Game loads s....l....o....w!!!!

I'm playing GalCiv v.1.13, giantic universe, near the end of the game, I think (only me and 2 civs left). Playing on a P4, 1.7 GHz with 512 Memory, and a GeForce4 Ti4200 video card, all running under Win2000. The game takes 11 minutes to load. This can't be normal. Can it? My watch is working fine, so tell me I'm doing somthing else wrong. Please!

I get similar load times toward the end on both my comps - p 4 (c) 2.4ghz, 1gb ram, ati radeon 9600; athlon 1ghz, 512 ram, geforce 2. Saves take even longer, taking over minute even at the start of the game.

~SDC~

Are you talking about saved game load times? Mine never take more than a minute to load and that's playing giganctic also. Maybe a hardware issue? Hard drive developing bad sectors?

Bill

~SDC~

Bill, I don't think it's hardware going bad -- no problems elsewhere on other games and programs. And yes, the problem has to do with loading a saved game; the longer I play (real-time hours)the longer it takes to load. When I started this game, it took about 10 seconds to load a game; 11+ minutes now, by the clock! I'm thinking of reinstalling, tho, because with all the patches, and the fact that I've had GalCiv on the drive for months, maybe it's a game-corrupt-file issue or something similar. I've noticed that saves take longer than before, too, and exiting the game takes almost a full minute now. Maybe kjames81 and I have a similar problem not related to hardware. I wonder if it's worth asking StarDock about?
[Message Edited]

Maybe you have a virus /worm on your computer. This would account for the game slowing down.

Do you have the same problem with other programs?

Have you got any antivirus software to check it out?

Hi Blueroach, thanks! Using Norton (just renewed subscription and patches are up to date) and Zone Alarm. Ran a complete check after all this started, the computer is clean. Nothing else is showing any signs of trouble, and I use a lot of games and commercial software. The more I think about it, the more inclined I am to reload the entire game. But I'm still open to suggestion...

Have you got some versions of the saved game earlier than the last one ?

If yes do they all take that long to load ?

If you do decide to reinstall you might want to take a copy of the save games first.

Primus, I keep about 10-12 saves, and they all take too long to load (I tried), If I reinstall, I'll keep the saves, but...I hope it's not the saved games that are themselves the problem. Guess there's only one way to find out. Thanks!

Also, do you mean that you are playing the game, decide to load a saved game (for whatever reason)? Or are you loading GalCiv and trying to start up a saved game?

The reason why I ask is that if you keep reloading saved games without restarting GalCiv, there is a weird memory allocation bug that causes the saved game loads to take longer and longer and longer until you just have to shut the program down and load it up again. If the problem occurs when you just load up GalCiv, I don't know what to say.

Hope this helps.

AmulekBird: Both. It happens either way! But you're right, I first noticed when I tried reloading 3 or 4 times with the game already running -- it just got slower and slower. Exit the game and start over, and it loads saved games faster. For a while. At the point I'm at now, it's an 11-12 minute wait either way. Frankly, if it continues like this after I reinstall, I'm going to scrap the whole thing.

You could try defragmenting your harddrive, if you haven't done that for awhile.

Games saved in 1.2 may load faster since I'm only creating one file, and writing all the data at once. 

But ships will still take the longest to load, so if you and the AI have a ton of ships in the game, that could be the reason.

CariElf: That's a though...I haven't run defrag in a long, long time. And, as you suggest, me and the AI have tons of ships (well, anyway, me and the Torians). I thought the game was almost over and I could reinstall and load a saved game, but the darn AI just won't roll over and die as it ought to. I'll defrag today (I hope) and post the results. Thanks!

OK, come to find out, there IS a problem with the hard drive. I'll have to replace it. Don't know how long that will take, but when it's done, I'll reinstall and try to load one of the saved games (assuming we can ghost them over to the new drive). I'll get back to this post later...I just don't know when "later" will be. Meanwhile, thanks to all for help and suggestions!

It sounded like a hardware issue. Good luck with the ghosting!

Bill

~SDC~

I've had a similar problem.. I guess.. When I go to load a saved game from the main screen it takes a while for the list of my saved games to come up.. I've found though that if I go into \galciv\data\savegames\ & delete all that left over junk (unfinished games & stuff) that load game list "loads" a lot faster. Maybe that could be part of your problem. Not sure. :notsure:

You can always zip them and e-mail them to yourself. I've done that before when backing up a hard drive.

I once had to retrieve data from an 80 Gig hd with a bad sector on it using only floppy disks, because I couldn't boot into windows and Safe mode didn't (doesn't?) have drivers for CD-Rs.  I managed to save most of my downloaded files and all of my e-mail and various documents that I've created over the years, but I had to re-rip my entire music collection.   This has made me extremely paranoid and so I went out and bought another internal hd so if one goes bad, I can just copy everything over to the other drive.

I'm back...finally! New hard drive and all. Copied some of the last saves to a ZIP drive, got the new drive instalaled, reinstalled the game, reloaded the saved games -- and the load time for them was down to about 2 minutes (from almost 20 at the last!). Yup, musta'v been the drive.
Crapnecticut, I delete the older saves regularly. It didnt' seem to help in my case.
CariElf, I know what you mean. But the drive that failed was my D: drive, used just for games. And for saving stuff, just in case.
Thanks to one and all for the help, suggestions and sympathy! I really 'preciate it.