Launcher takes *forever* to load

[king_spoon_ian]

Hi guys,

I recently picked up Cliffs of Dover in a sale from Ubisoft's digital store, but I've been having a bit of trouble getting the game working. I'm running XP, a GeForce 8800 GTS and a six core AMD FX-6100, yet when I come to load the game from Steam, it takes, almost literally, forever. From clicking to launch, to even the crosshair icon appearing on screen can take upwards of five minutes. As an example, I clicked load before coming to the site, logging in, and typing this up - and there's still no sign of the crosshair logo. Launcher's happily sitting in my task manager, taking up 37mb of RAM, but it's getting nowhere fast. I know if I leave it, it'll eventually work - but why is it taking so long to actually get anywhere?

Any ideas/help would be much appreciated!

[MadBlaster]

Hi guys,

I recently picked up Cliffs of Dover in a sale from Ubisoft's digital store, but I've been having a bit of trouble getting the game working. I'm running XP, a GeForce 8800 GTS and a six core AMD FX-6100, yet when I come to load the game from Steam, it takes, almost literally, forever. From clicking to launch, to even the crosshair icon appearing on screen can take upwards of five minutes. As an example, I clicked load before coming to the site, logging in, and typing this up - and there's still no sign of the crosshair logo. Launcher's happily sitting in my task manager, taking up 37mb of RAM, but it's getting nowhere fast. I know if I leave it, it'll eventually work - but why is it taking so long to actually get anywhere?

Any ideas/help would be much appreciated!

sorry. you'll never get it to run good on XP. 1C lied about that to get more money from the people who haven't upgraded yet to windows 7. in the mean time, they spent the last year and half rewriting the graphics engine for the sequel to get rid of dx9 for good. so you have choice to either dump xp or just deal with what you got. that's why it's called clod.

[5./JG27.Farber]

XP is a 32 bit system I believe. 32 bit systems can only use 3.5 G ramm and 64 bits use upto 5.5(?) - Im not too sure on the numbers but you get the jist.

The XP support IS being implemented and was a goal which the devs are still trying to reach - in fact its one of the delays in the patches we are waiting for! There was no readme in the last patch so I dont know if you should be running the stock 1.5 or the beta patch 1.08.

I know vista stank but serious you need win7 - its 2012. ;)

[MadBlaster]

seriously, you don't believe that do you? luthier said the sequel is going to be merge-able with clod and the only way you will get a better clod after the final patch is if you buy the sequel. so, that means they basically delete the old clod gfx engine based on dx9/dx10 code and replace it with the new one based on dx10/dx11. do you really think they spent the last year and half re-writing a new gfx engine to include dx9? no. that would be ridiculous. the investors and bean counters would not allow it.

edit: I'll go even further and speculate one reason they re-wrote the gfx engine was probably to get rid of dx9 altogether. luthier said in the past that dx9 was a mess and causing problems.

[Bounder!]

Hi king_spoon_ian!

Might be worth posting full system specs as, irrespective of your OS (although I do think it's worth running Windows 7 over XP), you may still struggle to get CoD to work - your GPX for example I believe has 512mb VRAM which is a little on the low side - a minimum of 1GB VRAM seems to be what's required for CoD.

[EDIT] when the game came out I was running a system with Windows 7, 4GB RAM and a GPX card with 512mb VRAM, and whilst it did load, it struggled in game with performance.

[king_spoon_ian]

Hi king_spoon_ian!

Might be worth posting full system specs as, irrespective of your OS (although I do think it's worth running Windows 7 over XP), you may still struggle to get CoD to work - your GPX for example I believe has 512mb VRAM which is a little on the low side - a minimum of 1GB VRAM seems to be what's required for CoD.

Hi Bounder,

The game itself actually runs fine, once it's loaded (my card actually has 320mb, so even less!). It's just the fact the game takes so incredibly long to initialise that I'm trying to fix : ) As I mentioned, it takes upwards of five minutes to even reach the menu from the desktop - there must be something odd going on here. I wonder if it is anything to do with the OS?

I would move to Vista, or 7, but I just can't get on with the interface - using my PC mostly for work, the way folders and the basic organisational side of the OS has changed for Vista and 7 (to start with, the lack of an up arrow for going up a directory in folders) puts me off - I just can't work as efficiently on Vista as on XP (not that I haven't tried - I have a laptop that runs Vista), and so I've stuck with, and am planning on sticking with XP for as long as I can manage ;)

[Bounder!]

Never had problems loading the game even on my old system and I don't know to be honest what could be causing the problem. It would be very useful for others if you post full system specs, including what hard drive you are running and how much RAM you have.

Might be worth checking your RAM load on idle and then what it is when loading the game. Do you have many programs running in the background? Also, how clean is your hard drive (is it near capacity, has it been defragged)?

[EDIT] I know your pain regarding Vista/Windows 7 layout, I run my Windows 7 in XP mode which helps as I too hate what they did with the layout!

[king_spoon_ian]

Never had problems loading the game even on my old system and I don't know to be honest what could be causing the problem. It would be very useful for others if you post full system specs, including what hard drive you are running and how much RAM you have.

Might be worth checking your RAM load on idle and then what it is when loading the game. Do you have many programs running in the background? Also, how clean is your hard drive (is it near capacity, has it been defragged)?

Whoops, sorry - forgot to post them. Being thick, not rude.

CPU - AMD FX-6100
GPU - GeForce 8800 GTS 320mb
RAM - 4 GB (3.25GB usable) DDR-something, not sure what speed it is, and I'm not sure how to check?
Hard Drive - 250 GB Maxtor SATA the game's installed on - XP's on a separate disk. There's not too much free space left, but enough breathing room. Might try switching it to my terabyte HDD to see what happens.

Let me know if there's anything else important I've missed out!

It'd odd. Plenty of ram seems to be free when the program's starting - it's not like it's having to clear things out to put CoD in, as nothing else is running.

[MadBlaster]

you can try booting your pc using the 3 gb switch in the boot.ini. it will change the ram allocation more for the game and less for the operating system. i kinda forgot how to do it. something like run msconfi in the run box of the start icon in the lower left corner. then select modified boot.ini. then you gotta copy the original boot.ini and modifiy it with the 3 gb switch and save it and...blah. just google it. anyway you get it set up, then reboot your computer and it will prompt you how you want to boot up, either standard way or the 3gb switch way. so you select the latter and off you go.