How to improve zoning time?

[DangerKitten]

I feel that my zoning time is causing me to miss out on teaming.   When on a TF with missions spread out on all zones, I wait to see what the mission target area is, then to go SG, then to new mission zone.  The problem is, the mission is usually over before I can get to it.   My SG base room has all the zones on a wall, from porting in to clicking on zone is about 1-2 seconds.   When the zone loading screen appears with the progress bar, this takes about 30 - 45 seconds.   When I watch the team window and see my mates zoning, it seems like it takes them 10-15 seconds  between SG/Ouro/ mission zones.   What is all your experiences? 

[ImpousVileTerror]

This tends to largely be a client-side hardware performance issue.  Sometimes reducing your graphics settings can improve load times, but largely it relates to your RAM and GPU.  

[Frostbiter]

An SSD would certainly help with that if you don't have one. My load times are under 2 seconds.

[johnnysc]

Are you using the 64-bit client?  If you have the hardware to support it, there is a definite zone load time improvement when it is used.

[Apparition]

All of this.  Make sure your system has at least a few GBs of RAM not in use and a solid state drive.  Also make sure that you are using the 64 bit client.

[Peacemoon]

Definitely a hardware issue.

 

In game there are a few things that can help you from the p2w vendor:

mission teleport power, 1 million influence and 30 min cooldown. Teleports you to the mission door. If the mission is quite far away I sometimes use this so it’s only 1 load not 2+.

 

team mission teleporter, 10 million influence and 30 min cooldown. This is where you summon a transport vehicle and it teleports everyone nearby on your team to the mission door as above. If everyone has one you can take it in turns to use.

 

assemble the team, 1 million influence 30 min cooldown, recalls everyone on your team to your position. If your friends don’t have recall friend, they could use this to teleport you to the mission door once you arrive in the zone.

 

Hope that might help a little?

 

Personally I always try wait for everyone to arrive before beginning a mission, but not everyone does this. 

Edited June 14, 2020 by Peacemoon

[nihilii]

All good suggestions, but going to second the SSD first and foremost. If you can afford it, this should give you the most dramatic improvement of all possible steps.

For a quick fix, turning off ingame vertical synchronisation might help with loading times. Back when I was on a HDD, I remember it took a solid third off if not half.

[killigraphy]

Really not an SSD  issue, CoX isn't an intense game to run.....you can run this game with a 5+ year old rig.

 

Sounds to me like RAM is the issue. Get more.

[DangerKitten]

2 hours ago, Apparition said:

All of this.  Make sure your system has at least a few GBs of RAM not in use and a solid state drive.  Also make sure that you are using the 64 bit client.

I'm doing all of this.  My OS, system page and the game folder are all on SSD.   I have 16G ram in system.  Task monitor shows about 9G of ram in use, 6.5G available, cpu at 10% and gpu (1660 super 6G GDDR6) at 40% when playing the game.  When zoning, the gpu and cpu drop down to ~5%, the drives show no activity.  The network spikes for a tiny bit but not for the duration of the zone load, more like a 1 second spike in traffic.

 

I am loading by using tequila.exe v 1.0.0.20 and starting Homecoming 64 bit.

 

I can play modern games at ~80 fps / 4k  so hardware works pretty good. 

 

I do have some usb external drives plugged in, but they don't have anything to do with the game. 

 

Things I might try soon - fiddling with bios stuff, changing resolution of game and/or desktop, network trace.

 

Thanks for all the suggestions.

 

Edit/typo

Edited June 15, 2020 by DangerKitten

[Frostbiter]

Your specs are good so it's not a hardware issue. I've found running with 16x Anti-Aliasing to cause hiccups with the game engine. I leave mine at 8x.

[MunkiLord]

1 hour ago, DangerKitten said:

I can play modern games at ~80 fps / 4k  so hardware works pretty good. 

So I was prepared to second a lot of the information people already gave, but my computer is not capable of this performance and I'm not having the same issue. 

 

This may not make a difference, but try changing from full screen to windowed mode, or the other way around if you're already in windowed mode. On my previous computer, significantly lower spec than either of us are using, making that change solved a ton of loading problems for me. 

[Frostbiter]

I'd also suggest trying the /netgraph 1 ingame command to see if its a ping or network latency issue.

[Twisted Toon]

17 hours ago, killigraphy said:

Really not an SSD  issue, CoX isn't an intense game to run.....you can run this game with a 5+ year old rig.

 

Sounds to me like RAM is the issue. Get more.

Since my desktop crashed (hard) about a year ago, I've been using my 8 year old laptop to play.

Although, my desktop is actually older than my laptop by a few years.

The Desktop has a SSD the laptop doesn't. Unfortunately, the graphics card on the desktop bit the dust too.

