The Dark Mod updated to 2.07!

nbohr1more on 28/5/2018 at 17:50

Quote Posted by bassoferrol

Changing to 32-bit exe was not much of an improvement. Perhaps 1 frame more per second.
As an example, mission pearlsnswine takes 95 seconds to load.
Is it too long for that mission or just about what should be expected according to my rig?

Long loading times is a different problem than in-game performance.

Did you review this section:

(http://wiki.thedarkmod.com/index.php?title=Performance_Tweaks#Slow_loading_times)

?

Azaran on 28/5/2018 at 18:01

I did notice loading times got slightly better with one of the last updates (2.02 - 2.04). Still needs work, but I definitely noticed it

Judith on 28/5/2018 at 20:24

Quote:

As an example, mission pearlsnswine takes 95 seconds to load.

Try unzipping .pk4 file to a subfolder, delete .pk4, and start this mission again. It should load faster. I took around one minute on my rig.

Constance on 28/5/2018 at 21:54

Hi there .o/

I just updated to 2.06 and noticed that the updater automatically installed the Microsoft Visual C++ 2013 redistributables, both x86 and x64, in versions 12.0.30501.0.

Why redistributing such an old version, though? The latest ones being version 12.0.40660.0 (Microsoft Visual C++ 2013 Update 5) as stated (https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/3179560/update-for-visual-c-2013-and-visual-c-redistributable-package) here (which itself was found from (https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/2977003/the-latest-supported-visual-c-downloads) there).

bassoferrol on 28/5/2018 at 22:11

seta image_useNormalCompression "0"
seta image_useCompression "0"

Using these made my loading time go from 95 seconds down to 27 seconds only. Great, great improvement.
Unzipping .pk4 made me go from 95 to 92 seconds. Not a real improvement.

nbohr1more on 29/5/2018 at 02:22

Quote Posted by bassoferrol

Hmm...

I never play with these compression settings since I like the extra VRAM but the Normal Compression one shouldn't
do anything in any modern TDM version since we don't use compressed normal maps.... Yet when I set it to 0,
I get HUGE stutters in Behind Closed Doors. It doesn't make sense...

Judith on 29/5/2018 at 09:41

Quote:

Unzipping .pk4 made me go from 95 to 92 seconds. Not a real improvement.

That is weird. Pk4s are just zip files, they're using old deflate method and the game isn't very fast in unpacking them. Using the unzipped version should speed things up quite a bit.

Csimbi on 29/5/2018 at 09:59

Quote Posted by Judith

That is weird. Pk4s are just zip files, they're using old deflate method and the game isn't very fast in unpacking them. Using the unzipped version should speed things up quite a bit.

With or without multi-threading enabled?

Judith on 29/5/2018 at 11:24

It's faster even on 2.05, which doesn't have multi-core support.

nbohr1more on 4/6/2018 at 05:08

Since users seem to be cranking the Soft Shadows "Quality" slider to soften shadows (not the intended purpose of that setting),
I have created an unofficial GUI patch to allow users to adjust softness (light center size) directly:

(https://www.moddb.com/mods/the-dark-mod/addons/unofficial-soft-shadows-softness-slider)