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[umiman]

When I finally upgraded to an SSD earlier this year, the unified response all my friends gave me was, to a man, "welcome to the modern age". Literally every single one of them, the cunts.

I highly recommend it. Even the noise reduction is worth it I think. Honestly they aren't too expensive. My Samsung 500gb cost me around $200. I still have around 4tb of regular hard drives for storing everything else. The SSD is only for Windows and load-heavy games.

[ZeroGravitas]

You just bought a gaming laptop that doesn't have an ssd?

Yeah... I mean I didn't want to spend a ton of money, I got a laptop that was a little old (6 months to a year out of date) and on sale, adding the SSD would have jacked the price way up.  So you're saying the load time comes down to HDD access, and therefore there's not much I can do to improve it.  Would lowering texture quality mean I have less to load at each transition?

Is load time significantly better on a SSD? Also, how are external SSDs? Are they limited so much by the USB connection that you don't benefit from the faster disk access?

i use both external and internal SSDs, and you shouldn't lose much speed with USB 3.0 instead of, say, eSATA (i use these) so if you don't want to open your case or don't have eSATA then it's really fine to use an external SSD. It's still a huge upgrade over traditional HDD for basically everything.

[ZeroGravitas]

I'm at 1.5 terabytes for my installed Steam games. So, I kind of disagree. Reinstalling big AAA games or games like fucking Payday 2 is a pain in the ass, so I like a big drive so I don't have to play the "hard drive cleaning" mini game every few months.

Plus using extra writes/deletes on an SSD to clear up space constantly seems self-defeating.

1.5 tb... wow. well, yeah, ok then. i mean that has to be like how many AAA games installed at the same time? 15-20?

[Reudh]

I'm at 1.5 terabytes for my installed Steam games. So, I kind of disagree. Reinstalling big AAA games or games like fucking Payday 2 is a pain in the ass, so I like a big drive so I don't have to play the "hard drive cleaning" mini game every few months.

Plus using extra writes/deletes on an SSD to clear up space constantly seems self-defeating.

I'm at 887GB for my installed games; i have 160ish total, 145 installed. Biggest offenders are Shadow of Mordor, at 56GB, and fallout 4/ skyrim both in mid 20s each.

[nenjin]

Feels like the number is getting smaller every year because the games keep getting bigger. Like, PD2 I think clocks in at around 40 gigs now. Vermintide is I think 34 gigs or something. GTA5 is like 30+ gigs. I feel like the average big title is around 25 gigs and it only goes up from there.

Witcher, FO4, Skyrim, XCOM2.....with the mods graphic packs added in, those bastards get YUGE.

Shadow of Mordor at 56 gigs...really? Jesus. I have that installed too. Will get rid of that as soon as Shadow of War releases, for sure.

[Reudh]

Feels like the number is getting smaller every year because the games keep getting bigger. Like, PD2 I think clocks in at around 40 gigs now. Vermintide is I think 34 gigs or something. GTA5 is like 30+ gigs. I feel like the average big title is around 25 gigs and it only goes up from there.

Witcher, FO4, Skyrim, XCOM2.....with the mods graphic packs added in, those bastards get YUGE.

Shadow of Mordor at 56 gigs...really? Jesus. I have that installed too. Will get rid of that as soon as Shadow of War releases, for sure.

Aha, I was wrong, it's 43ish GB. I have GTAV on disc, it was a 55GB install + a 6.1GB patch if I recall. Shadow of Mordor has tonnes of uncompressed textures, iirc, which is why it's so big.

[ZeroGravitas]

personally i uninstall games i haven't played in a month, because i probably won't play them again

[nenjin]

I like practicing self-deception. Keeps my life full of meaningless goals to hit.

[Egan_BW]

I use a hard disk drive. Not too noisy for me, I've never run out of space and had to uninstall anything, and things don't load so slowly as to be annoying. Dunno why I would get a solid-state, to be honest. I'd waste more time managing a second drive than I'd gain by things loading fast.

[nenjin]

For me the breakpoint is: does the game loading content actually slow down gameplay with an HDD? Generally the answer is still no. With a decent rig streaming data from your HDD is still not a massive performance hit unless you're like, 4k gaming at ultra. (Some games, especially poorly coded or optimized ones like Path of Exile, do show this however.)

But I expect we're approaching the time (since most devs develop on SSDs) where your average not-pixel indie game is going to require a way higher rate of data transfer than HDDs can provide. At that point I'll switch to an SSD for my main drive. Low boot times are nice but they're not on the top of my list for must-have performance enhancements.

[Flying Dice]

I liked survival mode, with some concessions made for autosaves due to mod instability. Dying is one thing, crashing after you're 30 minutes from your last autosave is infuriating, and the fact that you basically have to roleplay a narcoleptic just to continue the game (and the fact that 1 hour autosave naps can still cause illness) didn't sit well with me.

I did like the fact that enemies weren't bullet sponges (one of the most egregious parts of playing "hard" difficulties), so paying attention and getting the first shot off is far more important than having hugely overpowered gear... and it tended to open up a few more avenues that I normally wouldn't consider (such as mines and other explosives, which normally aren't worth the setup time in my opinion).

