map problems?

[hayaku]

Hi.... something I have noticed is that when trying to access the map (pressing tab) it will take a couple of seconds to load, with time increasing the bigger the explored map. Well, I have noted that trying to access the map screen on arnika-trynton road (a very big map) with most/all of it explored, the game takes up to 2 minutes to load the map, often outright freezing. Once the map is loaded you loose all mouse control and everything stops responding. The only way I have got the game to respond again was by Alt+ tab'ing out and the back into the game, then waiting a while.

Is there any way to play around with how the game caches the map so that this doesn’t have to happen? I expect the huge delay is due to the software having to compress/decompress the map every time it is accessed or something. Either way, it shouldn’t really be happening on a 2.6ghz system with 1024mb of ram.

Is this even normal? thanks...

[Gimli]

I think I've seen where people say that using the opengl video driver speeds that up - but slow map loads are normal.

[vesselle]

i never use the tab key for my map. i just click the radar screen instead. either way, my maps load immediately.

are you patched?

[babar]

mine sometimes take a while too load too. maybe it takes longer if you have a ranger or x-ray active.

[Wolfie]

Originally posted by Gimli: I think I've seen where people say that using the opengl video driver speeds that up - but slow map loads are normal.

Yes, also how much texture ram your video card had available is a big factor in whether it will be slow each time or just the first time.

Basically when you call up the map, it has to access every ground texture for the area you've explored (so the more explored, the more textures likely to be needed), now if your vid card has plenty of internal memory (for Wiz8, this would probably be in the 128Mb+), it can hold those textures in it's own memory and so access/display them quicker.

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