This may have been mentioned before, so apologies, but I am interested to know how long it takes to start up Train Simulator. I have a HP laptop with 16GB of ram with an SSD drive. From the time I press Play, it takes two and a half minutes until the career drive screen appears. Is this abnormally long? If so, is there some way, I can improve this in the graphic settings?
It would depend what else that laptop has under the bonnet. For an i3 based system using integrated graphics that would be pretty good but for something with more clout and a GPU it is slow (although complexity of both the route and scenario will make a difference). More system information is needed for a useful answer. Changing graphics settings may improve your frame rate but I doubt it will affect the time it takes to set things up. Have you put "-Fastload" in the game properties? That can make for a huge improvement. https://forums.dovetailgames.com/threads/train-simulator-2021-core-update-2nd-march-2021.36321/
I think that only speeds up loading actual scenarios, not the game loading time. Mine take 54 seconds. Core i7-3960X, 16GB, SATA SSD. No idea why yours should take 2.5 times longer. Is your SSD getting full? Changing graphics settings will have no effect. Mine also takes a further 15 seconds after clicking "Drive" to get to the menu. I notice this time after clicking Drive is increasing as I add more and more DLC. Clicking Build is instant.
The GPU shouldn't be making any difference to the load times. He's talking about loading the game, not actually loading scenarios. I'm pretty sure that will have no effect on game load times, only scenario loading times.
He said from clicking "play" on the Steam launcher, to the first menu appearing... I think. He did say when the career drive menu appears though, but that then requires an extra click of the "drive button".. maybe he can clarify. If he DOES mean getting to the actual career menu then that is dictated by how much DLC you have, as the time from clicking "Drive" to getting to the scenario menus definitely gets longer as you add more DLC.
My times: From clicking "Play" on the Steam launcher, to getting to the initial "Drive, Profile, Build" menu = 51 seconds. (It was 54 the first time I tried it... maybe some things get cached?) From clicking "Play" on the Steam launcher, then clicking "drive" and getting to the scenario menus = 1 minute 17 seconds.
It does affect that too. I timed loading time (from clicking play to menu screen load) before and after enabling fastload, and it went from about 1 minute to 25 seconds.
I haven't tried fast boot yet, I hope to upgrade my memory and hard drive in the next few weeks so might wait. My hard drive is getting very slow, even loading an internet browser seems to take an age with the hard drive light constantly showing. I decided to play a scenario I made for the combined workshop Welsh Marches/South Wales Coast route yesterday, it has a fair amount of traffic but not excessive. From clicking the TS 64 bit icon to the scenario loading took 21 minutes!
You should try it, the age of your HDD won't be an issue - you just have to add that one command. You'll never go back and scarecely be able to believe the minutes you whiled away waiting for it to load!
Many of the routes I use aren't DTG routes so aren't in AP files and there are some which I have modified so sit in other folders. I might give it a try though and see what difference it does make. I still think my HDD needs replacing as it is slow for other applications and I am sure isn't helping frame rates.
That sounds about right, Mine from Steam (Load 64bit) GO! - Drive menu 1:28:15 (298GB Railworks folder) From clicking on "Drive" to seeing the Standard, Career, Workshop etc Tabs has increased dramatically the more I have installed. I seriously need to stop buying stuff. LOL
Little difference here. I read it only speeds up unpacking .ap files, so not sure how many of those it's unpacking when just loading the game to the menu. WHen loading 3rd party routes, or stuff I've previously unpacked there's not really much improvement, but when loading scenarios in .ap files, the difference is massive.
It only takes me 21 seconds from clicking the desktop icon to seeing career scenarios in the drive menu and I don't have a super computer. Specs are: Intel core i3-8350k @4.00GHz 16.0 Gb RAM Nvidia GeForce GTX 1060 6GB WD Blue 1TB ssd My Railworks folder is only 71.6 GB, which seems small compared to what I have heard others mention. I also don't use and haven't tried -fastload yet. Mainly because I spend most of my time building and none of those files are in the .ap format.
Ah yes- Play in Steam to start TS- Drive to start a scenario... Read the question... I take it back- two and a half minutes is slow. Actually it's glacial. Play to Drive menu on the roughly five years old i3 laptop I got started with is about a minute- that's slow.
I read it.... He's not loading a scenario... just loading to the career scenario menu after you press "drive".
Thank you to everyone who responded, my laptop has an Intel i7 processor, 16GB RAM, a 13.3” Full HD touch screen and a 1TB Solid State Drive. I have mainly train simulator on it with about 250gb remaining. TSW2 is loaded into a portable SSD drive. Unfortunately my Nvidia graphics card is only a MX250 and this may cause the start up to be low. Once in the game everything opens and works pretty quickly and I already have -fastload inserted correctly as per Jamie’s instructions. From pressing play it takes 1 minutes 42 seconds to the first menu and then clicking on Drive takes another 45 seconds until the scenario menu opens I do have a lot of content so that may be the reason the last section is slowing down. But the first section has always been about the same since I first installed the game on my laptop. Opening other menus like Build it is instant. Closing down takes exactly 30 seconds. -fastload has made a world of different as routes open within 10 to 20 seconds.
I'm willing to be corrected on this, but I can't see why the GPU should affect load times. Can anyone explain why it can?
If you have a (this is guesswork) 600GB+ install of Train Sim, then that's your culprit Several examples further up the thread showing time to get to the drive menu increasing with larger installs, e.g. 76GB - 21 seconds 170GB - 40 seconds 298GB - 98 seconds [yours - x00GB?] - 147 seconds This is hardly scientific as we all have different boxes and it's a tiny sample size, but it at least appears to be a trend.
did i do this right? i haven't mucked about with Excel in years based on our terrible sample size your install size might be around 450GB ps anyone inclined to take any of this too seriously, please don't
My Specs.. (Highlighted drive is my standalone TS drive) My Times... Logged in to DTL. 21.8 to main screen, 28.5 to drive screen Logged out of DTL with Don't ask ticked. 21.4 to main screen, 27.3 to drive screen
Reef My times are roughly about the same times as yours. Via steam: To drive screen 30 secs to main screen 19 secs. TS20XX 400+GB install on 1 TB NVME .M2 card (cheapest I could find). pH
Crusty 10 year old rig (with 5 year old GPU). No idea why it doesn't report the motherboard... It's an Asus ROG Rampage IV Extreme. The CPU clock speed is reporting wrong as well. It's OC'ed to 4.2 GHz. Average over 10 loads. From Steam to initial menu = 52 seconds From Steam to (click Drive) main scenario menus = 1 minute 14 seconds. TS is on the SSD and Railworks is 241GB (no steam or non-British stuff, except what came with the three TS versions I've bought). SSD is a 10 year old Samsung 830
This is a monster outlier - 30 seconds for a 400GB install. Is this the only M.2 in the thread so far? Pookey's 74 seconds for 241GB pretty much fits bang on the line in my graph above.
Right... I've done 4 "start-up's" over the last 2 days... These are my results: Steam > TS / TS > Menu Screen 2m 01s / 21s 1m 00s / 21s 1m 43s / 23s 0m 53s / 19s RW folder size: 177Gb Computer specs: (Phone photo as I couldn't do a screenshot on laptop!) As you can see from my timings, there's some variation... Admittedly, start-up's 1 & 3 were the "first" of the day... Eric
Thank you Andy for your explanation and to everyone who contributed, I now understand the reasons and am grateful for all your helpful posts.
No worries and it's not a totally scientific method as a couple of monster PCs here are booting TS up very quickly indeed. Do you know the size of your Railworks folder btw? I'm so nosey
andy.malcolm I have zero WS scenarios it would be interesting to see if the more WS scenarios downloaded - the longer it may take for TS to get to the dRIVE", etc menu? As TS starts it opens the SDBCache.bin file and that checks every route, DTG, JT, AP, WS, etc and then it checks every scenario that you have installed as I have only around 1500 scenarios (many in .ap file structure) - no WS - it takes less time to load - especially as I rebuild the scenario database very week. I also TRIM the System SSD (non .M2) and the TS SSD every week. Further, my Windows OS used to open TS has been severely trimmed using Black Viper's recommendations. This initial SDBCache.bin check involves up to 14,000,000 lines of code. From DRIVE to the main menu involves around 2,000,000 lines of code depending on your route install - so it is faster. Funnily enough it sometimes takes me longer to open a scenario than the initial loading times. Lots of variables in loading times in TS!
Just to show the complexity of the SDBCahe.bin check as TS loads: Route check for EVERY Route: For every scenario that you have on your PC. pH
then my prediction up thread was pretty good! "based on our terrible sample size your install size might be around 450GB".