How to fix invisible items/buildings/scenery and/or slow loading and texture streaming issues FIXHEREIN! (Why drive condition matters)

[Whitedragem]

G’day… I have been putting this solution out there (and no contenders have been willing to try it)…

Some half hearted feedback has suggested it is working (but the complainers seem to not want to share its’ success prefering instead to blame the devs and take no responsibility for their own system maintenance).

As Ihave gone to extenisve word counts in a few forums going to great detail to explain WHY this will make a massive difference; to many naysayers who don’t understand what we are doing, or why, or believe that rebuilding the database is the same solution and believe they have already done it… (they haven’t).

Without having to get into arguments, please, any takers wanting to try this out and leave feedback, please do…

For negative nells; don’t bother taking up time in this thread going against ‘the grain’. you are just going to be NOISE. Iwant actual positive types here who are willing to help Warhorse troubleshoot and solve.

This one is quite easy, but will require a tool.

FIX: REBUILD the game into a neat linear chunk of drive space.
TOOLS REQUIRED: some time, and an external USBdrive of sufficient size.
METHOD:
1)use consoles backup command to make an offdrive backup of game.
2)clean up consoles drive where game will be installed (either format/clean wipe or if that proves a hassle, maybe just clean up some drivespace at the start of the disc eg delete one or two games that were first installed- that should make about 80Gb unfragmented free space at start of drive)
3) delete KC:D from the console
4) restore the game from the external backup

SOLUTION: Now have the game files altogether in one big linear area.

GOPLAY.

Feedback for any improvements noticed.
If this didn’t work for you; please list the steps you did and how you did them-
also - how old is your console, how many games installed, and whether you have had to delete other software to make space.

This will help irrelevant of whether users have applied patch, or not, on affected systems.
If we can ascertain in which instances this helps, we will have some useful into to give Warhorse.
Why does this work?: Consoles have no method to deal with file fragmentation.
Why are other games not affected?: Other games aren’t shooting for the moon

[Whitedragem]

Wow- what an odd community composition we have?!

Glad no one has hijacked the thread; but also really confused as in most places where people are suffering and an option to help themself is presented- it is a no brainer.

Sure I get as an analogy something akin to patients sitting around in the emergency department, being offered bandages and denying them cause they dont know how to use them… but because a nurse is handing em out rather than a surgeon we skip the help?

For those not knowing how to backup a game (on their respective platform); maybe learn how to use your console? And if you cant maintain the words easiest computers dont yell at devs in your system doesnt play the game nicely like other console users are getting.

System maintenance isnt the devs responsibility- and is why so many games producers call it a day making average products…

Usually a few years after system release we get second gen games /more polished uses of system resources.
ID software have used/ and pushed streaming texture games for awhile now.
These are other games like this one… but they haven’t come out so late in the systems life and they haven’t had 20+Gb patches applied to them.

If the unknowing here knew how bad file fragmentation would affect large open world game streaming performace even with low res assests and few models
(The iD games mostly being simple and pushing for framerate), … then users would understand why fragmented drives were the elephant in the room for many computer users.
Then solid state drives happened and users could pay ten times as much for drives that coudnt degrade through fragmentation. (Its the access times that we reduce when making files large and contiguous).

Anyhow - short of a drive upgrade - this ‘trick’ will even the playing field for all game installs and should give best/ideal playback experience.

[Whitedragem]

Playstation

Settings=>system=>backup and restore

[Kevymatts77]

Tried it, even restored it to factory settings and everything and still getting pop ins and other graphical issues,so regret restoring everything now i need too re download everything. It should be fixed within the next couple patches i say. Im on the pro also, all other games are fine

[Whitedragem]

Expanding on this concept a little more, as many don’t understand a few basic principles with regards to hard drives.
As KCD is loading from a harddrive- this importance of getting the drive right cannot be understated. (and is a large cause for variations in gameplay experience from console to console)

So lets look at the characteristics of a small form factor hard drive…

This is a playstation drive from the original PS4s. (Pretty much the same thing found in last gen PS3s). Of note is the size (500GB), and the speed (5400RPM).

Hard drives are made up of platters. The platters represent the storage zone,… and above them sits a read head; like the laser that tracks a CD, it moves the read head over areas of the disc that contain the relevant data. The time it takes to move the read head and find data is ‘access time’.

Platters rotate at speed. For the drive above it is 5,400 revolutions per minute. The throughput of data read from the drive is largely governed by this rotation speed,… although other factors, such as denser platters, will aid in data read speed.
(eg a 5300rpm drive with 333GB platters has similar speed to a 250GB platter at 7,200RPM)

faster RPM and greater density does generally make for a faster drive… (this isn’t the case with Playstations as Sony want users to use 250GB platter drives; As Sony places special Cache partitions along the outer edge of the drive which has the best seek times and fastest rotational speeds, aiding in game loads. Hence users who replace their internal Sony drives with hybrid Solid State / Platter drives that use 333GB partitions actually has a faster performing drive give worse performance under heavy load.

