It could be shader compilation, I suppose, yeah. At least yesterday it took about thirty minutes again.
Today, though, I've had the client running for nearly an hour and a half and it's still stuck on the loading screen. There's no possible way that shader compilation should be taking this long.
ETA: Well, speak of the devil. Literally the instant I posted this, the "Account ticket authetication failed" message popped up, lol.
As a test you can disable all power saving features next patch. The shaders are compiled on your CPU so if it goes into aggressive power saving for some reason, the compilation could take a long time.
I made another test on a spare laptop that you guys may try too. This particular computer had a copy of STO that was three months old. I let the patcher run and then checked ../Star Trek Online/Live/cache where the compiled shaders live. The files here still had the old date so no new pre-compiled shaders were distributed with the patch. I deleted the files in this folder and started STO, expecting a long wait while these files were recreated. But to my amazement the compilation only took 40 seconds and this on a 2.4GHz Core i5. I don't know if the game always recreates these files from scratch with every patch or only updates the parts that has been affected by new/updated shaders. I have assumed it's the latter and maybe the game runs into trouble if these files somehow gets corrupted. Deleting them and thus forcing them to be recreated from scratch would solve that problem. If you don't want to delete the files for this test you can just move them to a temporary folder instead but it would be interesting to see how slow/fast STO will start for you after trying this.
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I'll try that; thanks.
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