When do you call it an ILS?

[enkephalin07]

How long do you hang at a load screen before you call it "Infinite"? If I don't think it's loading, I'll look at TESV in resource manager. If there's still I/O activity I let it go, otherwise, I'll let it go for ~1min, depending on how patient I am at the time.

 

But sometimes disk activity comes back to life, then gradually falls off, and it can do this many times before it successfully loads. How long should I wait, while TESV taunts and teases me, before shutting down and calling it an ILS?

[fizzybutt]

Depending on where I'm loading into my screens take from 30 seconds to about 3 minutes to load. I'll let it sit for 5 minutes before I call it quits and shut 'er down. At one point before I found the savegame tool (and learned how removed mods effected saved games) I was letting it sit for 10 minutes before Whiterun would load in.

[Mewwt]

When playing on the xbox, I just go make a coffee and pray it doesn't get stuck. On the PC, it usually takes ~5 seconds, 10 seconds seems to be the limit, where anything longer means the game is asking to be closed or I could keep turning the stupid daedric shield for hours.

[dashipper]

If I become concerned that it may be stuck at in ILS, I see how much memory the game is using.  If its static at any arbitrary value and doesn't change within 15-30 seconds, I kill the game and restart, if it's fluctuating, I let it be.  That said, I haven't had an infinite loading screen in.. dozens upon dozens of hours played, which is remarkable considering I'm nearing the modcap limit and there's a lot of heavily scripted mods installed and running.  I find the game is sluggish at loading screens for the first few minutes or so (up to a couple minutes each), but after that things speed up to 10-30 seconds.

[Guest]

You tend to gain an instinct for it because there's a recognizable pattern to a 'normal' load (which will of course vary from one setup to another). But an easy telltale sign might be the theme music's either looped or gone quiet, and your disk led is flickering apathetically. 

 

ILS will often become more regular as a save game progresses in size and complication. If you've experienced one, you'll almost certainly get another one. You know you've cured it when the only problem  you get when attempting a load is the odd CTD.

 

 

 

 

 

[D_ManXX2]

no hardrive activity is clear indication of infinite loading screen. other then that there no real time stamp. because skyrim should be able to load pretty quick if it loads then no hard drive activity then you can clearly say that was infinite. if the hard drive is still giving indication that is trying to load something then you just have a slow hard drive.

[enkephalin07]

Yeah, I've started relying on the music looping as a clue. And if the game starts writing to system volume information, that seems to be another imminent sign. I wonder if that's Bethesda's way of squirming out of honestly confessing a crash.