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Terrain loading?


paulb1919
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Hi, I am just getting to grips with pioneer. I was a little disappointed at first because it didn't look as good as the pics and vids I have seen. I landed on a planet today to watch the sun rise and I noticed that 2-3 minutes later (real time) the terrain was still loading and eventually it did look as good as the pics I have seen. Is this normal or is something in my pc setup holding it back? thank you!


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Marcel
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The rendering speed depends on your computer. Mine runs it on medium. When I want to do a screen shot I set the detail to the highest and pause until the scene is fully rendered.


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paulb1919
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Thanks again marcel. I was running it on very high so that must be the problem. So long as it's not just me lol. What component of a pc would be responsable for the loading time? Pioneer is the best reason I have to consider an upgrade!


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Coolhand
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what system do you have now paul?


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paulb1919
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Windows Vista Home Premium

AMD Athlon 64 X2 Dual Core Processor 5000+ 2.60 Ghz

Memory RAM 2.00 GB

Nvidia Geforce 8400 GS


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Coolhand
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hmm, its a little old, but you could maybe get a little more out of it - you could perhaps get a faster graphics card pretty cheaply, but dont expect that to make a huge difference in simulators and you're probably limited by your motherboad in terms of transfer speed, perhaps get one with at least 1gb of onboard ram.

Some more system ram probably wouldnt hurt either and for the type you want it would be inexpensive, but may not offer a great improvement in games... even though your OS will only see 4gb total and let pioneer use about 1gb of that, (64 bit os will unlock extra ram) you can set some aside for use as a swapfile or a ramdisk which might offer an improvement to loading times.

but it depends on your situation, its getting to that age where you might want to think more about upgrading everything from the PSU down and longterm you might get more bang for your buck that way.


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paulb1919
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Okay, thanks for the advice. I know my pc is starting to show it's age now. Pioneer is still very impressive and I'm not complaining, I was just hoping I had missed a setting that would load the terrain quicker.


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Coolhand
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yeah well the terrain doesn't really "load" as such, it generates.. it doesn't really exist on disk... so your bottleneck may well be your cpu, which probably means a new motherboard, ram and psu... or just use it on the medium settings, its a little old but not a bad machine at all really... I was using something very similar, just with more ram until about a year ago when it literally melted, well, a bit of it did.


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paulb1919
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Okay thanks coolhand. I am, more or less aware of how the graphics work. It was just easier to type 'load' rather than 'procedurally generate'. lol. It reminds me a little of a program called Terragen.


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Geraldine
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paulb1919 wrote:
Windows Vista Home Premium

AMD Athlon 64 X2 Dual Core Processor 5000+ 2.60 Ghz

Memory RAM 2.00 GB

Nvidia Geforce 8400 GS

That's not a bad system at all Paul and about comparable to mine, except I use XP Home when playing Pioneer. That seems to have less of an overhead for my PC, especially so were RAM is concerned as I too have 2 Gigs. My machine is a dual boot with XP, Vista. I noticed that some games are a little slower on Vista and use XP mostly.


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Subzeroplainzero
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Your processor is quicker than mine but I have a slightly better gpu I think. When I want to see the fine detail on a planet I tend to switch to normal speed for a little while till it generates. Sometimes it's just a case of letting it "catch up"


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s2odan
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When setting up the terrain I used an i7 3.2 ghz to benchmark very high. With that cpu loading times on veryhigh are acceptable.

Most people should not go above high detail, veryhigh is literally half the speed of high.

My cpu is a q6600 2.4 and for the most part ill use very high but some terrains are slower than others and for those i would use high detail.

High detail should not be much different to very high visually, you should still get most of the detail but at a lower distance.

But if i was actually playing instead of testing, i would use medium or high.

Fyi, pioneer will use upto 3 cores. Not sure how much speed is gained with the 3rd core, but it will be partially used by shaders i believe.


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paulb1919
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Thanks for all your replys. I have been playing with all detail set to very very high so maybe I was being a bit optimistic! Also I have discovered that vista was only enabling 1 core at start up,so now I have that sorted, it is is much better. I'm still playing on max detail so it still takes a while to generate, but now its seconds rather than minutes. Thanks again-and thanks for pioneer!


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