There's a mod I use (I'll dig up a link if you're interested) that lets you add save items which you can hotkey to use. Thing is, their saves take a while to show up, so you'll generally only be able to see them ~15-30 minutes after you make them. However, you'll still automatically reload the most recent one when you die. Essentially it's the security against time waste that you get from quicksave, but you can't use it to casually savescum.

[Damiac]

To be honest, this is the only game where the load times are a noticeable problem.  As you said, the damn textures keep getting bigger, and it's not like the old days where you just loaded everything into memory when you started the game, so you just had one big load at the beginning and then smooth sailing from there.

I believe no effort was made to streamline loading in fallout 4, because skyrim is running off a dvd on my xbox360 and the area transitions are a lot faster!  DVDs are a hell of a lot slower than HDDs...

I suppose I'd get faster turn processing in Aurora 4x on a SSD, at least assuming the actual I/O task is the bottleneck there, rather than the database driver.

I suppose I should look at getting a decent external SSD.  Especially since this problem is only going to keep getting worse (both more stuff to load and seemingly less effort made to streamline said loading)  I doubt I'd want my entire computer running on an SSD, just seems overly expensive for not enough benefit, but a 500 gig ssd could hold the few games that need the faster IO times.

I'll have to check whether my laptop does have a SATA port.

As for CRT monitors, if it weren't for the fact that they're giant and heavy as all hell, I'd happily use them over flatscreens.  It's not so bad now as it was when they were new, but they've all got a little bit of inherent lag that CRTs don't.  Of course, I'm not sure what the real limit is to CRT resolution, since I believe the reason for the lack of lag is the fact that it's analog rather than digital.  Still, there are people who refuse to play games like super smash bros on a flatscreen and insist on CRTs, due to the perceptible lag.

[milo christiansen]

(High quality) CRTs also produce better colors, particularly true blacks. Too bad you can't get 4K CRTs... They may be old and hugely bulky, but they simply can't be beat in some ways. I finally had to ditch mine since the phospers were wearing out (and 1280x1024 was just too small), and the LCD I got is a nice IPS model, but it just isn't quite as good.

I too, am on a harddrive (a cheap 7200 RPM model) and the only game with truely anoying load times is... Fallout 4.

[Flying Dice]

To be honest, this is the only game where the load times are a noticeable problem.  As you said, the damn textures keep getting bigger, and it's not like the old days where you just loaded everything into memory when you started the game, so you just had one big load at the beginning and then smooth sailing from there.

I believe no effort was made to streamline loading in fallout 4, because skyrim is running off a dvd on my xbox360 and the area transitions are a lot faster!  DVDs are a hell of a lot slower than HDDs...

I suppose I'd get faster turn processing in Aurora 4x on a SSD, at least assuming the actual I/O task is the bottleneck there, rather than the database driver.

I suppose I should look at getting a decent external SSD.  Especially since this problem is only going to keep getting worse (both more stuff to load and seemingly less effort made to streamline said loading)  I doubt I'd want my entire computer running on an SSD, just seems overly expensive for not enough benefit, but a 500 gig ssd could hold the few games that need the faster IO times.

I'll have to check whether my laptop does have a SATA port.

As for CRT monitors, if it weren't for the fact that they're giant and heavy as all hell, I'd happily use them over flatscreens.  It's not so bad now as it was when they were new, but they've all got a little bit of inherent lag that CRTs don't.  Of course, I'm not sure what the real limit is to CRT resolution, since I believe the reason for the lack of lag is the fact that it's analog rather than digital.  Still, there are people who refuse to play games like super smash bros on a flatscreen and insist on CRTs, due to the perceptible lag.

Wrong thread, sorta.

That said, I recall Steve confirming that one of the primary causes of slowdown was VB6 Aurora's frequent writing to the Access database most of the game data is stored in.

Here's a thread of him discussing possible alternative approaches for C# Aurora.

As for FO4, one of the reasons to use the Vivid textures is that they're optimized for better performance, which feels like faster load-times to me.

[Damiac]

Good call, I'll have to try out that texture pack and that dynamic shadow adjustment program...
Any recommendations for alternate start/skip the prologue type mods? I don't think I could bear to go through that again... it was cool the first time, but just annoying every time since.

I like survival mode... in theory.  I like the idea of having to eat and drink and sleep(although these needs are completely trivial to manage).  I like the idea of combat being quicker and deadlier (although I hate the high level bullet sponge raiders.)  I sort of like the idea of limited saving, as it does increase tension to a degree and give a more roguelike feel (but I don't like replaying the same content and I especially don't like having to load 3 transitions at a minute a pop every time I try again).  The lack of fast travel makes for some interesting moments(but the drudgery of walking through the same empty place for the 50th time gets old). 

The diseases are a complete miss for me, they just seem completely arbitrary and mostly serve to punish you for saving.  If clean food and water were scarcer and one had to risk eating contaminated food to survive they might make for an interesting choice, but as it is I only ever get diseases from sleeping, which I'm usually just doing to save.

So... any recommendations for either a separate survival mode mod, or mods to improve some of survival mode's shortcomings?