Sufyan: Shooting in the dark here because I've never heard of this problem before...
- Try disabling Vertical Sync. Make sure you don't have any profile settings on your graphics card forcing it on. Perhaps V-sync is slowing down some animation that hinders the start up sequence needlessly. There are no loading bar animations when you first start the game but the whole game is a pre-Halflife 2 source engine hack job, you can't rule out anything.
- Try launching vampire.exe directly to bypass the unofficial patch mod, just to rule it out as the cause.
- More GPU settings to look for: don't force Tesselation, shader caching and other possible settings that may be wasting lots of resources writing data during game launch that you don't need anyhow.
- If you're using of wireless peripherals like mouse and keyboard, perhaps their drivers or additional software is interfering. Closing down software or disabling a few related entries in the Device Manager might help (Logitech stuff creates about a dozen different HID entries, only some that are actually necessary to use your hardware) Also, anti-virus software might not like the Game Mod Loader stuff that the GOG version of Bloodlines is using and stalls the computer for a while.
Thank you for such a thorough reply Sufyan but nothing seems to be helping. I'm going to try the "PLUS" patch a little later on and see what happens. Ultimately when a game is this good it's not a deal breaker to have this problem. Gothic 2 has always been notorious for this and anyone who ever had Thief on CD knew it was best to click 'play', go get some lunch, call your mother, do your taxes, and then come back and play. :P
