Any one have this issue!?? When i launch the game it takes like almost 4 minutes to load the game and then when i decide to leave some track ( and i tried a few, it's always the same ) the same thing... takes forever until i can select for example another series or menu!! Help please... anyone!??
I've noticed a small increase in load and terminating times as well. Not 4 minutes, but longer than previous builds.
Generally loading time will be longer if the last series you used was All Cars & Tracks as it has to parse every single car. Time returning to the menu after leaving the game is usually replay saving too.
I know that Alex... but is way more then that... it's not that believe... it is strange this is happen now!
I have the same problem, however found a workaround. The issue is my USB DAC soundcard, if that is the primary device, there is the giant pause you mention. My workaround is a tiny application that I run in background and allows me to switch between active soundcard via joystick button (spare gamepad). So at launch or when going back to menu I switch to onboard card, for racing the better USB one. The issue was reported to reiza long time ago, but they couldn't reproduce. I will attach the program here at a later time.
attached is the simple tool I wrote, it's very barebone, requires to edit the top section of the "joystick-audio-switch.lua" file, use at your own risk, it uses some third party exe to toggle between sound devices via cmdline NirCmd - Windows command line tool
As Alex said, if your last series was a heavy one (like, for main example, All Cars & Tracks) the game will take a while to load the next time. I play in Racedepartment servers and, although we run a single series, they configure it as All Cars & Tracks (not sure why), so the majority of the times I load the game it takes a while. If you disable the replays, when you exit a track next time you will see an improvement.