When starting the launcher, my intel quad core Q9400 goes from 0 to 25% cpu usage. Since there are no animations, nor any sound being played while the launcher is open, this seems like some sort of bug. The launcher actually uses more CPU than the game itself. This probably isnt a big issue for most people since they dont keep the launcher open for long but is probably something that should be looked into. 25% cpu usage across 4 cores would probably equal 100% cpu usage on a single core system and could be causing some of the launcher crashes or failure to load game that are being mentioned in the bugs section. Perhaps the launcher should be slightly less aggressive?
Yes. I noticed my CPU usage always spiked and stayed at 100% during the Choose Thy Configuration Wisely launcher. I'm using a pretty old laptop with Intel dual core T2400. Besides that, the launcher works just fine for me, and the game runs smoothly afterwards.
My guess is that it's because the launcher loads all of the game assets into memory and is poorly threaded, so your core is busy-waiting at 100% usage while the hard drive desperately seeks out a bunch of stuff. If this is correct, people with the game on an SSD drive would see almost no delay with the launcher. If that's the case, all it really needs is a "now loading" progress bar.
There's no indication that any game cacheing is happening. The IO the disk during that time is pretty low so it's not loading anything as far as I can tell. It could be similar to the recent Starcraft2 issue, where it was refreshing the screen so much that it's using up all the cpu/gpu cycles http://www.dailytech.com/Hot+Starcraft+II+is+Frying+Graphics+Cards+Blizzard+Issues+Temporary+Fix/article19224.htm It could be drawing the launcher screen constantly thus causing the CPU to spike so high.
Oh whoops you're right, I was thinking about something else For me, the first time I run Dungeons of Dredmor after turning my computer on it takes foreeeeever for the launcher to show up. Subsequent runs take less time, which is why I thought it was caching game files. Now that I look at it, though, the launcher itself chews up one core. I just never noticed that I guess.
