Fast loading World of Tanks: attempt number 2

Instead of the preface

After reading the article Accelerate the loading of the map in World of Tanks, the decision to add the article of the user tangro was born of itself .

The essence of the problem

The reason for the long loading of maps in the WoT is very easy to detect - just look in the \ World_of_Tanks \ res folder. Almost all the resources of the game, and there are more than 35,000 of them, are stored in this folder in the clear. A huge number of files of small size is the main reason, because any modern HDD has a catastrophically low speed of reading small files, orders of magnitude lower than the speeds of linear reading.
You can solve the problem once and for all by packing the textures into one or more archives, as is done in World of Wacraft. Reading from the archive will be much faster, and unpacking is unlikely to affect the performance of the game on modern computers. Developers promise to pack resources, but you can wait for improvements forever. So again we have to do everything on our own and in another way ...

')

Radical decision

If you are a happy owner of an SSD drive and store WoT on it, then you have come to this topic only out of idle curiosity. I can only advise the rest not to wait for the weather by the sea, but to buy one of them now. Modern SSD is relatively cheap (64GB costs up to 4000r), devilishly fast (reveals the potential of the SATA Rev. 3.0 controller) and, with rare exceptions, is very reliable. For the Crucial M4, one of the current market favorites, the claimed lifespan is 72TB of recording, which is enough for many home users for years.
The advantage of SSD is high reading speed, and not so much linear, how much speed on small blocks. And if not every HDD reads 4Kb blocks at least at a speed of 1 megabyte per second, then the SSDs already have tens of MB / s.

Here is a demonstration of loading from an old Intel X25-M G2:

Note the upper right corner - the download is so fast that the timer shows unrealistic numbers. True, it is soon corrected, and in the second screenshot we see that there are as many as 22 seconds before the starting countdown.

Modern OS

Adherents of Windows XP may not know that Windows 7 perfectly caches data. And it's not so much in ReadyBoost and Superfetch, but in the very principle of working with memory. I absolutely do not understand the details, but I constantly see that the second and subsequent downloads of the application occur significantly faster. It turns out that it’s worth just “waiting out” the load even from an old HDD, and then the data will be loaded from the RAM.
The nuance is that the RAM should be enough. And if 4GB can be considered a quite tolerable volume, then on computers with a smaller amount, the benefit from caching will be imperceptible. But, again, the prices for RAM are now very low, and you can take an 8GB set of the most common DDRIII 1333MHz for only 1400-1600r. Upgrading the memory along with the installation of a 64-bit OS does not hit the pocket and will still respond in the future.

If you do not want to spend money

The first step is to reduce the amount of data to download. And since these data are mostly textures, they can be trite to compress. You can do it yourself, or you can download ready-made textures, because there are a lot of options on the official forum .
One of them should be singled out separately - these are Improved textures from AHuMex . The author not only competently pressed the texture, but also conjured over the colors, adding brightness and richness to the game. A variant with 50% IMHO compression is the most optimal, quality can be assessed here . Download the archive, unpack it into the game folder and look at the result (before and after):

Saving almost 1.8GB, while the game, in my subjective opinion, did not look worse. I cannot estimate the difference in download speed - it is minimal on SSD.

The next step is to disable the unnecessary. The effect of this is small, but there is. Delete or rename the following:

• Extra sounds in the \ res \ audio folder. The names of the files "talking", easy to understand. Repeating music has long been awash, so I boldly deleted music.fsb. The rest of the archives did not touch and I can not vouch for the safety of removal.
• \ res \ gui \ flash \ video \ Logo_All.usm (splash screen)
• \ res \ gui \ flash \ login_bg2.tga (authorization window background)

You can also replace some elements of the interface and customize the game, refreshing the look of the game and increasing, if not the download speed, then FPS. Information - traditionally on the forum .

Instead of transferring some folders to ramdisk, you can transfer them simply to another physical HDD, if there is one.

And of course, do not forget to delete the update cache folder (updates, it seems,) and make preventive disk defragmentation. An intelligent defragmenter will move files as close as possible to the physical start of the HDD, where the speed is traditionally higher. I can advise Auslogics Disk Defrag, which is also in the portable version. Well, to clear the system from a possible heap of unnecessary files, there is CCleaner .

Other reasons

Of course, on disk operations the light did not converge with a wedge, and other factors also influence the load. They too can and should be considered:

• WoT uses the old version of the engine from BigWorld Technologiy. This version recycles only one processor core. The game responds well to overclocking, but is almost not sensitive to multi-core.
• Network delays can also be the cause. You can optimize connection settings with one of the utilities, for example, PingEnhancer .

Credits

The article uses materials from the official site and forum World of Tanks.
Picture at the beginning: Tank by ~ flyingdebris @ deviantart.com.
Mods in my screenshots: OverTargetMarkers (namplates, not visible, by NicolasSiver), OverCross (sight, by NicolasSiver) enlarged minimap (author unknown, edited by AHuMex'a), 3D icons 4.0.6 (by Black_Spy).