(If you are going to replace your drive; which is an easy thing to do, make sure you understand the replacement drive, and if it is optimal for your system)
I use a 7200RPM hitachi drive with the same sized platters as Sony sold me. Ienjoy this combo and it cost very little for a noticable performance gain. Dashboard loads noticably quicker, as do games… etc.

-=End of part one=-

[Whitedragem]

So how do Consoles give dramatically different performances with the exact same game?

Its in how WE, the users, use our hardware…

here are some shots of a drive surface. admittedly the artists rendition is poor, instead of attempting ‘circles’ as they physically are… I’ve used squares. (maybe I’m moody)

Newly opened system. Family has gotten around to installing games.

Same system after use. A handful of games installed… KCD in yellow at end of free space… Patch follows (has diag. black lines through the yellow).

ypical usage of a console that has had a nearly full harddrive and has had to delete earlier game installs to make space for KCD

Its not for me

to fix. WH should have tested THIS!!
Obviously no one in the world but a household member can take care/responsibility of your OWN system.
This is the typical drive config of users running into LOTS of issues.

Cleaning the drive and clean installing (Use BACKUP/RESTORE if you wish) the game will help SOMEUSERS.
YMMV (Your mileage may vary)

[Whitedragem]

Lots of fragments of data means the game cannot load large consecutive chunks (really easy to read and read quickly) in time for the game to utilise.
Instead your machine is tracking/seeking all over the disc surface just to get to a little bit of data.

Better to have a machine with an ideal drive setup.
The good news is- any issues that remain are now in the realm of patches to fix.

The last shot in the post above shows a typical aged console drive for a serious gamer. Hence why any KCD patch may make for better or worse performance.
Its kinda random luck that any of your game is sitting near itself on the disk…

[Whitedragem]

Many people with the worst save game glitches fall into a category of having aome issues that a fragmented drive would revel as well.

Whilst I have hesitated to suggest this previously - I do believe some od the save game issues some KCD players have experienced - is due to data so badly soread out on their syatems that the game is permanently behind task in what it is trying to do.

Best case scenario is reasonable to strive for for this game. Not many console games that push tech this far.

For those thinking ‘all my other games run fine- the problem is with their game.’…
Sort of (!); the problem is with this game on your system.

I wont deny the game has some niggles to sort- lets not remove our own ability to help our own machines be as close to dependable as they can be…

[Whitedragem]

Running with this theme…

One of the rarer issues (yet still an issue, and will affect SOME users), is replacement drives.

For years I have replaced drives in my playstations (starting with an 80GB intel SSD in a PS3).

In a PS3, SSDs were not a good value upgrade- the sata bus was old and could easily be maxxed out.
A few games yielded benefits (gran turismo being a noteworthy example),…
Most serious tech types wanted a better sata controller in the ps3…

PS4 being new tech got the sata upgrade and made considering an SSD a reasonable thought.

Problem becomes price.
PS4s launched with 500GB, and most users, if upgrading would likely want that much or more…
(A 256GB SSD would be limiting for even a smallish game collection)…
At PS4 launch 512GB SSDs would have cost similar to the price of the console… so SSDs kinda get ruled out in favour of HYBRID DRIVES.

Hybrid drives have a SSD cache and a normal harddrive.
Small files and regularly used data gets copied onto the SSD area and the speeds are very SSD like (sometimes after three game loads)…
Hybrid drives are a ‘best of both worlds’ affair.
Speed & size for an affordable pricepoint.

Now there isnt many hybrid drive designs on the market.
The first run seagate momentus are a great fit, but more recent drives use different hard drive platter sizes and will negatively affect performance. Actually delivering worse performance than the original drive in some instances.

Ahem. Whats that?

PS4s use a clever system design where they partition the drives locking off certain zones for system use.
This is done due to the outside of the physical platters having better access times and throughput than, say, the inner tracks of the platter (closer to the spindle/drive centre).
Sony users the outer area of the drive for game cache and specific system use that benefits from the extra speed.
Games actually copy some of their data to this zone during gaming as it maxes the drives output.

Now Sony don’t know where the physical outside of the disc is. They can take a punt at it, assuming a typical 250GB per platter drive surface, but if users replace with a 333GB per platter drive; the cache space wont be on the outer circumference/fastest area on the drive.

Consumers generally dont know about platter sizes.
We buy based on size.
A 1TB drive could be made up of 4x250GB or 3x333GB.

