alot of my saves are months at sea with a page of kills and a 3/4 page of missons completed. still instant loads,
I even get this message now after installing the tara maru mod thats says:
"get something to drink this may take awhile"
and by the time i finish reading that statement i'm loaded and looking at my helmsmen. I never understood what that meant exactly until i noticed in the forums people having long load times.

I have an above average machine, but not a screamer. By the time I'm half way through a typical patrol where I only refitted on the way out (if there was a refit between me and the partol area) my "Please Wait" time is approx 2 minutes. By the time I return after 30-40 days, I'm around 2.5 minutes at the "wait."

I don't even get "instant" at the 1st save leaving base. It's typically ~15 seconds.
-Pv-

If you've got a decent amount of RAM, say 2 gb, then setting the page file to something small(I use 2 - 500 mb with Windows' drive, and 0 where SH4 is installed) helps a lot. I had never seen the "Get something to drink" message, until I set the page file to 3067 mb. The loading times increased dramatically. Needless to say, it's now back to 500 and short loading times.

I think in R/L when they went into a port they were not ordered to, there had better be a good reason. The cruises had set lengths of time and specific places the sub was to be at certain specified times. The captains did not have the freedom you do to decide to reload and go back out there on the same cruise.

As a practical matter, they weren't playing a game, so there was no value in doing that unless they were ordered to. There were no mutinies aboard US submarines, but there might have been if a sub commanders' love of battle prolonged cruises unduly and against orders. Your whole attitude changes when you have a good idea that one of three sailors won't be coming back.

I know the odds were a lot better than that for submarines, but sailors went out on multiple subs. In accounts of the day, I keep running into that one of three ratio, and it just doesn't turn out to be true at the end of the war when all the heads are counted. Apparently, though, that was the odds submariners thought they were against. The whole operation was top secret, which made it very difficult for sailors to get the whole picture of just how well we were doing out there.

Also if you you use save replay option you will end up with huge save game files, why I never use it :arrgh!:

I read a similar post of yours like this JC and started doing this and I to have been going since day 1 and have made it to mid 44, 4 subs and no retirement.:up: Hope to make it all the way to the end.:yep:

Get a good defragger that supports full SPACE defragging (meaning it moves everything on the drive into one giant contiguous block and leaves all free space at the end of the drive as another contiguous block), this helps a bit. I recommend O&O Defrag, or alternatively, PerfectDisk or the retail/full DisKeeper. The built-in Windows defrag only does a basic defrag where it makes sure each file is contiguous in and of itself, but doesn't care where it lives on the drive. Keep in mind the first half of your drive is nearly twice as fast as the second half, so keeping stuff packed up in that space improves performance.

I find it also helps to just keep file count low on whatever your drive is. I notice a slowdown in overall filesystem performance when there's more than about 200,000 files on a given volume. I use Raxco DiskState to determine where the big offenders are and whack 'em.

Also delete old saved games once in a while.

With all this, my saves generally take less than 15 seconds or so to load. Core 2 E6600 at 3GHz, 2 GB RAM, 8800 GTS video, and four RAID striped hard drives.

Perhaps the biggest hardware improvement you can do beyond the obvious More RAM and More CPU is to stripe together two hard disks in a RAID-0 array. A bit advanced but worth it IMHO. When you read or write, say, a 20 MB file, it only has to read or write 10 MB per disk simultaneously so it effectively cuts the time in half. When you have 3 or 4 drives... even better but not really 4x faster, there's some overhead due to all the I/O, I think more than 2 or 3 drives is really not worth the extra hassle, cost, heat, failure possibilities, etc, but if you don't mind backing up often and all that heat it's the fastest you can get. I use four 80 GB drives so they are all combined as a single 320 GB C: drive. It's so insanely fast.

If you have an AMD processor you might try downloading CodeAnalyst and doing a profiling run to determine what modules are spending the most CPU clocks during a saveload.

I have 4 gig RAM with 2500 MB defragged virtual cache. 500 megs VRAM. I don't think my load times have anything to do with RAM or virtual memory. I don't use the replay feature at all. Disk fragmentation is over-rated (unless it's extremely severe) and many people wear out their drives prematurely degragging it too often. The game runs smooth and shows no sign I'm processor starved. I have no processes using CPU duing the game that shouldn't be there.

Yes, I could spring for RAID but probably won't. I don't think it has anything to do with disk or disk access speed. That 2.5 minutes spent at the end of a long patrol is spent with no disk access at all. It takes about 20 seconds at the red progress bar during which there is disk access as the files are being read. Obviously the game environment is being created in memory during this "wait" time. During play, disk access is very seldom and brief.

I do not have the 10 minute load times some have claimed. I would stop playing the game (as much as I enjoy it) at that point.

I'm not complaining (so those who haven't read the thread up to this point should not be alarmed.) I very much expect my performance is typical for the game for those with similar specs. I have no doubt faster RAM will get me another 10-15 seconds off the environment calc time, but not worth a couple hundred dollars for such a small margin.
-Pv-

I like "loadingtimes",they give me time to have a smoke outside before gaming.:smug: