6 réponses à ce sujet

[Andreas Papathanasis]

Hi everyone,

There have been lots of reports about loading screens getting slower the longer you play the game. (Lots of people use the term memory leak for this, but please refer to it as just "longer load times" for now). We're using this thread to collect more information on this bug from people who have it happen to them.

To be clear, this thread is only about the loading screens getting longer and longer the more you play the game. Normally, loading screens should never last more than 45 seconds to a minute, especially if your computer meets the recommended requirements. This thread only applies to you if you regularly get loading times longer than a minute. The longer the loading screen is on your computer (i.e. some people have mentioned 2-5 minutes loading screens), the more useful the data you can send us might be for us to figure out what the actual problem is.

To start with, may I please ask the following info from the people experiencing the problem:

- how long does a loading screen last after having played for a few hours (and how many hours you've played). Please measure the time with a stopwatch and don't use an estimate. Does this happen every single time you play? 
- amount of RAM you have on your system
- During the super long load screen, is the hard drive indicator light constantly blinking?
- is the loading times situation affected at all if you force the game to run on a single CPU only? To do that, start the game with the "-singlecore" command line parameter.

Thanks for your help and patience everyone as we're working through this issue, it's much appreciated.

Modifié par Andreas Papathanasis, 28 janvier 2010 - 02:42 .

[Andreas Papathanasis]

Thanks for the info so far everyone, and please keep adding information and the task manager screenshots to help us try and get an idea of the nature of the problem.



Some more info that may be of use to us (also added these to the original post)



- During the super long load screen, is the hard drive indicator light constantly blinking?

- Do you have any custom mods installed?



Sloth Of Doom: It can be possible for the CPU usage to reach 100% on single and dual core PCs, depending on the video card you have. This is normal and shouldn't cause any problems.



phordicus: It looks like you got the readings on the main menu screen, if you get a chance, could you please post the same readings from the task manager during a very long (longer than 2 minutes) loading screen?



Titius.Vibius : When you press I in the party camp and the inventory screen takes 10 seconds to come up, is your hard disk drive constantly being accessed during that time ?

[Andreas Papathanasis]

Sloth Of Doom wrote...
EDIT :

I started the game and just repeatedy loaded various saves.    After 15 saves I was up to 4 mins and 32 seconds load time.   As reported above, the memory usage of the game did not change outside of its normal range, nor did the harddrive light stay active.

Would it be possible to upload your save game folder somewhere so we can try and reproduce this by repeatedly reloading your specific saves? (Only include 15 saves if the folder is too big). You can find your character's save game folder under My Documents\\BioWare\\Dragon Age\\Characters\\<character name>.

[Andreas Papathanasis]

mkeller23173 wrote...

I noticed this issue got worse the longer I played.  I theorized it was because I had more saved games so I went in yesterday, deleted all the saves from my first run through and half of the saves from the second run through.  It worked.

Load times are back to being snappy.  Hope this helps.

Thanks! Did you use to have a problem with loading screen times overall, or after having played for a few hours? Do you remember how many saves roughly you deleted (was it tens or hundrends of saves?). In any case, we'll look into if a huge amount of saves can affect this at all.

[Andreas Papathanasis]

Thanks for the info everyone, it's really helpful for us to try and come up with theories on what is causing the issue on your computers. Again, I want to stress that this isn't normal behavior, and load screens should never last more than 45 seconds to a minute, no matter how long you've played. In fact the average load screen should go away in 10-20 seconds, if your computer meets the recommended requirements and has a reasonably fast hard drive.



Even though I do not have an update on the status of this bug, I do want to give you an update on how our investigation will work out. Because we still haven't reproduced the bug internally, we need to rely on your information to try and come up with ideas/theories on what is causing it. The more accurate information you can give us, the more likely it is for us to find the cause. From past experience, the hardest bugs to fix are the ones that happen rarely or on a small subset of computers, simply because it takes more time to find reliable reproduction steps for them. The process of fixing a bug requires reproducing it many many times, and obviously if that is hard to do it will take a long amount of time to fix the bug. If the reproduction steps are unavailable, we can't really do any progress with fixing the bug. This doesn't mean we don't care or are ignoring the problem. The current status of our work therefore includes gathering information from you, so we can try and reproduce the problem internally. Once we've seen the bug ourselves and we have an idea of what's causing it, we'll be in a better position to talk about why it happens and what amount of time it will take to fix it.



I do feel like there's enough of you having this problem that we'll eventually find reproduction steps for the bug, but because of all the reasons I mentioned, we can't give any kind of estimate about what the bug is or when it will be fixed. Please continue giving us the requested information, and thank you all for your time spent on this.

[Andreas Papathanasis]

We do not believe hard drives have anything to do with this bug. If the hard drive is fast enough to load an area in 20 seconds the first time through, it should do the same or better 2 hours later. Please stick to providing the information requested everyone, to keep things in order on this thread and make it easier for us to sort through information. Thank you

Modifié par Andreas Papathanasis, 14 janvier 2010 - 08:32 .

[Andreas Papathanasis]

Hi everyone,



is the loading times situation affected at all if you force the game to run on a single CPU only? To do that, start the game with the "-singlecore" command line parameter.