Rotation speed is an important factor, but is completely seperate to drive platters.
A denser platter drive (eg the 333GB per disc) actaully moves more data at the same rotation speed.
In general they might spin at 5300rpm, and have similar output to the faster 7200rpm discs. (There are further differences, but to keep this focused…)

So heres the rub:
First generation momentus hybrid drives ran at 7200rpm and used 250GB platters.
When PS4s came out-momentus drives were running 5x00rpm and used 333GB platters.
These drives, for the cache zone reason I gave above, can perform noticably worse that the default 5400rpm drives that come in the playstation. (Especially for a game like KCD, could prove a nightmare)

Whilst I figured the hybrid option was a nobrainer- the platter densities ruled them out for playstation use.

Classic case of consumers and spec sheets.
The numbers dont suggest there is any potential issue, and every PC tech site benchmarking them will reveal how much they would blow away the default drive in usual usage scenarios (but not in a playstation, due to Sonys optimisation)

Solution?!

I ran with a 7200rpm hitachi replacement drive.
My dashboard loads noticably quicker, and some games really benefit.
The cost was soo cheap as to not matter.

I used to upgrade PS4s for my local community.
Quite a bit of research was required to settle on the right drives to buy.
You can get away with going to your local warehouse store and buying an external drive and rippong it out of its case, swapping it into the system, and putting the system drive back into the unused housing (makes a great media drive).
Just make sure the platters are 250GB a piece.

This is such a simple thing to get wrong, and no one would ever know.
Except the support department at Warhorse, trying to figure out why some systems perform and others really dont.

(This isnt a bugbear for everyone; it just higjloghts one of the multitude of things that can go wrong)

I dont care for xboxs (microsofts ethics), but I imagine without being able to upgrade/swap internal drives, many users must connect an external USB drive.
Self powering USB drives are the slowest drives generally, and whilst I wouldnt load games from them, I can only wonder what loading games via USB from cheapie drives would be a horrible experience.

No need to defend xboxs and tell me about official SSD upgrade parts etc (your battle, not mine)

As With all things - Your Mileage May Vary
Understanding our consoles is a thing nowadays…
(I still have my woodgrain 70s atari 2600)
Heat and speed throttling/fragmented data- lots of lil things to keep users guessing.
And then there are the users who simply say “its a console and should just work” (sometimes their console burried in deep carpet pile, having sucked up a mountain of dust, makes ‘noise’; but thats normal and doesnt need to be shared factually when we complain how a game runs poorly -but only on that system-

Great thing about the net is we will find likeminded people and other users with same issues (with their console sitting on shagpile), which allows them as a group en masse - problem is with game- its not my system: others get it too!

And for all the lovely counter arguments where I get told “Ive defragged my console drive”- NO YOU HAVEN’T!

pretty sure that would require removing drive and putting it in a caddy, hooking it to a PC and running software to do so. Whether file system gets in the way of doing this on Windows, I am not sure.

I dont believe either console presently has a defrag command.
Rebuilding a database is exactly that. It rebuilds a database.
Just cause the person in the sony call centre said it does… (doesnt make it so)

[Whitedragem]

That last post was written elsewhere and I cut n pasted it here to keep a thread on the topic.

With patch version 1.6, there seems an exacerbation of some textures/load (speed) issues and so a few things will get better with 1.7

Per usual- recommend delete game and redownload a fresh version after a patch comes out.

It wont avoid console fragmentation already existing, but it will alleviate a game, + a patch, and then a game with gaps and data all over the place from patching.

[Whitedragem]

Not all SSDs are created equally, some will tax a machine in other ways that may not be expected. KCD is the odd piece of software/rare title that can get caught out.

SSDs are/were expensive.
When they first came out the ratio of cost / size was about 10:1 vs hard drives.
And that was more likely for the ‘non enterprise drives’ that were really the second release of the technology.

The first drives were comprised of single layer/level cells (SLC).
They could handle vaslty more writing and offered much greater endurance than the later released ‘consumer/mass market’ drives.

Second tier products used a technique to stack the data, effectively doubling the size of the drive vs the chips used (essentially halving the cost). These drives were reffered to as MLC, being ‘Multi Level Cells’.
The latency at this point wasn’t too bad… as the chips in the drive that controlled squeezing double data out of the same number of chips only had to hit a 50% squish effectivly.

Still consumers didn’t buy the tech saying it was outrageously expensive vs buying large platter hard drives. (That could still push a lot of data, and were generally paired together in RAID arrays for those who cared about top tier performance, essentially doubling the speed.)

