I've been playing Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines recently (for those who don't know, this game runs of the Source engine, which powers Half-Life 2), but with major loading problems. My system is more then capable of running the game:
CPU - AMD 2000+ (1.7ghz)
Ram - 512mb
GFX - Gforce FX 5600 256mb
this is way above the minimum specs and apart from cpu power I've got the recommended specs or better. So I would assume the game would run well. But no, it crawled, sometimes sitting there for more then 30 seconds during fights loading from the harddrive. The number of times I'd died because I was waiting for the game to resume during a fight, and when it did I had no time to defend myself. I'd almost given up playing the game until I started playing with some settings.
Under windows xp, in the properties for the game shortcut there's a tab called "compatibility", normally this would be used for old games to get them running. But there's on option of note "turn off advanced text services for this program". After selecting this option I found the game ran significantly faster, with far less harddrive access while running around the maps.
If anyone else is having trouble with Vampire: Bloodlines or Half-Life 2 loading too often during the game, try making that change on the shortcut. Remember that you must load the game via the shortcut and not the disc-insert-auto-load menu.
Be aware, that this probably won't help people running windows 98, since it doesn't have the same compatibility options, but there may be something, have a look.
Hope this helps a few people!
I don't suffer from insanity:
I enjoy every minute of it!
