I have a fairly fast connection and still find it pretty frustrating to have to move up one frame at a time and let it load. I would personally prefer to just have a splash screen while they all load but can we at least have the program continue to load frames even though we’re not actually on them? that way we could switch to another web page or grab a drink instead of having to scroll over each frame in the cube just to get it loaded before really being able to do anything.
Hi kmdewey, sorry you’re having trouble with the images loading. We’re working on making it faster. Something I do when I’m having the same issue is scroll through most of the slices really quickly (even if the images don’t load as you scroll through them it’ll still help). The program only pre-fetches so many slices at a time (that’s why you’ll get a section you can scroll through fine, and then you’ll have to wait again), so scrolling through the slices will help pre-fetch all the slices.
Actually, that’s not true (or at least it shouldn’t be). It should prefetch the entire volume from the start. It tries to prefetch around what you are looking at, so if you move somewhere else in the volume, it will prefetch there. The rate shouldn’t change at all. That having been said, moving the slice to the place you want to work will help speed up loading data around that slice.
In any case, I think the answer to these issues has already been mentioned elsewhere and that is to include a progress bar to show how much of the volume has been loaded. It should be very usable by the time it gets to 50% or so.
Wouldn’t this simultaneously slow down the download speed of the slices you actually care about at that time? From a technical viewpoint I’m very much interested in how the preloading works exactly, as my intuition (and experience with seeing slides load) tells me there is a lot of room for improvement.
E.g.
- Does the slice you are on at the moment get precedence over other slices being loaded?
- How long are slices cached? (I often experience scrolling back and forth the cache seems to be lost)
- To which degree is the currently traced (or provided) area taken into account?
- Does the slice you are on at the moment get precedence over other slices being loaded?
- How long are slices cached? (I often experience scrolling back and forth the cache seems to be lost)
- To which degree is the currently traced (or provided) area taken into account?
- Yes. when you move to a slice which hasn't been loaded, we cancel all current requests and get the individual tiles we need for that slice
- They are supposed to be cached forever. Not sure how you are experiencing that. Next time you see that, check the error log. Could be a bug...
- each time we try to prefetch, we get the tiles closest to what you are currently viewing. This is done per chunk and per direction (i.e. different threads searching up and down)
I don't see a better way to do it, but if you have other ideas, feel free to let us know. That having been said, we think we might have a bug which only shows up with high latency connections where a single chunk can't keep up with the others so one of the 4 quadrants might not load correctly.
You might try again now, I made a few changes. Would love to know if they made any difference.
I agree, the slow loading time is THE issue that has limited me playing.
Sometimes I feel like just doing two or three cubes during my breaks, and I get frustrated really fast with the loading time :(
- Does the speed limit come from the cache size of the computer? From your uploading capacity?
- When I leave the browser open while doing something else, is it still caching slices?
I also have the same question as @whathecode, to which degree the currently traced area is taken into account in the loading process? Sometimes I get a lot of definition in the map on areas that are far from the cell, and the area I am working on is all grainy…
That having been said, we think we might have a bug which only shows up with high latency connections where a single chunk can't keep up with the others so one of the 4 quadrants might not load correctly.
I think I am always experiencing this bug… I have a high latency, high speed connection. (actually, it’s not my connection’s fault if the latency is high, IMO). It can be very annoying…
Also, sometime a slice will never load, unless I press the shift key once. Also, the coloured area can take a very long time to load.
At the moment, if you are a long ways from MIT then you will have a high latency connection. We are working on setting up a CDN for the data, so that latency should go down substantially in the near future… Stay tuned!
My loading has really slowed down in the last week or so. Even if I quickly zip back and forth through all the slices, I still have to wait a long time before I can do anything. I thought this was due to high traffic, but it’s the same when only around 10 other people are online. I know we had a similar problem a while ago, then it got much better. I admit it’s making it hard for me to do much. Amy was letting the team know about the loading issues the other day - so I’m just checking up to see if there is any news. :) Cheers.
Hey! it seems things are a little faster now 
yay!