It was expensive developing this tech and manufacturers wanted their investment R&D recouped. SSDs were pushing the bus limits on the platforms they sat on,… and in many instances, certainly at a consumer level, games weren’t always benefitting from their installation. (Windows did, naturally, as it is poo, and doesn’t really make use of anyones hardware so generally brute forcing it is a great way to almost get it to work as well as a late 90s linux distro off a thumb drive)

Samsung figured they could make a LOT of money selling SSDs if they jimmied the controller to squeeze Three layers of ‘compression’ into the chips… TLC was born,… and this is the stuff that started to get the ball rolling.
It had nothing on the earlier SLC/ and decent MLC drives, but it was cheap to produce, and consumers not knowing any different, are happy to save a few dollars (samsung could obvioulsy price aggressively), and bought in. Eschewing quality intel drives that had vastly larger chips in them (and needed less compression to achieve this feat)…
An unmeasured metric was born. (It was measured, but no one payed attention, as it revealed their new purchases ‘weren’t THE BEST’; it was the delay on the drives started to ramp up.
Most couldn’t tell as they were coming from hard drives anyway… but anyone playing with gen 1 and gen 2 SSDs noticed samsung drives ten times slower In some metrics… but ten times an imperceptible number isn’t much to worry about.
Samsung continued to push the size/price barrier down, and find new ways to put even less chips into the drives.

My ancient 40Gb and 80Gb intel SSDs are actually still very practical to keep in systems as cache drives for large Hard drives and some of their metrics are still ‘cutting edge’.

Samsung know to pair strong controllers with their drives to squeeze 4x more data per cell… but those controllers have to ‘think’ for a wee moment to achieve that magic.
How long that moment is depends how much a consumer pays for the part.
(Most want size, and are happy believing that all SSDs are created equal, so choose the cheapest drive that fudges itself a place in the market, eg a mid sized samsung EVO…)
The largest EVO drive will get the controller chip from last years PRO line, generally, and then that will be sent to reviewers to benchmark.
Unfortunately the smaller sized drives will get a cheaper controller… one that might not do such a great job in a heavily multitasking environment (the Pros exist for a reason). Unfortunately for us - KCD is the beast that wants to hit the machine hard and continually.

A cheapie SSD could have many use scenarios where it underperforms a HardDrive for the same task.
Seriously? Yes.

But no one will ever tell you that, so SSSSSHHHH!

Putting cheap SSDs in our consoles could easily prove a drama for them.
If I recall correctly, microsoft licenced a fairly cheap verbatim part as the ‘official system SSD’ (they know users just want the bragging right of owning one, and will find even an average SSD vastly better than a HDD in many instances. (Not noticable much at all depending on the game/program)

Even on PC, many hardcore gamers run a game for awhile to figure if it benefits from the SSD, and if it is paulty differences,… or just a slightly longer initial wait on game start,… might move the game to the large HDD.
For the games that benefit hugely from SSDs, - you wouldn’t go back to running them on a Hard drive.

Case in point, I have a modern version of a decent SSD that loads at 1200MB per second, and writes more than 600MB per second. It is an M2 drive and injects straight into my RAM/CPU line. It Avoids the SATA BUS completely, therefor jumping massively ahead of the 500-600MB per second numbers that high end SSDs touted for a long while; Sata 2-sata 3 seemed to keep drives around those numbers for a long time. (again not all 500MB per second reading drives are equal,… as my high IOPS Intel drives revealed, and continue to deliver acceptable performance… 4k writes… lots of things are more important than writing data at 500MB per second) (from what source are you going to load from at 500MB per second? Another SSD? Plan on copying terabytes of data from one SSD to another daily?? No? Then we quickly realise this isn’t the most important metric for we end users- but its the best marketing number they can use to sell em to us, and consumers like big numbers. Bigger is better, naturally.

The stupid thing is, we got into ssds to actually make something smaller.
Seek time.

Seek time is the time lost where nothing practical is coming from the drive, whilst it locates the data it is looking for.
A really fast 7200rpm drive will have a smaller seek time, say 12ms average, vs a slower 5400rpm drive which may take 17ms.
My decade old first gen intels had a seek time generally around .01ms
In this instance the SSD is basically instant data access, vs the Hard drive which is a vastly longer wait.

All these new cheap SSDs dont worry about Access time, as all SSDs are better than Hard drives in this respect. Squeezing a whole bunch of data compression into a tiny chip and doing massive data writes at high speed is ‘hard work’… (it adds a lil latency/takes a wee moment to perform some magic)

Like all things- you get what you pay for.
Consumers are not voting for quality SSDs, generally we are after LARGE SSDS with big read speed numbers.

Saying SSD should perfrom flawlessly when running KCD, and that KCD should be perfect because of it is not guaranteed.

On a great drive with no other system bottlenecks… KCD loads in ten seconds, and all textures are loaded (rips and blood etc) first pass.
Nothing pops in. No textures appear late. LOD transitions are perfect.