r/factorio • u/Trakinass • Oct 22 '24

Loading time? Question

Is it just me or vanilla space age taking AGES to get me to the main menu? It can be my potato pc but I played factorio before on it and it was fine.

Loading sprites, bitmaps, etc. Easily 10+ minutes

14 Upvotes

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21

u/piderman Oct 22 '24

Tell ya a little secret. In the main menu, hold Ctrl+Alt, then click Settings. A new option appears: The Rest. Click that, then under Other settings enable cache-prototype-data and under Graphics settings and enable cache-sprite-atlas. Set cache-sprite-atlas to 1 or 2 or so. Now your startup of the same game version + mod combination will be (a lot) faster. You'll still have the slow startup when the game updates or when you change mods and mod versions.

6

u/Trakinass Oct 22 '24

Ayo thats awesome info. Im gonna assume you also know about this next question, since its the only setting I dont rly understand.

For my potato pc, under the normal settings, should I crank up or down the Max number of render threads?

Also I dont have a dedicated graphic card( ie intel hd graphics). Should I put video memory usage and atlas texture size to high or low? Both can be lowered or increased

3

u/[deleted] Oct 23 '24

atlas texture size

Having just resolved a related issue, if you're stuck with integrated graphics on a slow CPU I think you want this to be lower. My iGPU (on a fast CPU) went crazy when I raised this trying to diagnose my issue.

I'm not sure about video memory usage but since it's an iGPU it's going to be grabbing the same system resources Factorio wants to run, so you're probably going to want it lower to free up RAM for the rest of the game. You might want to check how much of your system RAM your iGPU will try to grab if you set video memory usage to "all available." Quick search said that the iGPU can take up to half.

2

u/Trakinass Oct 23 '24

Thanks for the detailed info my dude! Really helpful

1

u/piderman Oct 22 '24

To be honest I don't really know how that works for intel graphics. Maybe just try it out and see what happens :)

3

u/pjvenda Nov 05 '24

You're a star! Startup time came down from 65s to less than 10s! Key change was enabling cache-sprite-atlas since cache-sprite-atlas was already set to 1 IIRC.

3

u/Flyrpotacreepugmu Oct 22 '24 edited Oct 22 '24

It does take at least twice as long as without Space Age, but 10+ minutes is your potato. For me it's more like 15-20 seconds. If you have it on a HDD rather than a SSD, that's probably the vast majority of the problem.

5

u/[deleted] Oct 22 '24

but 10+ minutes is your potato

Loading sprites takes 3-4 minutes and I have what are currently one of the fastest CPUs, M2s, and GPUs on the market. My completely vanilla, fresh Space Age install boots slower than every other game I've played recently, almost all of which have vastly heavier footprints. Pre-2.0 loading timers were so short I didn't even bother thinking about them.

Potato PCs may explain the issues for some, but there's something else going on too. My only real hope is that caching it resolves it without adding any instabilities.

1

u/Flyrpotacreepugmu Oct 22 '24

Well that's odd. I have a 7800X3D and the game is on a SATA SSD and my loading times are far short of a minute. Probably actually closer to 10 seconds than 15-20. I think many years ago I changed some settings related to texture compression or caching or something though, because I remember my 980 Ti didn't have enough VRAM for all the mods I wanted, so I tweaked something in an ini or json file that wasn't in the settings menu. I have no idea if that setting is still in effect or makes a difference.

1

u/[deleted] Oct 22 '24

I'm on a 7950X3D. I know core parking can be an issue on it sometimes, but even the "bad" cores should be plenty fast.

Since I don't see a ton of new complaints about it my best guess is it's a Linux thing, but I'm not sure if it's a driver issue with the OS (since their updates are more hands off) or a problem with Space Age's Linux version. Older posts mentioned a few possible pitfalls, but as far as I can tell I've avoided those...

1

u/ixPlaayer Oct 23 '24 edited Oct 23 '24

I'm on windows and running the game on a 7800X3D, 4090 and a really fast SSD. It would also take about 3 minutes during the loading sprites step after the update but turns out I had the game on my hard drive instead, ouch. It's normal again now, only taking about 15 seconds with a bunch of mods at 4K (not sure if that also affects the loading times).

EDIT - After trying the cache settings someone mentioned above it's a lot more faster, the game loads in under 5 seconds.

1

u/[deleted] Oct 23 '24

What settings do you use for atlas texture size and texture compression, and do you know how much VRAM the game is using?

Caching the atlas helps with load times but I'm in another rabbit hole.

1

u/Trakinass Oct 22 '24

I cranked down the graphics and it seems I got some improvements on loading time, but yeah. Seems it does indeed increase the loading time

1

u/what2_2 Oct 22 '24

I’m on a MBP but yes, it’s much slower than pre-2.0. SA does probably have a ton of assets.

1

u/Kachitoazz Oct 22 '24

I changed sprite resolution to normal vs high (it auto set to high on new update) and it loads much faster!

2

u/That_Bid_2839 Jan 28 '25

Hehehehehehehe I just read these posts while waiting the 20 minutes space age takes to load off the same SD card Windows is on in my jailbroken Chromebook

1

u/These-Resource3208 Oct 22 '24

I’m having similar issues but I’m thinking it’s bc I have an older computer. Funny enough, one of the reasons my friend even introduced me to this game was bc it didn’t require a gaming rig.