MTW long loading times are gone...!

[I of the Storm]

Everybody who has issues with long loading times in MTW (>30s) might want to try this:

http://www.twcenter.net/forums/showthread.php?322453-MTW-and-W7&p=10100148&viewfull=1#post10100148

It basically forces your system to boot with only 2 GB RAM, no matter how much you have installed, and that seems to do the trick.

I tried it yesterday and MTW is loading and running smoothly, I can even change resolutions at will and fight battles myself without trouble.

Basically, it's like it was in the old days... and now I'm a happy little warmonger.

Spread the word!

edit: seems to settle issues with ol' RTW as well - obviously, you CAN have too much RAM...

[drone]

This is the old resolutions fix, correct? I've never had the loading issue, but I'm wondering if this works, would the ddraw wrapper (https://forums.totalwar.org/vb/showthread.php?142044-Fix-for-resolution-problems) work as well?

[I of the Storm]

Apparently, yes. I never read about it, because resolution issues weren't my main problem. Loading times of 2 minutes were...

Feel free to close or merge thread.

[drone]

Feel free to close or merge thread.

Sorry, not what I meant. Sepheus' ddraw wrapper was meant to be a solution for the limited resolutions offered by the game when it got back an "unreasonable" value from high RAM systems. I was just curious whether it would work for long load times as well. There had been a lot of speculation back in the day about the cause of the load times, most of the educated guesses revolved around memory and AGP. If the ddraw wrapper solves the load issues, it's a lot easier than the msconfig change, and doesn't require going back and forth just to play MTW.

Either way, glad you can play again without the mandatory intermissions. :bow:

[I of the Storm]

I see. I'll try that tonight. To be sure, some other folks should try that as well.

:bow:

[I of the Storm]

I tried the resolution fix and put the ddraw.dll in my main MTW folder, as instructed. Now it doesn't work anymore, so I guess I'm stuck with the msconfig+reboot method.
Could be worse though...

Edit: Correction - it does work, but not on resolutions higher than 1280. Fine with me.

[drone]

Good to know that it works. The higher resolutions probably need just a little more that 2GB, which IIRC is what the ddraw wrapper returns.