PTW loads slooooooow

gunkulator · May 29, 2003, 13:28

Just got PTW yesterday (I know, I'm a late comer) and downloaded 1.21f from www.civilization3.com. The problem? The game takes a real long time to load now. Whereas generic CivIII loaded almost immediately, PTW takes a couple minutes. Looking in Task Manager, I see it cycling between 0% of the CPU for a few seconds, followed by 2% for about one sec.

I have a 1.8 GHz P4, 512MB memory, 32MB video ram and over 40GB disk space free. Windows XP.

Any ideas?

MattH · May 29, 2003, 17:54

Odd problem... Lets go with the obvious first. Have you restarted? What programs are running in the background? You're going to hate me for this next part, but the only solution I have after that is to nuke+pave PTW.

gunkulator · May 29, 2003, 18:01

Rebooted a couple times. CPU almost completely idle. Nothing in Startup. Just the base Microsoft services running. I even made a pass with Adaware and Spybot.

The game runs fine once it gets going but man is it slow to start. Briefly running at 2% then doing nothing at all for a few secs makes it look like its polling for something, but what I can't guess.

Kuciwalker · May 29, 2003, 18:47

It does have to load a bunch of files and initialize stuff.

How long exactly does it take to start up?

Did you know you can click to skip the intro movie?

bobbo008 · May 29, 2003, 21:59

that was the first thing when i got PTW.

either i stopped noticing the longer load times or they went away...

Konquest02 · May 29, 2003, 22:10

Quote:

Originally posted by skywalker
Did you know you can click to skip the intro movie?

Or add "playintro=0" in the civ3.ini file...

Always backup before doing any modification though...

vmxa1 · May 29, 2003, 23:19

Is the game loading a game or are you talking about just waiting for the main menu?
One of the issues is that Civ III used Safedisc 2.60.052 and PTW uses a newer tooled called SecuRom 4.84.00.0017. The makes loading the game very painful even on the fastest hardware. I should know I have P-IV 3.06, 1024 MB ram and Radeon 9800 128 MB. The hard drive is 7200 rpm. Still is slow to come up and loading a save game is about 30 seconds on all three PC's I have (slowest one is Amd 1900+) All running XP PRO.

gunkulator · May 30, 2003, 08:42

Problem went away yesterday, yea! I'm almost too embarrassed to say what it was: some dust and threads on the CD. Wiped them off and voila, no more problem. The apparent polling was probably repeated attempts to read the CD. Nothing like a good low-tech solution!

Sorry to bother everyone. Thanks for the help.

Kuciwalker · May 30, 2003, 20:14

I never really noticed, until you pointed it out, that PtW takes a long time (though only on my downstairs computer). Now I know it's because that comp has dust on the CD drive laser lens (which, due to the construction of the drive, can't be wiped by CD lens cleaners

)

pedrojedi · May 31, 2003, 14:04

All civ advances for us, and still its all a matter of time and dust...

I have to wait for some time while loading games, but I think it's just the standard... 1-3 minutes, I think, in the late game... Just the time to make a hot chocolate or eat a sandwich...

Panag · May 31, 2003, 16:09

Quote:

Originally posted by gunkulator
Just got PTW yesterday (I know, I'm a late comer) and downloaded 1.21f from www.civilization3.com. The problem? The game takes a real long time to load now. Whereas generic CivIII loaded almost immediately, PTW takes a couple minutes. Looking in Task Manager, I see it cycling between 0% of the CPU for a few seconds, followed by 2% for about one sec.

I have a 1.8 GHz P4, 512MB memory, 32MB video ram and over 40GB disk space free. Windows XP.

Any ideas?

hi ,

do you shut off all programs you dont need

defrag

what about security soft or hardware

have you done a "diagnostic" of some kind on your comp , diskcontrol

have a nice day

Gramphos · May 31, 2003, 17:10

I've noticed that the copyprotection part of the gameload is extremely slow (at least for the European version...) Maybe should try to use a CD lense cleaner...