f13.net

I posted this in the Gothic 3 thread on SA, but I figured I should crosspost it here as it's good information I think.

Especially for mass multi games and stuff that is patched often. When those huge files get patched the stuff moves all over the hard drive.

This really helped my eq2 zoning times when I played, as they'd update the big zone files with nearly every patch.

------------


Here's a cool utility that comes in handy for pretty much any game.

http://www.sysinternals.com/Utilities/Contig.html (http://www.sysinternals.com/Utilities/Contig.html)

Contig. This is a single file defragmenter, but you can tell it to specifically defragment an entire directory, including all subdirectories, with a couple of switches.

Place the contig.exe file somewhere in your path statement. Easiest place is \windows\system32\ - do this so you can run contig from any directory and it'll be found.


With these options what you'd do is change directory to where you installed gothic iii then run "contig *.* -s" without the quotes. This will hit every file and include the subdirectories.

I've already done this for my gothic iii directory, so I'm going to run contig *.* -a to analyse.


Now I'll check out another directory that isn't so clean.


I should have ran "contig *.* -a -s to analyse the subdirectories as well, but it is early and I forgot that step.

Now I'll run "contig *.* -s" in the rFactor directory. (great racing game, btw)


As you can see this is a pretty useful tool. I normally use it after a game is patched or every couple of days on whatever I'm playing. If you really want to test if it works or not, go to the windows defragmenter and analyse and view the report. It'll list the most fragmented files on your system. Sort that list by the most fragments and use contig to defrag specifically that file. Analyse again with windows defrag and see if that file shows up in the list.

Nice.  Funny how staring at the Sysinternals web site just makes my eyes hurt instead of revealing useful tools.

This should also give me a way to batch up defrags; no one has ever been able to tell me how to construct something that allows "one-button" defragging of my whole system.  Damn DOS.  The flexibility to just defrag certain objects is gravy; I'll be using this on FarCry after the inevitable patching.

For all defragmentation needs I use http://www.oo-software.com/en/products/oodefrag/ (http://www.oo-software.com/en/products/oodefrag/). It's many many times faster than the one in windows.

Oh, and on the subject of Gothic 3. It's buggy as hell and runs like total shit. There's no difference in performance no matter what settings I use. Judging by heresay performance seems very much CPU related. Something funny is that boars are ultra powerful, you can slay tons of orcs but as soon as there's a boar nearby you better run. JoWood is more or less a symbol for buggy software.

The KEY to gothic3 performance is 'resource cache' on high.

(http://content.imagesocket.com/thumbs/gothic342e.jpg) (http://imagesocket.com/view/gothic342e.jpg)

It runs pretty good for me but it a long, long time to figure out what works best for performance. You would figure putting everything on low makes it run the best - but resource cache on low means it stores the majority of the stuff in your pagefile instead of ram. (i'm guessing)

http://www.youturd.com/g3wolves.avi (http://www.youturd.com/g3wolves.avi)

Get a bow for the boars. For all animals in fact. I fucking slew a demon without breaking a sweat and when I turn the corner with the second best buyable armor  a lowly wolf made me his bitch by hiding in the shrubbery and impregnating me with his filthy seed.

Hope the baby doesn't claw in the womb.