Long Loading Times Thread - S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Anomaly mod for S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Call of Pripyat

I'm using Anomaly 1.5 (Beta 2.4).

The loading times in Anomaly are incredibly excessive, everytime I start to play it, it takes long to load, which is alright because the game initializes all resources at this time, but it takes about 6 minutes, when it should be at worst 3, normally 2 to 1 minute.

And then, between saves and moving in and out of locations, it takes a minute or two. For saves, it should take less than 30 seconds, going into other territories should be less than a minute.

I may be making a pointless report, but I hope not.
The gamedata folder is 7gb big, with over 7000 files, which probably explains the very long load times.
It's on beta so I suppose that's why, I just hope the next update (beta including) can deal with this issue.

I'm playing with laptop intel graphics and a i3 2.3 ghz and it takes 5 minutes to load after starting a new game and a couple minutes at most for any other loading...

On a side note, when I had my gaming pc I ironically had A LOT more technical and crashing issues with the game, and also my loading times were pretty much the same if not more?

This mod in particular, nothing else comes close to it's level of immersion and realism to me, at least in single player survival. It's a shame it's so un-optimized and broken not including the beta, though it did seem to fix some things at least, and what it includes that I don't have to mod the game with anymore is fantastic.

Anyway that is a rather big gamedata folder, I am running the 2.4 beta as well, with numerous mods, but mine isn't even 2gb, so my best guess is, that may be the culprit.

How is your gamedata folder merely 2GB instead of 7GB?

I didn't even download any mods, just the whole Anomaly 1.4 then the Beta 2.4 update

@Strogglet15, is it a spinning hard drive or solid-state? I wonder if it has developed some bad sectors under the game files, and it takes many retries to read them without errors, causing excessive loading times. Did you try benchmarking the drive with HD Tune? They have a free version [1] if you don't have it yet. Healthy spinning drive should look like [2], and a bad one - like [3], for example.

Also, turn off as much of auxiliary software you might be using in the background as you can. Things like Google Drive or Dropbox sync, real-time cloud backups, anti-virus scanners and so on may slow down hard drive I/O very much.

In my experience, loading times in Anomaly are just about the same as in the original trilogy, CoC and LA - I have accumulated several thousands saves on my hard drives over the years, and never experienced any loading slowdowns.

1. Hdtune.com
2. Top-windows-tutorials.com
3. Top-windows-tutorials.com

According to HDTune, my HDD is incredibly healthy, not too surprised.
Imgur.com

You say your loading times are just like from CoC? That's actually amazing.
I remember having trilogy-like loading times with CoC too.

But as I said, my gamedata folder for Anomaly is 8GB big, according to QueenKat hers is merely lower than 2GB.
I know for sure that having a gamedata folder would heavily increase loading times, especially depending how many folder-to-files there are. (7722 files 509 folders on my end)

I don't get it, did I do or install something wrong? I used the guide as seen here Moddb.com

I am sorry this did not lead anywhere. I am on an SSD, and it very well could be that since all loading times are much faster all around I just notice the difference between Anomaly and CoC less.

My Anomaly folder is now 28.4 GB, with 'db' being the largest at 18.8 GB, 'appdata' the second largest at 7.9 GB (mostly my thousands saves), and the third largest is 'gamedata' at 1.7 GB with 7,708 files and 508 folders. Could it be that you accidentally left one of the downloaded 7z archives in there or something like that? You do seem to have one more directory and a few more files in there?

Nope, it's all purely gamedata folders, there's no foreign file.

I'll just have to wait for the 1.5.0 update to come out of beta, or maybe I can use some tool to convert the whole gamedata folder into a database, but I don't know how.

What are some of the largest files in your gamedata folder and how big are they?

My 2 largest are ui_icon_equipment.dds and ui_actor_portraits.dds both 32mb. No files bigger than that.

Biggest folder is textures at 1.40gb followed by sounds at 150mb, meshes 75mb, levels 187mb, configs 60mb.

The rest are like, under 10mb to kb in size.

Do you have the Xray engine executable in compatibility mode by any chance? when I tried that and ticked it for Win7 or Win8, my load times increased 6x. I'm on Windows 10.

That's interesting, sounds like something that shouldn't happen.

I'm on Windows 7 64-bit myself, so I can't set it to any of the two mentioned.

QueenKat wrote:

What are some of the largest files in your gamedata folder and how big are they?

My 2 largest are ui_icon_equipment.dds and ui_actor_portraits.dds both 32mb. No files bigger than that.

Biggest folder is textures at 1.40gb followed by sounds at 150mb, meshes 75mb, levels 187mb, configs 60mb.

The rest are like, under 10mb to kb in size.

I have no idea and to be honest don't wanna bother with them because I have over 7000 files there.

I'm still confused how you have less than me, can you tell me how you installed Anomaly, step by step?
It's possible you got a torret download that had 1.4 and the gamedata contains the 1.5 BETA update, either that or you got the packed game and your gamedata is mods.

Edited by: Strogglet15

Got Win7 64-bit myself, and I had shit load times with higher gfx settings too. In Options (Main) --> [Video], use DirectX 9 (Basic), with 8GB RAM & 2GB VRAM. Exit & restart the game.

I didn't use any torrents, I just downloaded everything from Moddb.com and unzipped them in the correct order to a folder.

QueenKat wrote:

I didn't use any torrents, I just downloaded everything from Moddb.com and unzipped them in the correct order to a folder.

I did too, but you have less size than I do in my gamedata, the hell?

Well, with the 1.5.0 update which normalized the files, I still have long loading times.

Could there probably be a bug/issue, like bad prefetch, cache not properly being loaded or so? I'm willing to debug it if I can get to know how.