Rain and Load Times

Everyone uses everything as an excuse for desync

Chris - possibly rain/particle effects are causing computer-side lag and thereby latency?

Certainly I've noticed the same - positional issues seem to occur more often in rain-affected areas and in part I suspect that's not just my normal connection woes but also the slight lag caused by the simulation having to stop chugging through all the particles and interpret what I'm trying to tell it to do.

Why not make rain disableable(is that a word?)? If I prefer performance over graphical fidelity, atmosphere and immersion, why can't I pick it instead of being forced to suffer poor performance (which, by the way, destroys the atmosphere way more than the lack of rain ever could)?

You guys are clearly missing something.

Crosroads, Docks, Gardens, Pier, Cemetery, etc, etc, etc ALL load considerably longer not only for myself, but for hoards of other players. I've had a HC character die as a result of looking at a black screen for longer than the grace period permits.

We are not imagining it either.

Have you considered that it could be a "sound" problem, rather than graphical?

./shrugs

Edit: Nevermind, I need to "learn to read" :-P

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Well, I hope the rain gets optimized, :). Those time I had to play with the so so computer, it made things awful.

PS: Yay for the communication Chris.

I've never had an issue with rain. I've read endless posts about people complaining about it though. Seems to me that the only way to really quell that would be an option like Torchlight II to disable weather effects.

Trust me, people seeing screen shots and streamers playing a game are not going to be steered away due to lack of rain particles.

At any rate, I love my ambient rain in my Unearthed Hideout with my 20 stacks of snow. Thanks as always GGG!

Ok so, I have to bite my tongue a bit. I think that long load times are repeatable but I don't have the resources available to me to test this out at this time (mainly friends/testers).

Since my last post, I went around to various areas and tested out my load times to get a good picture of what influences my loading. I have 26 videos on my computer right of me loading various instances.

Whenever I go from area to area loading instances without playing, my load times are all very low (3-4 seconds).

I was able to replicate my 'extremely long rainy load time' under one condition. I join a 6-man party and play with it for a while (like 30m-1h). For my case, when I got to a rainy map after playing with them for a while, my load time spiked hard. But as soon as rainy maps started to be chained, load times returned to normal. The reason that I say 'it's the rainy maps faults' is because I never have issues loading into non-rainy maps. This entire 'extremely long load time' never happens when loading non-rainy maps.

Here is one video of an extremely long colonnade load that I managed to get: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XkzIoVBg59w&feature=youtu.be

I know it's not really evidence because "Hey, he could be faking it and all areas load this long" or "he did something to his computer to get the load time that long!" but I want to at least show that it happens to me, to some degree. In order to get a more definitive video, I will have to record for... well, a very long time. I might just stream and have the broadcast on twitch enabled. (Would be easier)

But yeah, again, my friends list is all offline and the group I play with has already quit (technically I did with them too I guess) so I'm forever alone on this. I'll try to get a more definitive video tomorrow, maybe I can recruit some people from the global channels or get more people in a map group during a busier time in the day. (I was lucky to get that 1 person to help me from in my video).

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Oh a quick edit too:

I think that ideally if I can just do a non-rainy map with 6 people, rush the boss while killing everything on the way, and then enter a rainy map, I'll probably get a long load time. (This is based more on history and experience rather than my testing this evening.)

It's not that the zone takes longer to load. It's just that the following minute after the instance is loaded, there is a massive FPS drop that slowly disappears over time. It usually lasts around a minute on my case.