Din's Curse and most recent nVidia drivers

[Valgor]

Ever since I installed nVidia's most recent release of their notebook-compatible display drivers (197.16), it takes anywhere from 1 to 5 minutes for the main menu to appear on screen,
with lots of HDD activity going on in the background. Before the change, it rarely took longer than a few seconds.
The game also seems to have taken a slight, but nonetheless noticeable performance hit, especially with Monitor Sync checked.

Anyone here sharing my experience?

[Valgor]

Just found out nVidia's new notebook drivers had nothing to do with the issue...
It seems the 1.000 patch was to blame, since it somehow enabled the "autoBuildTextures" option in the game's user.cfg file. Setting it back to "0" alleviated the problem.

By the way, what does "autoBuildTextures" do that could potentially increase loading times?

[Shadow]

AutoBuildTextures has always been on. What it does is build the textures in the format it needs if it doesn't have them. With the default settings, if you dropped a tga file format texture in somewhere it would automatically convert it to our compressed format.

[Valgor]

If it's always been on, why didn't it affect the loading times previous to version 1.000?
Maybe it's something nVidia changed with their drivers after all.

[chk_ngts]

Has anyone had any problems with 1.000 simply refusing to open? I've been getting the following popup:

"Critical Error

Couldn't find base BaseItem referenced in TeleportStone"

Huh?

[Kruztee]

Originally Posted by chk_ngts

Has anyone had any problems with 1.000 simply refusing to open? I've been getting the following popup:

"Critical Error

Couldn't find base BaseItem referenced in TeleportStone"

Huh?

That sounds like an issue with a corrupted assets archive to me. Have you ever used a modded version of the game? If it continues, I'd suggest backing up your saves and reinstalling. Extremely unlikely that what you're seeing is a driver issue.

[Shadow]

Originally Posted by Valgor

If it's always been on, why didn't it affect the loading times previous to version 1.000?
Maybe it's something nVidia changed with their drivers after all.

From the game's perspective there are 2 possibilities. You have turned off compressed textures, they are no longer supported, or something else changed that would require the game to build all of the textures in a different format. The other possibility is that you have unzipped everything and now instead of checking lots of files in 1 zip the game has to check lots of individual files which is a lot slower.

If neither of these things is happening it's probably not the game.

[Valgor]

Well, compressed textures are enabled in-game, though I don't know if they're still supported by the new drivers.
While I haven't unzipped the game's assets myself, there is an "Assets" folder under C:\ProgramData\DinsCurse\ which is about 330 MB in size.
I tried deleting it, and it seems the game always creates a new one as long as autoBuildTextures is set to 1. I guess that is what's taking it so long.

[Shadow]

Yeah, it's building textures for some reason. What is the extension of the files in there? They should be rtx or ctx.

[Valgor]

The file extensions are all .rtx, both in the Models and Textures subfolders, and their respective subfolders as well.
I'm taking it .rtx is the uncompressed format?