Loadtime Mods

[Froofy-D]

I have CTRaid, Decursive, and WeaponQuickSwap and it never takes more than a couple of seconds to load a zone on an average gaming rig: P4-3.2, 1gig RAM, X850. If its taking you 30-60seconds to zone I would guess its either your PC or the 80 mods you have installed coded by 3rd semester information technology majors.

[Ukerric]

Originally Posted by Froofy-D

I have CTRaid, Decursive, and WeaponQuickSwap and it never takes more than a couple of seconds to load a zone on an average gaming rig: P4-3.2, 1gig RAM, X850. If its taking you 30-60seconds to zone I would guess its either your PC or the 80 mods you have installed coded by 3rd semester information technology majors.

Actually, not.

In 1.10, Blizzard changed bits of its internal scripting engine. Basically, it now generates events for every single item in your cache, whenever you change zones. Any add-on that operates on these events must filter every event, even if irrelevant. The more add-ons, the larger your cache, the more processing for essentially nothing.

It's not something you can control, as a mod developper. The game throws 50 thousand events at you, you do have to decide (quickly, usually) that they don't matter and let it continue. The only way you can get speed is if you duplicate the speed mods, i.e. disable event catching when zone load starts, and restore it when zoning is finished. Something nobody had to do until 1.10 and those event cascades.

Oh, and as you guessed, CTraid, Decursive, and Weaponquickswap don't operate on the cache events. But things like lootlink, auctioneer, enchantrix, and all these have to process every single item you saw since the last time you removed the WDB, every time you zone. Or disable this during zoning.

[Ossoi]

So I installed these mods, zoned into BWL in a few seconds...buffed up, started clearing to Broodlord - 15 second cast lag...and zoned out again,

yay

[Tuco]

However, before deciding to remove them or even make a user servicable option like a slider to enable disable them you have to weigh it all. Does the noticable user benefit outweigh the potential support petitions or perceived instability/complexity in the event that someone fiddles with it without understanding exactly what they're doing?

Basically yeah. This is why WoW doesn't incorporate these mods.

[Cad]

I just installed catalyst and ace (dependency) and ... wow. Loads are noticeably faster, to the tune of 2-3 seconds vs. 10-15 before. I'm running discord bars/unit frames and gypsy buffbar, damage meters, ctraid.. blah blah

[DeLLy]

Yeah I was getting pretty long load times after I had to fix my UI in 1.10 but now they are back to normal, probably even faster then before.

[Cybsled]

Glad all I use is ctra + the default UI. I remember when the patch broke necrosis...you'd think someone broke the legs of all our warlocks.

[Drauk]

To answer some questions about Blizzard UI coding and stuff. I watch UI forum pretty close, and its safe to assume that there is exactly 1 (one) person doing all the coding of UI - Slouken.

He is damn good, very open to suggestion and ideas and generally cool. However he is alone and has a bunch stuff to do (i suspect he has other work outside UI).

Regarding the whole loading times issues - Blizzard default UI is almost not affected by this problem, it is responsibility of addon author to optimize its perfomance and loading times. Nonetheless, after the problem was posted on UI forums Slouken has looked into this and optimized events during load time. It took him only 2 days to do this, and due to a massive amount of changes its goind live only in 1.11.

[Plaeroma]

Originally Posted by Drauk

To answer some questions about Blizzard UI coding and stuff. I watch UI forum pretty close, and its safe to assume that there is exactly 1 (one) person doing all the coding of UI - Slouken.

He is damn good, very open to suggestion and ideas and generally cool.

QFT. If you go to the official UI forum with any regularity at all it becomes very clear how badass this man is.

[Angerz]

He was also the one that told us how to optimize our mods as well right?

If he is the one I am thinking of, his openness with the community is probably the best of anyone that works at blizzard

[Parabola]

Slouken also posts about upcoming changes in the next patch so author's can take advantage of the changes before test even goes up, and speaking of which he said for the next content patch he'd be optimizing the ui to not need these addons.

[Tindel]

slouken is indeed awesome

[Lusiphur]

RE : BWL Lag.

I found tha the latest Cat drivers (if you have an ATI card) caused the problem for me. Went back to the Omega drivers (www.omegadrivers.net) and that solved the issue.

Back on topic. These didn't make any difference for me but then I only run with CT and Titan.

[Antarius]

Originally Posted by Tindel

slouken is indeed awesome

I hear that Slouken can walk on water and turn water into wine, but chooses not to because he doesn't want to appear pretentious.

[Tingteng]

Clearly his walking is not hindered by rivers of wine either. Forsoothe