In order to use the desktop again, I need to do a lot of downloads.

Unfortunately, I don't have a reliable high-speed internet connection.

 

I attribute any load screen issues with my crappy internet connection that I get by using my phone as a wifi hotspot.

[DangerKitten]

On 6/14/2020 at 6:16 PM, MunkiLord said:

This may not make a difference, but try changing from full screen to windowed mode, or the other way around if you're already in windowed mode. On my previous computer, significantly lower spec than either of us are using, making that change solved a ton of loading problems for me. 

This made a big difference.  I was at full screen, then I switched to windowed mode.   Now my loading times are ~ 10 - 15 seconds.    I should note that when it was taking time to zone, it was the COX splash screen that was the big part.   It was taking ~25secs on the splash screen then 5 more on the zone, but now it is about 5 seconds on each. 

 

Thanks everyone for the help.  You guys are great!

 

[Zeraphia]

On 6/14/2020 at 12:36 PM, Frostbiter said:

An SSD would certainly help with that if you don't have one. My load times are under 2 seconds.

A thousand times this.

[EmmySky]

On 6/14/2020 at 8:13 PM, Frostbiter said:

Your specs are good so it's not a hardware issue. I've found running with 16x Anti-Aliasing to cause hiccups with the game engine. I leave mine at 8x.

I looked and couldnt find this in in-game options though I seem to recall seeing it before...do you know where I might find it please?

[Bill Z Bubba]

2 minutes ago, EmmySky said:

I looked and couldnt find this in in-game options though I seem to recall seeing it before...do you know where I might find it please?

It's listed as FSAA under Graphics and Audio, 1st section. I leave it off in game and force it at the driver level. Found that it's a bit clearer that way.

[Seigmoraig]

If you are still running Windows 7 that might be the issue, I heard that lots of people have longer loading times when on W7 vs on W10.
My friends on W7 takes like 45 seconds to log out into the character select screen while my pc takes like 3 secs

Edited June 17, 2020 by Seigmoraig

[Maagic]

On 6/14/2020 at 4:54 PM, Peacemoon said:

Definitely a hardware issue.

 

In game there are a few things that can help you from the p2w vendor:

mission teleport power, 1 million influence and 30 min cooldown. Teleports you to the mission door. If the mission is quite far away I sometimes use this so it’s only 1 load not 2+.

 

team mission teleporter, 10 million influence and 30 min cooldown. This is where you summon a transport vehicle and it teleports everyone nearby on your team to the mission door as above. If everyone has one you can take it in turns to use.

 

assemble the team, 1 million influence 30 min cooldown, recalls everyone on your team to your position. If your friends don’t have recall friend, they could use this to teleport you to the mission door once you arrive in the zone.

 

Hope that might help a little?

 

Personally I always try wait for everyone to arrive before beginning a mission, but not everyone does this. 

Those are all great options for moving around in the zone itself, but the OP was talking about actually going from one zone to another and having to wait for the loading screen w/ the blue bar. I've been having this issue for about 2 weeks now. It's not a hardware issue either, because my crappy $300 wal mart laptop can run CoH and my system is a LOT faster than it. (4ghz AMD Ryzen 2600, 16GB ram, 1TB NVME, Radeon RX 570)

[Peacemoon]

1 hour ago, Maagic said:

Those are all great options for moving around in the zone itself, but the OP was talking about actually going from one zone to another and having to wait for the loading screen w/ the blue bar. I've been having this issue for about 2 weeks now. It's not a hardware issue either, because my crappy $300 wal mart laptop can run CoH and my system is a LOT faster than it. (4ghz AMD Ryzen 2600, 16GB ram, 1TB NVME, Radeon RX 570)

These powers teleport you from wherever you are standing to directly outside the mission door. So it means you can skip middle steps (like Ouroboros or SG base etc) and just have one zoning screen to land directly at the mission door.

Assemble the team just let’s you catch up if someone kindly uses it to jump you to the mission door.

Its not a fix of course but just trying to suggest ingame tools that might mitigates and help the OP.

I would als try reducing world detail, as that use to help me with loading times on my old pc.

 

[Troo]

Likely it is a users connection or setup.

 

To test, lower all settings all the way down and see how it goes.

[Frostbiter]

6 hours ago, Seigmoraig said:

If you are still running Windows 7 that might be the issue, I heard that lots of people have longer loading times when on W7 vs on W10.
My friends on W7 takes like 45 seconds to log out into the character select screen while my pc takes like 3 secs

This is true but it also makes me sad at the same time so :(

[Maagic]

4 hours ago, Peacemoon said:

I would also try reducing world detail, as that use to help me with loading times on my old pc.

 

But it was working fine before and only started the long load times within the last couple weeks. I haven't changed anything. All my other internet connectivity is unchanged.