Project Reality Forums

Heya guys....
I've noticed (Kinda hard not to) that there is a long time between the intial splash screen of PR, until the log in screen. Now let me make this clear, I'm not talking about map loading, ping, or anything associated with internet play.
I'm talking about the time from when you double click the PR shortcut till the time the Log In Screen shows.
Now I've timed it, and it's 5 mins. But until recently, I always thought PR was busy loading textures and what not. But I discovered that the CPU use is down around 10%....about normal for my system at idle. On further investigation, I've discovered that the PR/BF2 program, basically sits and idles for 5 mins before loading into the Log In Screen.

My Question is: Is this a bug? And if it's not, is there anyway to shorten this time to under a min or something?

The long start up / wait makes it a pain for configuring and testing (System Wide), and considering PnkBusterB is having continued system start up problems and has to be reinstalled to function on startup, it's a big pain!

Hi Ozzrat, welcome to the forums.

Has it always been like this for you? (only talking about 0.8 )

Punkbuster does download stuff, adding *.dll & HTML files etc the moment after you open PR, it could be something to do with that.

I have to do a quick uninstall, reinstall, delete certain dll's & HTML's & update for punkbuster every time I wanna play PR but it only takes me a minute.

I use pbsvc.exe to perform the uninstall/reinstall process, then run pbsetup.exe for my updates, is this what you do?

Other than that, I can't think of anything that might make you hang upon startup (other than system problems), I'm no expert.

Have you not had any other hanging problems with other games/programs? Does your optical drive have trouble reading any other discs? Just asking incase you've not tried troubleshooting with things other than PR/BF2.

It takes me much shorter to get to the log-in screen. The time from log-in to the main menu can be long due to BF2 checking every server in your favorites (and waits for the response of them - which is quite long if the server is offline), but from clicking to log-in? 30 seconds at max i think. Closing takes very long though.

Heya SgtSmeg, and ta for the welcome.

Ya asked in which version...Well I'v'e only played from version 6 something. And yeah The load up was with that version too.
As I said I presumed it was texture mapping or something, but turns out the system is idle. And it doesn't hang, it just sits for 5 mins. Eventually (After 5 mins every time) it gets to the login page.

As for the punkbuster, far as I can see PnkbusterB is having some sort of trouble keeping itself in the windows start up list. I've looked into that. Apparently, PnkbusterB, like PnkbusterA, is supposed to sit in the background and wait for connections. After powering off and rebooting (Cold booting), PunkbusterB no longer starts up with the system (Must see if that happens 100% of the time). I can get around that by just running the Punkbuster install/unistall program and reboot. No problems until the system is powered off and rebooted.

As for the favs folder, I only usually have four servers there. and I've tried deleting them from the con file, to no avail. I haven't tried deleting the favs folder itself yet, but may soon.

Just strikes me as unusual for it to sit idle on the starting warning splash screen for 5 mins.

This is the comp I use

AMD 3200 Sempron (64bit with 32bit XP)
1024MB DDR2 Ram (667)
2 x 120GB IDE Seagate HD
LG Sata DVD Burner
Plugin C-media Sound card (837
Palit Nvidia 7300GT AGPx8(sidebanding) (512MB DDR2 RAM)
MSI K9MM-V Motherboard with Via Chipset.



Tis all a bit of a mystery atm.

Two options;

1. Add +restart in your PR shortcut, this skips the intro.
(add +playerName Ozzrat +playerPassword password also saves you the log in-screen)

2. Rename the Movies-folder in battlefield2/mods/pr
This option also saves you a fraction RAM

I've also had incidents of BF2.exe messing, takes ages to load. In this case I make a new Gamer-account in my Win, and that normally fixes all.

One thing you can do which should speed everything up is get another gigabyte of RAM or three.

RAM is so cheap (esp DDR2) that you might want to invest in two 2gb sticks (total of 4gb) even though you'll only be able to use 3.2gb of it on a 32bit OS.
You'll be amazed at what another gig of RAM will do to your computer.

You might wanna try defragging the harddrive where your PR is installed. Might not help much, but it should improve load times in general.

If you have a lot of servers in favorites/server history it tends to take long time to load.
Go to My Documents\Battlefield 2\Profiles\0001\General.con and delete all lines that say GeneralSettings.addServerHistory

You can also make the general.con file 'read only' so it doesn't save all the servers to server history. Right click > properties > tic 'read only

This shortened my start times from 3m to 30s

Ditto Tupla, old fav's (they'll show up as red on the Fav screen) kill boot up time. I prefer to periodically manually delete so I can keep servers that are my real favorites as opposed to deleting the whole folder.