Slow loading time - Not Responding message

[VinAlanson]

It always seems to take Minutes (2-5) for the program to load once I have selected the campaign to run and press start.

[JohnD]

Do you have a lot of tokens?

[Trenloe]

To be honest, this is pretty standard in the current, un-optimized version of FGU. It's loading all of the assets, etc..

[notrealdan]

The "Not Responding" message is also normal for any process that isn't "responding" to the OS. It just means it's busy doing something. It does not necessarily indicate that the program has crashed or even hit a problem.

[pollux]

The "Not Responding" message is also normal for any process that isn't "responding" to the OS.

I wouldn't call it "normal". It's possible to design programs that do work without being labelled unresponsive. Consider the case of photoshop or a video encoder, both work for long periods of time without hanging their UI thread. I'm sure the Smiteworks team will want to circle back on this to keep the UI thread responsive (even if it "handles" the input by doing nothing or saying it's not ready) during loading. But certainly it's a common and expected behavior at the minute, and I believe something that's well understood by the dev team even though it's not listed in the known items thread.

[notrealdan]

I wouldn't call it "normal". It's possible to design programs that do work without being labelled unresponsive. Consider the case of photoshop or a video encoder, both work for long periods of time without hanging their UI thread. I'm sure the Smiteworks team will want to circle back on this to keep the UI thread responsive (even if it "handles" the input by doing nothing or saying it's not ready) during loading. But certainly it's a common and expected behavior at the minute, and I believe something that's well understood by the dev team even though it's not listed in the known items thread.

I just meant that that is a normal message from the OS and doesn't necessarily indicate a problem, just that the process is busy. FG is (I believe) a single-threaded program, so if it's busy, it's just busy.

[Moon Wizard]

It's not completely single-threaded. In FGU, all the networking is multi-threaded, as well as all the non-image-loading initialization routines. Unity won't let you load images or interact with on-screen objects outside of the main thread; so we're a bit limited in what we can do right now without re-architecting to replace core Unity functions with a separate library. We'll be continuing to look at ways to speed up both the actual UI/code, as well as find ways to allow background tasks to occur for asynchronous operations.

Regards,
JPG

[notrealdan]

It's not completely single-threaded. In FGU, all the networking is multi-threaded, as well as all the non-image-loading initialization routines. Unity won't let you load images or interact with on-screen objects outside of the main thread; so we're a bit limited in what we can do right now without re-architecting to replace core Unity functions with a separate library. We'll be continuing to look at ways to speed up both the actual UI/code, as well as find ways to allow background tasks to occur for asynchronous operations.

Regards,
JPG

Very interesting, thanks for the clarification!

[FuzzyFlipFlop]

I'm glad to see this mentioned as the responsiveness of the UI is the biggest negative I see. In fact the UI feels slower loading over FG classic (even when loading the default 5e campaign). I was going to post the suggestion that the UI should have its own thread and any assets be loaded in the background. But it sounds like the development team is already looking into solutions.

[MNBlockhead]

Just testing FG. I have the $9/mo. subscription to FGU and a trial version of FGC. FGC starts right up. Almost instantly. Doesn't hang. FGU takes minutes to start up and I have not been able to use is in a live game yet because it becomes unresponsive frequently for minutes at times.