I’ve been spending my time setting up log off traps with my character. However, one of the biggest issues that I’ve come across is that I always seem to load into the game (and appear in Local) for a good 10-12 seconds before my client has even finished loading the game assets.
I’ve timed this, and even took screenshots. Here is my clicking my Character portrait to log into the character.
You’ll see that some of the UI elements have already begun loading. Given this, I’m going to also assume that I’ve already appeared in Local.
Shortly after this, I’ll sit there in black screen, able do absolutely nothing for a good 10-12 seconds. By the time the client has finished loading everything and I’m able to issue commands, my target has long since disappeared.
I have EVE installed on an SSD, my cache is also located on the same SSD. I’m got the lowest settings set so as to load the game as quickly as possible, but no matter what I do. I cannot seem to get past this 10-12 seconds of black screen before I’m able to even load into my client.
If anyone has any suggestions, I would love to hear them because this has started to become very frustrating.
How fast is your internet connection?
What’s your ping to the game server, aka london?
Have you tried turning off sound/music, too?
More complicated:
Make a RAM drive, copy files from the shared cache over and symlink the files/folders to make windows believe it’s all on an actual physical drive. Try measuring a difference. Prioritize smaller files over bigger files on your RAM drive. This would give more data for research, because if this actually speeds things up there’d still be room for improvement.
I know SSDs have fast access times, but looking into the shared cache folder reveals a metric ton of small files which is absolutely batshit insane from my perspective and offers more room for finding potential slowdowns. SSDs can’t beat RAMdrives in terms of bandwidth and IOPS and the difference is, as you likely know, pretty big.
In general, if you’ve covered literally everything on your side (like low graphics settings, no music and sound effects, everything on a RAM drive) then the last part is your internet connection and the server sending your client data it needs to actually play.
Well … almost! When you turned off all audio, what you can also do is boosting the client’s CPU usage by pinning it to a single nonHT core (that’s cores 0,2,4,etc). Windows’ context switcher is absolutely INSANE and keeps moving processes unnecessarily around between cores for no reason, causing programs to generally run 2%-5% slower. It’s … absolutely stupid and python programs generally suffer a LOT from this.
Not saying your CPU is slow, just covering more ground.
Once you’ve covered literally everything you can, the last way to speed it up would be a faster connection (higher bandwith or lower ping. that’s why i asked above).
Nothing seems to impact the duration of the black screen on login. I’ve also submitted a support ticket to CCP and the suggested fix they provided (to Verify Shared Cache) did not solve this problem.
It seems like this is something that is beyond anything I can do on my end to alleviate. Hopefully CCP is able to figure out what’s going on and issues a fix from their end. This is a frustrating issue and makes it difficult to engage in the type of gameplay that I’m seeking to enjoy.
I’m having a similar issue. My black screen while logging in a station reached 88 sec. Logging into space -even more.
I cleared cache, I reinstalled the mage completely, I disabled sound - nothing helped.
It seems I am not going to WH anytime soon.
Best gaming experience - paying subscription but not playing the game.
I have 12 GB of RAM on my system. But to be honest, I have no idea how much of that is dedicated to EVE Online at any given moment.
While I would like to know if there is a way to make EVE Online utilize more of my available RAM, particularly during these black screen periods, I don’t know if it should be up to the players to go to this much of an extent in order to solve the issue. I welcome any advice, however, to reduce this black screen on login issue.
I’ve been working with several GMs to try and determine the cause of the black screen on log in, but it doesn’t seem like anything is working.
I almost feel like at this point, a good compromise would be to have the client connect to the chat server last, as this way, your computer has the chance to load the client, your ship, the grid, etc. before you appear in local. This way, you’ll at least have the opportunity to fully load the game before you’re put at the mercy of everyone who notices you connecting a good 10-15 seconds before you can even issue a command.
Some time ago I had a email conversation with one of the support team.
I was told that the BSoF ( black screen of frustration ) is part of the game.
So you just may be barking up an empty tree.
Currently, I am on my laptop, win 7 4 gigs of ram. Normally it runs eve nicely.
Since the recent incursion update, I am getting the dreaded BSoF ( Black Screen of Frustration ).
I have tried clearing my cache to no avail. Ready to file a support ticket.
Would you have logs to show this? I’ve heard people say that CCP is saying that the black screen is here to stay, but no one seems to have any actual proof that is CCP’s actual stance on the matter.
You really should, more tickets in means CCP will collect more logs and have more information to look at. And hopefully they won’t just dismiss it as a “well, this is your life now, so deal with it.”
