those that have them installed: does it takes ages to fire them up as well?

Well, it depends. Albeit there's probably nothing profound and it's exactly what you'd expect.

If you don't have steam running it'll take longer than if you do. Clearly it's designed to be running all the time even if you choose not to do so.

But 5 minutes? No. The only time anything takes anywhere near that long is if you're running a game on hardware that isn't good enough to run the game in the first place...or as the OP posted, that he had broken something, which once fixed meant the problem went away.

So really, it's not a lot different to any other piece of software, how quick it runs depends on the hardware you give it. As others have noted and you might expect, older software targeted for less powerful computers generally starts quicker than newer software with higher requirements on the same computer. So, as I hinted at above, the bleeding obvious is the answer :)
 
I have no mods installed on my STEAM installs and they are on two pc's, one is a months old quad thumper, the other a two year old that was a thumper back then. Both take time to get to the game. The two year old takes about a minute and a half.
After all, once you click on the desktop icon, you have to wait for STEAM to respond and give you the window that you can then tell it you want to see your applications

and wait for it to give you the window that you can tell it which application you want to launch

and wait for it to give you the little window that you can tell it that, yes you want to launch the application you told it you want to launch

and then wait for STEAM to start launching.

It takes both machines about 20 seconds for STEAM to get through it's "do you really want to launch" bit....... and then it takes about 35-40 seconds to actually launch. Well, it takes my new machine about 35-40 seconds.

It's a quiet night and it just took 1:03 got get to the server selection lobby.

You realize that you can avoid everything you described by having Steam already running (like it's supposed to be) before you click the game icon.

In the settings you can tell Steam to open directly to the games list instead of the main Steam window, but there's really no need.

As soon as Steam opens, just close it to the tray and start the game.

I don't know where you get all those extra steps you describe. They are not necessary.

Open Steam, start game.

That's it. No popup windows, no questions to answer, no need to go to games list if you already have a desktop icon.

Everything you described can be avoided by simply starting Steam first.

If you don't have steam running it'll take longer than if you do. Clearly it's designed to be running all the time even if you choose not to do so.

So really, it's not a lot different to any other piece of software, how quick it runs depends on the hardware you give it. As others have noted and you might expect, older software targeted for less powerful computers generally starts quicker than newer software with higher requirements on the same computer.

Exactly.
 
  • teruko

Hi all.
I have the same problem that the user 'Philip Grimm'. I play Race, Race 07, and GTR Evolution since their respective releases.
THese games always used to run very smoothly, a minimum of 40FPS at the beginning of races.
i have a 4800X2, 2go ram, a 8800GTS640 and a 1440x900 monitor... Everything's running fine since i build this machine. i did not make any change to the settings of the game, nor to my pc hardware... And since severals weeks now, the game takes 3 minutes to launch.
Defrag done, complet cleaning of the pc done, drivers cleaning done... i just dont get it.
Not very annoying because when the game is on, everything's still running fine.. the only problem is the game takes a LONG time to start. So, if you have any advice, or new information about that kind of problem, i would be very pleased to ear it.
Pardon me for my poor english.
Have a nice ride buddies! :)
 
First of all :welcome: to RD.
Do you have a lot of mods installed? The more mods and other add-on stuff you have installed the slower the game becomes since it has to compress and decompress all the files if I am right.
 
  • teruko

Hi & Thanks for the Welcome. :D
The answer is simple, i don't have any mod on this game.
I dont even know how to install one, to be honest.
I have race07, race wtcc, and gtr evolution, all the game sold on steam (except stcc expansion (because i'm waiting for Race On)).

Thanks anyway. :)


Edit:
According to one of my friend, my HDD is probably dead (or almost)... Im gonna erase all my steam apps and install it onanother HDD. Just in case.

Edit2:
test the hdd with hd tune... looks like not dead to me

the first is the 80gb system disk
the second one the games disk(with steam)
and the old 40gb is the backup disk

Edit3:
i tried severals others game in steam, none of them has the same problem. All of them are starting fast (flatout2, defensegrid, DOW2, trials2, HL2...) as soon as i dbclic the shorcuts.
 
How much time does starting the game take you? RACE 07 and expansions aren't really known for their super fast booting :) Always takes time, also on good machines.
 
  • teruko

How much time does starting the game take you? RACE 07 and expansions aren't really known for their super fast booting :) Always takes time, also on good machines.
Hi
Race07 or GTR Evolution takes actually 3 minutes to start. Before this, it is was something like (max) 10 seconds. I dont use any skin/mod, or so, and i always turn off every useles windows service before lauching steam.
I have 1700mb of ram available before lauching any game, a 0-1% use of cpu, and 3000mb of reserved memory available for windows apps. And every driver up2date. Everything always used to run very nice with that.
And all partitions are 'NTFS', so this is probably not a problem of "moving big files" in memory (that kind of thing..^^).

@SimbinRacer
Yeah, many people told me so, but i just cant buy an expansion which is more expensive that the game itself (bought it on play.com, gtr+race07, something like 20€) :)
 

Latest News

Online or Offline racing?

  • 100% online racing

    Votes: 74 7.4%
  • 75% online 25% offline

    Votes: 103 10.2%
  • 50% online 50% offline

    Votes: 145 14.4%
  • 25% online 75% offline

    Votes: 277 27.6%
  • 100% offline racing

    Votes: 402 40.0%
  • Something else, explain in comment

    Votes: 4 0.4%
Back
Top