How do I actually -Install- the game?

[Moogie]

It's frustrating that my inventory always starts out with grey questionmarks for items I've been holding for days. That my clothes, which haven't changed since I started playing, are always invisible at first. That boats, carts, trees and buildings are invisible for the first few minutes, while the game seemingly polls the server for each individual sprite to display.

I want to 'install' the game so that it doesn't take an hour for all the images and resources to display each time I run the game. If this can be done, could somebody please show me how?

Ty

[Moogie]

Anyone?

I'm absolutely loving this game so far, but it's so annoying to spend the first ~20 minutes just trying to log in and wait for the screen and graphics to appear before I can even begin to play.

Once I've been ingame for about half an hour, and everything's loaded, it's great. But having to go through that whole process every time I load the game is frustrating... Half the time I have to just quit because it's stuck on a black screen, or stuck on Character Select and won't progress.

Is there really no way around this? I've been searching the forums and wiki and see absolutely no mention of any installation methods, nor any performance tips at all.

[Jackard]

you can get a cache but i forget how to do this. try pachos client, it might have one

[Sever]

You can't install the game, really. You can download a custom client, such as Pacho's client here.

I am not sure how the image downloading works but I have heard a few times that it might redownload things every time you open the game. What I am sure happens is it downloads something from the server if you don't have it. If this doesn't help, you probably need more RAM and/or a better internet connection. However if you have more than 1 GB of RAM it shouldn't be a problem.

I don't know about a cache, other than that Java has one.

[Riou1231]

Hmm... Maybe your computer just sucks? My computer is about 2 years old and Haven and Hearth works on it just fine apart from some occasional lag here and there.

[Moogie]

The cache thing sounds about right. I have pretty decent specs; 2GB RAM, GeForce 9800, 2.3GHz Core2 Duo. Good enough for a Java game I'd think, in any case.

My connection isn't amazing, but has been adequate for most MMORPGs I've played. I get roughly 500kb/s max down, and about 70-80kb/s max up. Did I read somewhere that the servers are located in Sweden? I'm in the UK, so perhaps the route is laggy somewhere along the way.

Thanks for the replies! I'll try Pacho's client next time and compare the performance.

[loftar]

The vast majority of the sprites are downloaded along with the client, so I can imagine two reasons why they would take so long to appear:
1) The protocol uses a kind of simple compression by assigning a simple numeric ID to each resource and only sending the ID-to-name mapping once each session. If the mapping messages would be delayed (for example, due to lag), that would prevent the client from loading the real sprites.
2) The resource loader is really slow on your computer for some reason. Even if the resources exist locally, the resource loader itself still operates asynchronously, so there is normally a very slight delay each time a sprite is used for the first time, during which e.g. inventory items which show up as question marks. Normally, however, that delay is not even noticeable.

Reason 1 (delayed ID-to-name mappings) doesn't seem congruent with your problem. In particular, you are not describing any particular lag apart from sprite loading, and you also describe similar delays at the character selection screen, which does not use such mappings at all. Therefore, I'd put my money on reason 2. I cannot, however, figure out any particular reason why the resource loader would be slower than is usually is. Not right now, at least.

In the vast majority of cases, however, the client does not "poll the server for each individual sprite to display". There are a few sprites that are not downloaded along with the client, but those are rather unusual, and once downloaded, the client will cache them anyway (so they only need to be downloaded once, ever). There is, in other words, no extra "installation procedure" which would help you at all. Rather, it is more proper to say that the normal method of starting the game (by clicking the play button) does install the client, since it downloads all its resources to your hard drive.

[Potjeh]

I get the question marks without lag maybe 20% of the time I launch the game. It seems that the newer a sprite is, the less likely it is to load, so it's mostly pancakes, vaprnwhatever and hazel tees that are affected by this.

[loftar]

Well, if it's only shortly after you've started the client, it could just be that it's still busy loading other resources in the background. I think it takes a minute or two for the client to finish its list of resources to preload (just after the client has started, if you don't log in, you can observe it preloading resources by the fact that it uses 100% CPU for a minute or two, after which it should only use a few percent until you actually log in). How long does it take for those question marks to resolve? (It shouldn't take more than a second or two.)

[Potjeh]

Sometimes 1-15 minutes, sometimes they don't resolve at all so I have to close the client and relaunch. I guess it doesn't resolve in some given time frame due to my crappy connection (256k WLAN), and it just stops trying.